Soldiers, mushrooms, and migrants: Poland heads for elections

Poland is also to hold a referendum on the same day, on issues including EU migrant-relocation.

And the PiS campaign to extend its eight-year rule began in earnest on Thursday, when defence minister Mariusz Blaszczak told Polish radio he was stationing 10,000 troops “closer to the border with Belarus to scare the aggressor so that they do not dare to attack us”.

The decision comes after Belarusian military helicopters violated Polish airspace last week and thousands of Russian Wagner group mercenaries set up camp in Poland’s neighbour, frightening Polish people.

The PiS show of force also draws attention to increasing numbers of African and Middle Eastern migrants coming via Belarus into Poland and the wider EU — there were 19,000 attempted crossings so far this year, compared to 16,000 in all of 2022.

But the border was already being defended by some 2,000 soldiers and 5,000 border guards as well a 186-km long metal wall.

And the nebulous timeframe and location of Blaszczak’s 10,000-man deployment also suggests a political gesture — to amplify the idea of an imminent threat, which PiS is strong enough to handle.

For his part, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki had also been talking up the allegedly mounting danger from Belarus in the days prior to Duda’s election-date announcement.

And the PiS party chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński, is turning up the euroscepticism and Germanophobia that his party uses to woo its base, alongside security scaremongering, racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

Kaczyński claimed at a political rally in Chełm, near the Ukraine border, on 6 August that EU-led privatisation of forests will mean Poles can no longer pick mushrooms in future — a cherished national pastime, with the mushroom-picking season falling at the same time as the 15 October vote.

“We have this freedom. We can go mushroom picking … This is part of our freedom and we will not let this freedom be taken away from us,” he said.

Kaczyński also played to Poland’s historical trauma of Nazi and Soviet-era oppression.

“Do you know who has the greatest influence in Brussels? Exactly, Germany. And we would have to go from living under one boot from the east [the Soviet Union] to the other boot from the west,” he said.

Meanwhile, most of the referendum questions are yet to be revealed.

Its main concern will be wether Poles accept mandatory EU migrant-relocation quotas, as Europe’s front-line states, such as Italy and Greece, struggle to process tens of thousands of asylum claims a year.

But Kaczyński said on Thursday one additional question will be: “Do you support the sale of national companies?”.

“The Germans want to install Tusk in Poland, so that he sells off our common wealth,” Kaczyński added, referring to former Polish prime minister and EU Council president Donald Tusk — his party’s main electoral rival.

Kaczyński’s mushroom line met with ridicule from Tusk and other opposition MPs.

“Kaczyński declared that the freedom of mushroom picking is at stake in these elections. I feel a bit strange having such a rival,” Tusk said.

But if the security scares are harder to dismiss due to the genuine risk that the Ukraine war could spillover into Nato territory, then Kaczyński’s mushrooms also struck a nerve.

The word “mushroom” trended top and higher on Google searches by Poles the following day than “Ukraine” or “inflation”, according to research by Poland’s Wprost magazine.

Pollsters are predicting the nationalist-populist PiS will win with 35 percent of the vote, compared to Tusk’s conservative Civic Platform party on 30 percent.

They’re also saying the far-right Confederation of Freedom and Independence Party, led by Janusz Korwin-Mikke, will come in third with up to 13 percent, in a further blow to Poland’s image in EU circles.

Korwin-Mikke, who is pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian despite the war, was also fined by the European Parliament in his time as an MEP for a sexist tirade (claiming women were less intelligent than men) and for doing a Nazi salute in a dig at his German peers.