Tomorrow we have the European parliamentary election (wybory do Europarlamentu) and I still don’t know who to vote for.

This will be my very first voting in Poland and I am determined to participate. I have zameldowanie (official registered domicile), I have dowód osobisty (ID card) and I am eligible to vote. Don’t laugh, but for me this is a big deal. I feel like a giddy 18 year old.

There’s only one problem – na kogo powinnam głosować (who should I vote for)?

I said once before that I wasn’t going to write about polityka (politics) on this blog, so instead of politics, let’s talk about the general pain of choosing a worthy candidate.

Oh yeah, the candidates, you can’t have an election without them. And simply put, from my point of view all of them are bad choices. Or maybe I don’t know enough about them to form a positive opinion just yet?

I asked my hosts here about what I should do, and they, in a typically practical Polish manner, advised me to stop thinking about the issues and election promises and vote for the least bad of the bunch.

In order to learn more about the elections, I went to the website of Państwowa Komisja Wyborcza (National Election Committee). There’s a multitude of menu options on that page, but locating a complete list of all the candidates in the country is not so easy.

And when I finally found it, I was disappointed. I was hoping for a bit more than an alphabetical list of names in a pdf format.

I went to ask my neighbors where our assigned election place is, because I have no idea, but they just looked at me with a slightly annoyed expression.
“Glosowanie?” (wybory) the lady next door said. “I have no idea, but I’ll ask when I go to church tomorrow.”
I wanted to know if she was planning to vote. “Nah, it’s my cousin’s birthday, I’m going to Pruszcz right after church.”

I finally found this local election page and it has all the info I needed.

There was even a handy quiz to help me determine which political party is the closest to my personal opinions. The results surprised me totally, to say the least. I’ve never thought of myself as a social democratic leftie.
So, now if you excuse me, I have to read up some more about the candidates that the quiz suggested I have the most in common with.

If you are a foreign EU citizen in Poland, what is the election process like for you?