After a brutal campaign, Poland gets ready to vote

ELBLAG, A GRITTYPSPSPSEUPS PS KOEU port where the air stings from factory soot, is not exactly full of latte-sipping cosmopolitans. In Poland’s bitterly divided politics, urban voters mostly back liberals; in Elblag in 2019 the ruling hard-right Law and Justice (i) party came first. Yet when Donald Tusk, the centrist running to unseat i, arrived for a rally on September 28th, the hall was jammed. For years, he cried, i had packed Poland’s courts and bickered with the . Mr Tusk (pictured), who served as prime minister from 2007-14 and then as president of the European Council, promised to end all that: “Europe is freedom, the rule of law, the fight against corruption.” iwas trying to brainwash Poles, he said, just as the communists and Nazis had.If Mr Tusk’s language was harsh, the rhetoric at a igathering outside Warsaw a day earlier was acid. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party’s leader, claimed that in a war with Russia Mr Tusk would surrender half of Poland’s territory. The group Mr Tusk heads, Civic Coalition (), would help the ship in illegal migrants. Mr Tusk wants to instil “German order” in Poland, Mr Kaczynski said, just like the Nazis. The speech was only slightly less rabid than one in August when he called Mr Tusk “pure evil” and said the opposition should be “morally exterminated”.