Parliamentary elections 2023. The most important events of recent days

Parliamentary elections 2023 will take place on October 15. Poles will elect 460 deputies and 100 senators for a four-year term. In the Sejm elections, Poland is divided into 41 constituencies of various sizes. In the smallest of them – Częstochowa – 7 MPs are elected, and in the largest – Warsaw – there are 20 seats up for grabs.

Except for the election that day there will also be a referendum.

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Here are the most important events of the last week (September 11-17) as part of the ongoing election campaign.

The visa scandal is still on the lips of opposition politicians, who at subsequent press conferences refer to the journalists’ findings and inform about their own actions taken in connection with the suspicion. irregularities in issuing visas by PiS government officials. After an inspection at the Ministry of Family, Labor and Social Policy at a conference on September 13, PO spokesman Jan Grabiec said that “there are no grounds to claim that it was the Ministry of Labor that insisted on increasing the issuance of visas.” As he added, “the PiS government has invited 250,000 immigrants from Asian and African countries to Poland over the last 2.5 years.”

A day later – September 14 – The Supreme Audit Office announced its plan to conduct an ad hoc audit at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Due to the scandal on Friday The speech was delivered by the Speaker of the Senate, Tomasz Grodzki. The politician said that “this is the biggest scandal we have faced in the 21st century.” – Corruption at the highest levels of government, bringing a direct threat to all of us. And it’s because of people whose mouths are full of phrases about safety, Grodzki said. He also publicly asked questions regarding the visa scandal to “the highest representatives of PiS power.”

A day later, on Saturday, The Marshal of the Sejm, Elżbieta Witek, delivered her own speech. In her speech, she accused Grodzki of using the institution of the speech to “try to lie and mislead Poles.” She also pointed to the situation on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where several thousand migrants from Africa have arrived by boat in recent days. She also attacked several times Donald Tusk.

It took place on Friday at the headquarters of the National Electoral Commission drawing numbers of electoral lists of candidates for the Sejm registered by electoral committees in more than one district. From the information provided on the website NEC shows that six committees registered their lists in all 41 electoral districts.

The following list numbers were assigned to the committees: 1 – Nonpartisan Local Government Men, 2 – Trzecia Droga, 3 – Nowa Lewica, 4 – Law and Justice5 – Confederation, 6 – Civic Coalition.

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On the same day, the National Electoral Commission adopted a resolution stating that: ballots will be in the form of one sheet of papernot books.

In recent days, there have been two “clashes” between politicians. On Friday, Deputy Minister of Climate and Environment Jacek Ozdoba interrupted the press conference of former foreign minister Radosław Sikorski, which referred to the visa scandal. A PiS politician tried to give him a T-shirt of the German football team with the inscription “Gazprom“. After a short argument and Ozdoba’s intrusion into the microphones, an outraged Sikorski left his own conference.

On the same day in the evening, a verbal skirmish – this time not at a press conference, but at the Confederation’s election rally – took place between the leader of this group, Sławomir Mentzen, and Ryszard Petru, former head of .Nowoczesna, and currently a candidate for the Sejm from the Third Way. The discussion on stage about the liquidation of ZUS and the public health care system quickly turned into an argument. – You have a pitbull that looks like a dachshund, you flex like a leftist rhesus, you admire Mr. Kunta Kinte, you waste my friend’s path of the best powder, and finally you want to make a deal with me. After what I saw here, I don’t want to kill a fly with you, Mentzen said to Petru, paraphrasing the words from the movie “Boys Don’t Cry”.

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Although there is less than a month left until the parliamentary elections, polls still do not provide a clear answer as to which parties can count on forming a governmentand even those who will be above the electoral threshold.

According to the last IBRIS survey for Onet (conducted on September 13, the results were published on September 15), there would be five parties in the Sejm: PiS (33.3 percent), KO (26.4), New Left (11.1), Third Way (10.2) and Confederation (10.1). According to Onet’s calculations, there would be a “deep stalemate” in the Sejm, because both PiS and Confederation and the entire opposition would each have 230 seats.

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The situation is quite similar in the United Surveys survey for Wirtualna Polska published on September 13 and conducted two days earlier. The Ipsos study for TOK FM and OKO.press (conducted on September 8-11, published on September 12) shows that Third Droga would not have entered the Sejm with 6 percent support, and PiS would clearly win the elections. In turn, according to the IBRiS survey for “Rzeczpospolita” and RMF FM (conducted on September 8-9, published on September 11) Third Road would be the third force in the Sejm with support of 10.3 percent, which is slightly larger than the New Left and the Confederation. In this scenario, a victory for the opposition – winning more seats than the leader, PiS – may be probable.

This year, the share of women on the Sejm electoral lists is the highest in history, although parity is still a long way off. Women constitute 43.8 percent of the candidates.

According to the analysis of the Institute of Public Affairs and Gender Solution, most women are on the list of the New Left, the least on the list of the Confederation. There are also a record number of women on the “first” and among the Senate lists.