WARSAW (Reuters) – A firebrand farmer will contest October elections for a coalition led by Poland’s main opposition party Civic Platform (PO), it said on Wednesday, as it seeks to loosen the ruling nationalists’ grip on rural voters.
While the liberal PO dominates the political scene in Poland’s largest cities, ruling nationalists Law and Justice (PiS) have won over people in the countryside with conservative policies on issues such as LGBT rights and immigration combined with generous social spending.
However, farmers have become disenchanted with the government, in part because of an influx of cheap agricultural products from neigbouring Ukraine, and Michal Kolodziejczak from the AGROunia campaign group has become the most recognisable face in a wave of anti-PiS protests.
Kolodziejczak will stand for AGROunia as part of the PO-led Civic Coalition (KO) grouping in the central Polish town of Konin.
“The decision to start together with KO was not easy, but we have to show that, despite different views, we look in one direction – the future of Poland is strong, rich and built together,” he said. “We will take back the countryside from PiS.”
According to an Ipsos poll, in Poland’s last parliamentary elections in 2019, 56.4% of people in the countryside voted for PiS while 16.9% voted for KO.
Government spokesman Piotr Muller said that Kolodziejczak had “betrayed the Polish countryside” and that he had previously criticised KO leader and former prime minister Donald Tusk for “setting Poles back several centuries” with policies that forced many to emigrate in search of better pay.
Tusk on Wednesday also said that Poland’s former human rights ombudsman Adam Bodnar would stand for KO in the election to Poland’s upper house of parliament, the Senate.
Bodnar has been a leading critic of PiS reforms that the opposition say have politicised the judicial system.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish and Pawel Florkiewicz; editing by Barbara Lewis)
