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Going to the Polls Tomorrow Posted by on Jun 6, 2009 in Culture

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?

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Comments:

  1. Kuba:

    Anna,

    Good luck on your vote. I have voted for the lessor of two evils to many time. I hope next time there is a better choice for me.

  2. pinolona:

    um… to vote in Poland I should have registered by April 27 – by the time I found this out it was already too late. To get a postal or proxy vote in the UK, I should have voted by May 28 – and I didn’t: I couldn’t decide whether to trust the postal system or simply to ask someone else to vote for me, and by the time I had thought it through it was too late. Very ashamed of myself, particularly as elections come up so rarely that it’s actually quite exciting going to the polls!

  3. Anna:

    Hi Kuba – yes I voted! And “my” guy went through. 🙂

    Pino,
    ouch! And if all this was necessary for an EU citizen to vote in another EU country, I don’t want to know what those people who are temporarily somewhere else (like working in Chad, for example) had to do to cast their votes.
    I’m hearing there will be presidential elections in Poland in a couple of years and I need to see what the voting procedure will be for Poles who live overseas.