Polish Confederation party unlikely to join ECR, experts say.

3 months ago 19

Poland’s far-right Confederation Party, likely to have MEPs for the first time after the upcoming European elections, will either try to join the far-right Identity or Democracy group or form a new faction with AfD and Fidesz, experts say.

The Confederation Party was founded as an alliance of several far-right and free-market movements before the last European elections in 2019. However, it failed to reach the 5% electoral threshold and won no mandates.

Since then, the patchwork right-wing party has managed to carve out a strong position in Polish politics, coming fifth in the 2023 parliamentary elections with 7% of the vote, with the party set to win six seats in the new EU parliament, according to the latest Europe Elects polls.

If the election results confirm the latest polls, the party will have to decide which group to join in the European Parliament.

Cooperation with the European People’s Party (EPP) of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is off the table especially after the latest debate between the EU’s political families on 23 May, when she said she would not cooperate with the Confederation, calling them “friends of Putin who want to destroy Europe”.

“Only someone who is out of touch with reality can believe that we could ever consider cooperation with this German politician,” the co-leader of the confederation, Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Krzysztof Bosak, told a press conference last week.

He called von der Leyen “a symbol of exactly what we want to put an end to: unfounded rules that are contrary to the interests of citizens, that undermine the European economy, that destroy Polish agriculture (…)”.

What about founding a new EU group?

The Identity and Democracy (ID) group, on the other hand, seems too pro-social for the Confederation, with its largely free-market profile, says Przemysław Witkowski, a researcher on political extremism at the Collegium Civitas University in Warsaw.

“The Confederates may attempt to join the ID, but I would not say their efforts would be successful,” Witkowski told Euractiv Poland, adding that another potential problem is that the ID has expelled the German AfD, one of the Confederation’s main allies.

For Witkowski, the most likely scenario is that the Confederation will join forces with the AfD and some other independent parties. This is even more likely now that Bulgaria’s Vazrazhdane has announced its intention to leave the ID group and form a new grouping with the AfD.

An alliance with the conservative ECR group is also unlikely, according to political science Professor Karolina Borońska-Hryniewiecka of the University of Wroclaw.

Apart from the bad blood between the Confederation and the conservative PiS, a key member of the ECR, the other sticking point, as Borońska-Hryniewiecka points out, is the mild anti-Ukrainian stance and accusations of siding with the Kremlin, which could provoke resistance from some of the ECR’s member parties, such as Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI) or the Czech Civic Democratic Party (ODS).

“On the other hand, the ECR group is becoming increasingly eclectic. After all, it admitted Eric Zemmour’s Reconquête,” Borońska-Hryniewiecka added.

(Aleksandra Krzysztoszek | Euractiv.pl)