The initiative was announced by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki at a news conference in Warsaw on Wednesday, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
The prime minister said: “We call it the ‘10 million leaflets’ initiative because we want to reach 10 million people.”
He said his governing Law and Justice (PiS) party was targeting more than 10 million people who had voted for President Andrzej Duda in the 2020 presidential elections, and 8 million who had voted for the ruling conservatives in the previous parliamentary ballot in 2019.
Morawiecki said his party was "aware of the crises" that have “hit Poland over the past four years” and was willing to not only discuss its achievements and pledges for the next term, but also to “listen to justified words of criticism.”
He said the Law and Justice party had decided to reach voters through leaflets to “bypass some of the media outlets," such as the private TVN television network and the Gazeta Wyborcza daily newspaper, which he said “protect the elites and protect Brussels.”
Morawiecki also said the leaflets would remind voters that the previous government, led by the centrist Civic Platform (PO), now the main opposition party, had created “poverty and unemployment,” raised the retirement age and sought to “admit illegal migrants to Poland on a mass scale.”
The prime minister argued that “the stakes are enormous” in the October 15 parliamentary elections as well as in a nationwide referendum on issues including illegal migration, due to be held on the same date.
Morawiecki also told reporters that the latest movie by filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, The Green Border, about a migrant crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, “slandered” the Polish army.
He added that the film was designed to "pave the way for dismantling" the barrier built by his government along the frontier to stem illegal migration, the PAP news agency reported.
Last month, Poland's lawmakers approved a government plan to combine the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 15, with a nationwide referendum on issues including the retirement age and illegal migration.
Voters will head to the ballot box to elect 460 new MPs and 100 senators for a four-year term.
The ruling conservative Law and Justice party and its government coalition allies have maintained a clear lead over the opposition in most recent surveys, polling ahead of the centrist Civic Coalition (KO), the far-right Confederation group, and the Third Way coalition of the rural-based Polish People’s Party (PSL) and the centre-right Poland 2050 grouping.
The ruling conservatives in 2019 won a convincing victory over opposition parties at the ballot box, securing a second term in power.
(pm/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP
