Polish ruling party support drops amid EU clash, bonus scandal

Bloomberg

Poland’s ruling party suffered its biggest drop in popularity in two years as clashes over democratic standards and a Holocaust law, a government shakeup and a public bonus scandal were compounded by mass street protests.
The Law & Justice party saw its support drop more than a quarter to 28 percent, from 40 percent a month earlier, according to a survey by pollster Kantar Millward Brown for TVN24 published on Wednesday. The score was well below those in other polls published this month showing Law & Justice with backing ranging from 37 percent to 47 percent. The biggest beneficiary of the drop was the opposition Civic Platform, which jumped eight percentage points to 22 percent.
Law & Justice has been dented by weeks of criticism of former Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, who paid bonuses to herself and other cabinet members of
as much as 82,000 zloty ($24,170), or about one-and-a-half times the country’s average annual wage.
Authorities have also faced criticism over a law criminalizing suggestions that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust, which outraged Israel and alarmed allies including the US and France. The government, now led by Premier Mateusz Morawiecki, is facing an unprecedented rule-of-law probe from the European Commission that, in a worst-case — and unlikely — scenario, could strip it of
its voting rights. “This may be a beginning of a negative trend showing that the
Law & Justice formula isn’t working,”
said Andrzej Rychard, a sociology professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “Part of the electorate that supported
the party in the 2015 elections is now seeing that it causes too much turmoil on almost all fronts.”