Anna Richards

A change in politics is coming. Until now, the progressives were the ones with networks, stemming from Joe Biden's White House, to think tanks, and the legacy media. For the right, politics was not a fair fight. The internet has changed that. Karol Nawrocki’s win in Poland's presidential election marked a key moment in the translation of the new right from the internet to geographical reality. Donald Trump's backing was combined with that of Kristi Noem, the US Secretary of State for Homeland Security, at Poland’s first ever Conservative Political Action conference (CPAC). A change in politics is coming From the 1960s onwards, the progressives turned universities into a reproduction mechanism for their own political ideals in a 'long march through the institutions'.

Poland looks set to head into a month of intense coalition-building. The exit poll for the country’s parliamentary election on Sunday showed Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party with the single biggest result of 36.8 per cent, but it still fell short of being able to form a government by itself. Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition gained 31.6 per cent of the vote, followed by the Third Way with 13 per cent, the Left with 8.6 per cent, and Konfederacja with 6.2 per cent of the vote, respectively. The late poll released around 8 a.m. Polish time, which took account of around half of the election’s overall result, remained broadly consistent with these results. The historic voter turnout of 72.9 per cent underscored the importance of this election to Poles.

On 15 October, Poland goes to the polls. The Polish people must choose between two narratives for the country, each inspired by a different era of history. For the ruling Law and Justice party, the Second World War has become a key theme of its parliamentary election campaign. This came about after the question of German reparations was revived by an exhibition on Polish war losses presented in the British parliament last month. Discussing a recent Polish radio poll which revealed that 58 per cent of Poles support war reparations, Arkadiusz Mularczyk, the Polish Secretary of State for Europe maintained that Germany, the aggressor, was ‘given the privilege to choose to which victim states they provide compensation and how much’.

Poland and the United Kingdom have been allies for years. But, since the outbreak of the Ukraine war, that union is becoming stronger. This week, the UK government announced up to £10 million in funding for a joint UK-Polish partnership to erect two purpose-built villages in Lviv and Poltava to shelter more than 700 of Ukraine’s most vulnerable displaced people. The UK-Polish partnership will also provide £2.6 million for power generators to serve some 450,000 people in schools, hospitals, and community centres in retaken and front-line areas, and up to £2.5 million distributed in partnership with the Red Cross to support those suffering under extreme weather conditions.