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WARSAW — Anyone in favor of accepting illegal migrants, lowering border defenses, selling off state companies and making people work longer before they retire?
If that’s the case, they should vote for Poland’s opposition parties and not the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which is putting those four questions to a referendum that will be held on the same day as the October 15 parliamentary election.
The referendum questions are set to be approved Thursday by the lower house of parliament, where PiS holds a narrow majority.
The questions and the way they’re phrased are not serious legislative ideas. Rather they’re designed to cause problems for PiS’s main rival in the election, the center-right Civic Platform (PO) and its leader Donald Tusk, in an election in which the ruling nationalists are trying to win an unprecedented third term.
The idea is for the questions to whip up public support. The referendum is also treated separately from the election under campaign finance laws, allowing the ruling party to boost spending ahead of the vote.
“It’s just another method to appropriate public funds to finance an election campaign basically without any limits,” Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk, an MP for the opposition Left party, told private broadcaster Polsat News on Wednesday.
For months, PiS and the state-controlled media that loudly back the government have been claiming that Tusk will compromise Poland’s national security and economic development if he wins back power. Law and Justice leaders claim that Tusk, who served as prime minister from 2007 to 2014, is a creature of Berlin and not a loyal Pole.
“Tusk is the greatest threat to our security,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said last Sunday in a video explaining the rationale behind the referendum. “Let’s not let Tusk, an envoy of the Brussels elites, demolish Poland’s security.”
Critics say that the idea of a referendum is a purely political gambit, as the questions tackle issues, like raising the retirement age or removing a fence along the border with Belarus to prevent illegal migration, that the opposition isn’t pushing.
“It’s an absurd referendum. Why frighten with something that no one is proposing?” opinion writer Tomasz Krzyżak said in an op-ed for the Rzeczpospolita daily.
Just say no
Tusk is calling for voters to boycott the referendum.
“I solemnly declare this referendum null and void. It is invalid in the deepest and broadest sense of the word,” Tusk said Wednesday.
He’s trying to flip the issues back against PiS. He insisted that the border fence put up last year to block a stream of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, encouraged to try illegally entering Poland by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, is ineffective, and that Law and Justice has overseen a huge increase in legal and illegal migration to Poland. He also accused the ruling party of selling parts of a state controlled oil company to Saudi Arabia and Hungary.
“The real referendum will be voting on the only important question: Who will rule Poland after October 15,” Tusk said.
Boycotting it will require voters to refuse the referendum ballot and have that refusal written down by polling station officials.
Other opposition parties are also likely to join in.
“This referendum is absolutely nonsensical,” said Dziemianowicz-Bąk.
Morawiecki lashed out at Tusk’s boycott call, calling it “undemocratic” in a speech Wednesday to the parliament.
“This is primarily what democracy is about — giving the people a say. An opposition party like PO that doesn’t want to hold a referendum is, in fact, an antidemocratic opposition,” Morawiecki said.
“These questions are questions precisely about the economic sovereignty, energy sovereignty and security of Poles, and that is why we are holding a referendum. And Mr. Tusk, you can invalidate a referendum in Germany,” Morawiecki said.
PiS is in the lead ahead of the election, according to POLITICO’s poll of polls, with 36 percent support — enough to give it first place but not enough for it win a majority in the new parliament. Civic Platform is second with 29 percent.
It’s not the first time a Polish incumbent has turned to the idea of a referendum to boost support.
In 2015, President Bronisław Komorowski tried to fix his floundering re-election bid by proposing a referendum on financing political parties and the introduction of a first-past-the-post election system.
But only 7 percent of Poles took part in the referendum — well below the 50 percent needed to make it valid — and Komorowski was defeated.
