Beata Szydlo, candidate for prime minister of the conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS) celebrates with supporters at the party's headquarters in Warsaw after exit poll results were announced on October 25, 2015.JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP / Getty Images
For almost a decade, Poland has been Europe's great exception. It has escaped the economic crisis that has gripped much of the rest of Europe, enjoying strong growth and booming exports while its neighbours collapsed into unemployment and debt. It has also avoided the angry politics that have swept across many countries – until now.
On Sunday, a strong plurality of Poles threw out the moderate Civic Platform party, which has governed since 2007 under prime ministers Ewa Kopacz and her predecessor Donald Tusk (who is now the president of the European Council) and overseen the constant growth and deepening ties with the EU that have made Poland a widely lauded transformational success story.
That story, however, did not resonate throughout Poland, which remains very rural, very religious and, in its more remote corners, still crippled by the transition from the Communist regime that ended a quarter-century ago and untouched by the country's wider economic success.
Perhaps because of this, Poles gave a majority government to the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS), which ran on a platform built on conservative Roman Catholicism, resistance to Europe and opposition to foreigners, migrants and ethnic minorities.
The party was created by identical-twin former child actors Jaroslaw Kaczynski, 66, and his brother, Lech, who died in a 2010 plane crash in Russia. Its last turn in government in 2004 and 2005, which saw the twins serving as prime minister and president respectively, was widely seen as shambolic. The Kaczynskis launched repeated verbal attacks on neighbouring Germany, lashed out at women and homosexuals and failed to hold their right-wing coalition together.
This time, the party took a new tack. Its prime minister-designate, 52-year-old Beata Szydlo, is a more polished political operator who hails from the Krakow suburb of Oswiecim (better known by its German name, Auschwitz), who found herself the most right-wing of three women competing for the prime ministership.
She combined blistering right-wing Catholic conservatism – including angry opposition to abortion and homosexuality – with attacks on the European Union (though she did not suggest withdrawing) and an unlikely populist economic program built on pledges to lower the retirement age back to 65 for men and 60 for women (it had been slated to rise by two years), increase social-security payments and tax banks and supermarkets.
Former prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who remains chairman of the party, loomed in the background, appearing only late in the campaign to make a heated speech attacking immigration and declaring that Muslims (who are few in Poland) bring "cholera on Greek islands, dysentery in Vienna, all sorts of parasites and bacteria that might be harmless to these people [but] might be dangerous here."
Adam Michnik, the former anti-communist dissident who is today editor of Poland's best-known newspaper, the Gazeta Wyborcza, said the vote would have "disastrous consequences" because of the "clearly xenophobic attitude of this party. … If the leader of this party wins the election by saying that refugees are carriers of parasites … it is an absolute disgrace to the state, society and nation."
The PiS victory probably does not represent a change in Polish attitudes, but rather one of the features of politics in post-Communist central Europe: There are no real social-democratic parties (Civic Platform, while to the left of PiS, would be a liberal-minded conservative party in the West) and a limited social-safety net.
As a result, Poland's economic boom did not reach everyone. Unemployment remained close to 10 per cent, reaching much higher levels in the country's sprawling rural regions. There is a sense, among many Poles, that the boom has belonged to the elite of Warsaw, Gdansk and Wroclaw, but has left them behind.
By shrewdly taking advantage of this bitterness – and the fact that Civic Platform has been in office for eight years – Ms. Kopacz became a channel for Polish frustration, though one that may make the coming years more difficult.