Both Poland and Romania will host presidential elections this Sunday, and a joint rally by the sovereigntist candidates from both nations saw a crowd of Polish voters chant the U.S. President’s name in response to a call for border control.
Romanian Presidential election first-round do-over winner George Simion travelled this week to Poland to rally alongside the right-wing challenger for the highest office in Poland, Karol Nawrocki, calling on Europe to reject neo-Marxism, open borders, and to embrace freedom. The two men have already spoken of forming a “pro-MAGA” alliance in Eastern Europe, reports Poland’s TVP, calling also to “Make Europe Great Again”, ‘MEGA’.
Romanian Simion, standing besides Nawrocki at a rally in Zabrze, Silesia, Poland on Tuesday apologised for not speaking Polish well and switched to English, decrying “unelected bureaucrats” undermining democracy — Romania’s first presidential election was annulled before being re-run with the winning candidate disqualified — and honouring Poland’s “anti-communist fighters” of history.
Saying Europeans must again fight for freedom, as many did during the Cold War, he said it is time to “fight again for freedom, for our rights, for our Christian family, for our countries… Everywhere in Europe the nations are waking up, and will not allow the neo-Marxist ideology and the green deal to take place. This is a new form of communism. We will oppose illegal migration, we will stop the anti-American change in Europe.”
In response to this, the crowd of supporters broke out into a spontaneous chant of “Donald Trump”.
Simeon responded to this, saying of the U.S. President: “Donald Trump is not just a person, he is a symbol of freedom that will travel all over the free world… on Sunday, here in Poland and in Romania we have Presidential elections, and the most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, is supporting Karol Nawrocki.”
Nawrocki met with Trump in the Oval Office earlier this month, posing for photographs and saying that Trump had told him he would win.
Poland’s election on Sunday will be the first round in the country’s two-round system. Held every five years, if no single candidate gains 50 per cent of the votes, the election is run again two weeks later between the top two candidates, making a majority verdict certain. It is a similar system to that used by France, for instance, where the system is designed to exclude candidates from outside the mainstream, as all centrists of varying political traditions can coalesce around a moderate candidate in the second round to defeat a newcomer.
Nawrocki, a historian who is the director of the Institute of National Remembrance and ex-director of the Polish Museum of the Second World War, is of Poland’s conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, presently out of office after a record-breaking stretch in power. His main opponent is pro-European Union Mayor of Warsaw Rafal Trzaskowski, who presently leads Nawrocki in polling by five per cent.
Nawrocki has weathered a difficult week in the press, after he claimed in a speech — appealing to the sensibilities of the working man — to be of the “one apartment” owner class. However, it was later stated in some Polish media that he actually owned more than one property, and bids to explain this away have fallen flat.
Read the full article here