While I had paid some attention to the recent Canadian parliamentary elections, I did not realize that the same thing would soon happen in my ancestral country of Poland. The result appears to have gone in the opposite direction of that in Canada, with the victorious Law and Justice party being described as "conservative", "right wing" and "eurosceptic". This party, led by Jarosław Kaczyński, received 39.1 percent of the vote and took 242 out of 460 seats, enough to govern alone in the lower house of Poland's Sejm (parliament). Current Prime Minster Ewa Kopacz, whose Civic Platform party received 23.4 percent of the vote and took 133 seats, has conceded defeat. Although Kaczyński is his party's leader, he is not expected to run for Prime Minister. Instead, their deputy leader Beata Szydło is expected to run for that office.
A few notes:
Kaczyński is the twin brother of the late Lech Kaczyński, who was president of Poland until he was killed in a plane crash in 2010.
This election marked the first time since the end of Communist rule in 1989 that any Polish party has won an outright majority. But a few centuries earlier, Polish nobility actually elected their kings.
From my admittedly limited knowledge of Polish: The name "Szydło" translates literally as "awl", a kind of tool. The word "sejm" is pronounced like the English word "same".
Read more at Yahoo News, Politico, BBC News, Reuters and Radio Poland.
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