The German minority in Poland after the change of government

After the last parliamentary elections in Poland, the political balance of power in Germany’s eastern neighbor has changed.

The previous national-conservative ruling party “Law and Justice” no longer has a majority, leading to a new center-left coalition led by Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform.

The German minority in Poland also participated in the elections to the Polish Sejm and Senate with their own candidates, but for the first time in almost 30 years, they failed to enter the parliamentary chambers. The election result and the newly formed government give hope for relaxation – in German-Polish relations and on-site in the environment of the German minority.

It is planned that from the coming school year 2024/2025, the subject “German as a minority language” can again be offered at the previous level to the more than 50,000 affected students who were affected by the reduction to only one lesson per week.

• Under these conditions, after the parliamentary elections and the subsequent change of government, how is the activity of the German minority in Poland?
• What political and social developments does the change of power in Warsaw bring for the German minority? How does the German minority politically position itself in the coming weeks and months after it no longer has a representative in the Sejm?
• What perspectives and challenges are seen? What role will the German minority now be able to play in cultural relations between Germany and Poland?

The chairman of the foundation council, Hartmut Koschyk, will discuss this as part of the online discussion with Natalie Pawlik MdB, Federal Government Commissioner for National Minorities and Resettlement Issues, Dr. Magdalena Lemanczyk, sociologist at the Institute for Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and Rafal Bartek, the chairman of the Association of German Social-Cultural Societies in Poland (VdG) and Knut Abraham MdB, member of the foundation board of the Foundation Verbundenheit, former diplomat and envoy at the German Embassy in Warsaw.

The event can be followed as a Facebook livestream via @stiftungverbundenheit and on the YouTube channel of the Foundation Verbundenheit. We cordially invite you!

INFOBOX

The German minority in Poland is a recognized national minority, mainly living in Upper Silesia. Their rights are guaranteed by the Polish constitution and they are represented in politics and administrations. In municipalities with at least 20 percent German population, German is the second official language. The 2011 census recorded around 45,000 people who stated only German nationality, and 103,000 people stated another nationality or ethnicity in addition to German, mostly Polish. The self-organization of the German minority in Poland estimates that it has 300,000 to 350,000 members.