“The voter turnout, the highest in the last 14 years, is proof that the Poles believed in the importance of their vote”, said Msgr. Stanislaw Budzik, general secretary of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, commenting on the result of the parliamentary elections held in Poland on 21 October. The party that emerged with the largest slice of the suffrage in the election was the Civil Platform, the party of the liberal right, hitherto in opposition. According to the bishop, this demonstrates “a growing democratisation of life in the country”. Msgr. Budzik observed: “The result of the elections will lead to a greater concentration on the Polish political scene. There are now two strong parties in Poland, because although the PIS (the party hitherto in government) lost the elections, it did maintain a large share of the vote. Both parties, both of them born from the tradition of Solidarnosc, will perhaps become a fixed presence on the Polish political scene”. The Most Rev. Slawoj Leszk Glodz, Metropolitan of Warsaw-Prague (the part of the Polish capital situated on the right bank of the river Vistula), observed: “it won’t be an easy government for the Civic Platform”. He said he wasn’t surprised by the verdict of the electorate, since “the final days of the electoral campaign” had raised expectations of “this result”. “I congratulate the winners – added Msgr. Glodz -, but it should be remembered that the PIS will be a strong opposition, also because it can count on the support of the President of Poland Lech Kaczynski, twin brother of outgoing premier Jaroslaw Kaczynski”. The bishop also pointed out that “the Church, like the media, appealed to the Polish people to take part in the elections. The Church had even gone so far as to suggest that failure to vote would be a sin of omission”. According to the Metropolitan Archbishop of Warsaw Kazimierz Nycz, “concern for the country” had won the elections in Poland. Pointing out the importance of the mass participation of youth in the polls, the archbishop of the Polish capital said it was “a generation” that, in his view, “had a different notion of the State and of the country’s future”. Archbishop Nycz also expressed the hope that the new government “would be a creative continuation of the Poland that was reborn in 1989, the Poland in large measure wished by John Paul II”.
