WARSAW: Poles voted on Sunday in parliamentary elections that will determine the country’s future ties with the European Union and neighbouring Ukraine, as the ruling populists bid for a third consecutive term in power.

Opinion polls indicate the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party will get the most votes but may struggle to build a governing coalition, giving a chance to the opposition led by former EU chief Donald Tusk.A PiS victory could exacerbate tensions with the EU and Ukraine and will dismay campaigners concerned about the future of media freedoms, women’s and migrants’ rights.

“It’s time for a change,” said Ewa Bankowska, a 43-year-old working in finance, said as she voted in Halinow, a town just outside the capital Warsaw. “I’m concerned about the economy. I would like us to develop and for the government to stop spending money it does not have,” she said.

But Dorota Zbig, a 57-year-old nurse, said the last few years of PiS government “have been very good for me and my family and I hope everyone including young people votes reasonably.” At PiS’s last major rally on Friday, party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski said he wanted Poland to stay in the EU but that it should be a bloc of “sovereign countries”.

Tusk told supporters from his Civic Coali­tion party the government was “leading the country down the wrong path”. “This is the most important day in the history of our democracy since 1989,” Tusk said.

PiS has vowed to press ahead with controversial reforms of the judiciary which it says are aimed at rooting out corruption but which the EU sees as undermining democracy. The row has blocked billions of euros in EU funding.

Published in Dawn, October 16th, 2023