Politicians Canvass Poles In Britain For Extra Votes

Polish immigrants have rapidly changed the face of Britain, filling the pews of Catholic churches and the rolls of hotels and restaurants.

Now they could change the face of Poland. With up to a million in Britain and 200,000 in Ireland, they could prove a decisive factor in levering out of power Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the controversial nationalist Prime Minister.

As a result, Polish politicians now consider it normal to go on the stump in Fife or Peterborough in the morning and return for an evening rally in Poland. There are 400 planes a week travelling between Poland and Britain and many of them seem to be occupied by campaigners as well as carpenters and plumbers.

Donald Tusk, the head of the moderate conservative Civic Platform, was in Scotland the other day drumming up support in Kirkcaldy and drew a crowd of largely sympathetic Poles.

He has been accompanied by Radek Sikorski, who emigrated to Britain for political reasons in the 1980s and returned to make a career in postcommunist Poland. He was made a junior Defence Minister in his twenties and now, aged 44, is sometimes tipped as a future president.

“I think we can identify with Sikorski,” says Beata, 23, a student working for a catering company in Birmingham. “He can move between different cultures just like our generation.”

The Civic Platform has the best chance of winning the Polish vote in London. “About 50 per cent say they will vote for us,” says Mr Sikorski.

Mr Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party is expected to win about 15 per cent of the vote in London, and the left-wing Left and Democracy party is likely to draw in about the same.

Ryszard Kalisz, just back in Warsaw from a morning’s campaigning in Dublin, said that his Left and Democracy party was doing well in Ireland. “The interesting thing is that many of the young people in Ireland have come from small towns in eastern Poland where their parents are conservative, stalwart supporters of the Kaczynski twins,” Mr Kalisz told The Times.

“But once they are in Ireland or Britain they rebel against family voting traditions, their minds open up.”

There will be two main polling stations, at the embassy in London and in Edinburgh. About 20 other areas will have designated voting points.

But the Polish consul, Ireneusz Truszkowski, cautions that the figure of 1,200,000 Poles in Britain and Ireland might be deceptive. About 500,000 are actually entitled to vote. Many long-term émigrés have British passports. Some of the newer immigrants will return to Poland for the weekend and vote there.

“At the last parliamentary election barely a thousand voted, and even in the EU entry referendum only 6,500 cast a vote here,” the consul told the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

This time the turnout figures are likely to be much larger. All votes cast abroad are added to the results for the Warsaw constituency, which is the largest in Poland. Current forecasts suggest that (partly as a result of the campaigning in Britain) Mr Kaczynski’s party will not capture Warsaw. But his strength has always been in the poorer eastern and southern provinces of Poland. Nationwide his party is still narrowly in the lead with a week to go before polling day.

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