WARSAW — They may be aging, fading in influence and dwindling in number, but Poland’s coal miners might just help swing the country’s nail-biting election.
Parties are fighting hard to win coal miners’ backing ahead of Sunday’s vote — even if it means making them empty promises.
Poland still produces 70 percent of its power from hard coal and lignite, and counts 80,000 miners backed by powerful trade unions mainly concentrated in the country’s southern region of Silesia.
That also happens to be a swing region in an election that’s being pitched as an existential battle for the future of the country.
The two main parties — Donald Tusk’s pro-EU Civic Coalition and Jarosław Kaczyński’s nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party — are scrambling for every extra vote as POLITICO’s poll of polls shows neither one is expected to win enough seats to rule alone.
“This is very important region,” said Zdzisław Krasnodębski, a PiS MEP on the European Parliament’s energy committee, adding that coal miners are still “important, I think not only for Law and Justice, but generally for everybody.”
When Tusk and PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki both campaigned in Katowice on Thursday, neither said much about the future of the region’s coal mines.
But avoiding the thorny issue — and not butting heads with the influential coal unions that pushed the government into a 2049 coal phaseout deal two years ago — may be part of their strategy.
“We expect this or the next government to stick to the deal,” the head of the Sierpień ’80 mining union Bogusław Ziętek said, adding that last year’s energy crisis tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means “the government should be flexible in how we get to 2049 because it may turn out that the economy won’t make it without coal.”
Pulling out the stops
The election campaign has been dominated by the cost of living, rule of law and migration, while the two parties’ positions on energy have converged as they both agree on an eventual end to coal, said Joanna Maćkowiak-Pandera, president of the Forum Energii think tank, and to at least double the share of renewable energy.
“It seems that in Poland there is a consensus on generally phasing out coal,” she said, “this is something which is quite remarkable compared to what we had [in the election] five years ago.”
POLAND NATIONAL PARLIAMENT ELECTION POLL OF POLLS
For more polling data from across Europe visit POLITICO Poll of Polls.
But in an election where the stakes are very high, parties are resorting to handouts, U-turns and deception to capture support.
This summer, the government put in place “extreme benefits” for the coal sector, Maćkowiak-Pandera said, including four years paid holiday and huge severance pay.
Then last month, when Poland’s largest electricity producer PGE announced a new strategy to achieve climate neutrality by 2040 that would mean abandoning coal by 2030, coal unions lashed out — forcing the state-controlled firm to reverse its plans due to pressure from the government.
Both parties have also made coal phaseout pledges incompatible with the gloomy reality for the sector.
While PiS has reaffirmed its support for a 2049 deadline, Civic Coalition last month quietly scrapped its aim to abandon coal by 2035 in its updated electoral program.
Doing so was a “political tool to get [miners’] votes,” said Robert Tomaszewski, an analyst at the Polityka Insight think tank, pointing to the fact that Tusk has also pledged to slash emissions by 75 percent by 2030 — an impossible task without shuttering mines.
Add to that most mines in Silesia will have to close in the “early 2030s,” he said, as long-term power contracts expire, rising costs eat into coal plants’ profit margins and by 2028 at the latest EU rules will forbid state subsidies.
“Everybody’s dishonest,” Tomaszewski said,” and “nobody’s speaking honestly with normal miners.”
Krasnodębski, the PiS MEP, said the government would “never … endanger our energy security” nor “put into risk social peace in our country.”
But Artur Wieczorek, a Greens candidate fighting for a seat in Katowice under the banner of Civic Coalition, said it’s high time to face the facts.
“I’m telling [voters] straight,” he said, “We’re going to see end of coal mining in Poland by 2030 and what the region needs is transformation that’s just and helps it shift to green economy.”
