However, PiS has already been focusing on voters in the countryside. In September, Poland blocked grain exports from Ukraine after Russia pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal and the European Commission let its own restrictions end. While talks between Ukraine and Poland remain ongoing, Warsaw is only allowing the transit of a few Ukrainian commodities. Two wheat farmers from Koszajec, a small town near Warsaw, complained about prices falling after cheap Ukrainian imports became stuck in Poland as a result of the Black Sea dispute. Jan Jacek Oliszewski, 55, said: “This is a big, big, issue because it impacted the price of wheat.” He added that the wheat price decreased by almost half, while production costs rose. Mieczysław Pękala, 65, said: “We want to support Ukraine, but our colleagues are losing a lot thanks to this transport from Ukraine.” Both declined to say how they would vote.
At the same time, big cities whose residents vote for Civic Coalition have gotten far less attention and money. Magdalena Młochowska, coordinator for the city-run Green Warsaw program, which seeks to improve air quality, said that her budget had been cut because of PiS changes to tax laws: “This policy is clever, from the current government’s point of view, because the people who vote for them live in the smaller cities, so they transfer proportionally more [EU] money to these towns. They never win [at] the polls in the biggest cities. Never.”
Even if the opposition does prevail, PiS will still control the judiciary and the presidency: The ruling party has appointed all of the sitting members of the Constitutional Tribunal, who serve nine-year terms, and President Andrzej Duda is in office until 2025 and has veto power. This makes Civic Coalition’s promised changes, like legalizing abortion in the first trimester, extremely difficult. The “Polish-Polish war” that Tusk spoke of would likely continue for several years.