Poland’s history will play a vital role in its election

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’.

The topic cropped up again a week later following the controversy caused by two standing ovations given to the Waffen-SS ‘Galizien’ veteran Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian House of Commons. Hunka was invited to attend Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the parliament in recognition of his fighting ‘for Ukrainian independence against the Russians’.