Adam Warżawa/PAP

Jarosław Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, has said this year’s parliamentary elections will be about the country’s independence and not being subordinate to Germany.

Speaking in an interview with the Sieci weekly, Kaczynski said the vote would also be about the “socio-economic development model,” arguing that the opposition wanted to return to the old system and send money “to where it went before.”

“It will be an election about Polish independence,” Kaczynski said. “But also about the socio-economic model of development.”

He added that he maintained his view that the stakes would be as high in this year’s ballot as they were in 1989, the first election in Poland after the fall of communism.

“Then it was a choice between the road to democracy… and maintaining some form of communism,” the PiS leader said. “Today it is an election between a truly independent, secure, militarily strong, ambitious, developing Poland, and that independence being lost, exploited, led through various crazy ideologies to a slowdown of development, subjugation to Germany.”

He said the United Right governing coalition “proposes to Poles a defence of the achievements of recent years, a radical plan to improve the health service, external and internal security, halting ideological madness, defence of normality, stability.”

Kaczynski said if the opposition won the elections they would scupper the current government’s pro-family and pro-social programmes.

“The aim after all is to return to the system that was (before),” he said. “And to direct money to those places where it flowed earlier. Specifically, where it was embezzled.”

Kaczynski said the United Right would stand for election in its current form and that he had spoken to Zbigniew Ziobro, the leader of junior coalition partner Solidary Poland, and that he held the same view. He also said the coalition’s main adversary would be the centrist Civic Coalition, led by Donald Tusk.