Jarosław Kaczyński believes that Warsaw’s accession to the euro zone may provoke price rises and a drop in purchasing power, Euractiv reports.
According to Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, the real value of one euro is 2.55 zloty, just over half the official exchange rate, which stood at 4.31 zloty on Sunday.
Speaking at the party’s election rally in Sompolno, a town in the Greater Poland region, he also said Poland’s entry into the eurozone would lead to a sharp rise in prices and a fall in the purchasing power of wages. He argued:
The (EU) treaties say we have to do it, but we don’t have a deadline. We can do it in, say, 60 years. If Poland joined the eurozone, prices in the country would rise to the level of Germany, which would be unstoppable.
Kaczyński believes the euro could be an obstacle to Poland’s development. He added:
If you have a strong currency, you lose (by joining the eurozone) because exports become too expensive. We have good exports, including agricultural products, but if we had the euro, it would only be profitable if wages in Poland were lower.
PiS argues that Poland should keep its own currency, which it sees as a sovereignty issue. At a party congress last month, Kaczyński said the eurozone only benefits Germany and a few other rich Western countries such as the Netherlands or Austria.
Poles are quite negative about the euro: according to a poll published last month, 66.8 per cent are in favour of the country keeping its own currency. The most sceptical are voters of the right-wing opposition parties, PiS and the Confederation Party.
Nevertheless, “as a member of the eurozone, Poland could participate more effectively in shaping the economic system in the EU, taking security issues into account,” according to a report published last year by Agnieszka Smoleńska of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Paweł Tokarski of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik.
MEP from the ruling Poland 2050 (Renewal) party Róża Thun believes that Kaczyński is simply repeating rhetoric that PiS has been repeating for a long time.”
She told Euractiv:
Threatening the Polish people with the euro has no point at the moment, as the vast majority of the EU countries have already joined the eurozone.
Poland trades with eurozone members, she added, and when money is exchanged, banks make money while entrepreneurs and citizens lose. The EU lawmaker also added:
It’s hard to plan the future of your business if you don’t know what the exchange rate will be.
However, Poland cannot join the eurozone because it does not fulfil the requirements, especially the convergence criteria. Thun said:
There is still a long road ahead of us. We will not join the eurozone until we ensure that the zloty’s position is stable enough to prevent major price fluctuations or other major economic problems.
