Poland

The question of Poland’s EU membership has been always perceived in the categories of raison d’être, as an undisputable chance to become finally a member of the democratic and wealthy club of countries. As with most issues related to foreign affairs, there was a shared understanding that they should not become an issue for party competition. From that point of view, until the early 2000s, only marginal parties expressed their opposition to EU membership. The mainstream parties, regardless of their ideological profile, strongly supported Poland’s EU membership (Markowski 2007; Zuba 2009). However, the time of acceding negotiations showed that this national unity over EU issues will not last indefinitely, and that some parties will try to capitalise on politicising the issues of EU integration. In 2001, two parties rejecting EU membership won representation in the national parliament. During the first election to the European Parliament in 2004, the voters could choose between openly federalist, moderately pro- EU, moderately Eurocritical and overtly anti-EU membership parties. However, how specific and accurate were party preferences on EU integration? How do they structure domestic competition over EU affairs? These are the principal research questions. The chapter starts off with a short introduction to Polish party politics. Then it moves to the qualitative analysis of the party manifestos adopted for the 2004 and 2009 elections to the European Parliament. The manifesto coding was carried out within the INTUNE project, thus focusing on four major areas: general attitudes towards Europe, identity, policy scope and representation. The pros and cons of basing analysis on manifesto content are discussed in the Introduction to this volume. This short time span is the main reason to use the qualitative, rather than quantitative, analysis, with the latter seemingly better suited to document programmatic change, and the former better able to capture the complexity and detail of the actual programmatic supply.