(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Movimientos tectónicos en Europa y en la derecha)

In Poland, elections are being held on October 15 that are of capital importance for Europe.

For politics, for international security and defense in this country neighboring Ukraine and Belarus that already invests 4% of its GDP in defense and leads a revival of national defense awareness that extends from Scandinavia across all of Mitteleuropa to the Balkans.

But also because it is going to give shape for the first time to the effects of an ideological phenomenon that will have a colossal impact next June in the European elections, and which may change the destiny of the continent and radically halt the drift of the European Union toward a socialist, centralist, anti-national, authoritarian space with ever fewer rights and freedoms.

Poland has become, in little more than a decade, one of the greatest examples of success in its growth, economic development and prosperity. And also in stability and social cohesion, despite all the internal political polarization and the external political and military upheavals of its neighbors.

Moreover, it has become a leader in the conservative revolution that is spreading across the whole continent and beyond.

In addition to its economic and cultural success, its social peace and internal security, Poland’s importance has soared because it has become a decisive force in Western defense, given the shifts in strategic weight.

These had already begun long before the war unleashed by the criminal Russian invasion of Ukraine, but they have accelerated with it.

Poland has already replaced Germany as the United States’ main ally on the continent. And Poland is the natural leader of a new axis of nations that definitively eclipses the decadent and degraded Franco-German axis within the EU.

Many things are going to happen in Europe in a short time. But what is never going to return is the unquestioned power of the Berlin-Paris directorate that for decades imposed, through its puppets in the European Commission, its agenda and its political, economic, commercial and ideological interests, and over the past two decades in total disregard for the interests of the other EU members.

This is due in large part to the fact that Germany is tragically self-mutilating in its delirium of German idealism in battle with the eco-climatic dragon. And it does not stop inflicting damage on itself, as do other countries in that ideological wake, among them, unfortunately very prominently, Spain.

France, with its irreformable, paralyzed State and the multiracial bomb already with its fuse lit, can only hold out some hope with a radically different presidency and government. Of leaders who are not afraid of traumatic solutions in order to try to prevent the social, cultural and security catastrophe that looms over them, our neighbor.

But let us leave the agonizing, if not finished, hegemonic axis of Gauls and Teutons and return to Poland’s elections.

Many readers will not be aware that the parties competing for the government are both officially to the right of center.

The governing party is Law and Justice (PiS) and the main opposition party is Civic Platform (PO); the first is integrated in the European Parliament into the group of Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) with VOX.

The opposition one, PO, is integrated into the European People’s Party (EPP) with the PP. The left in Poland, with barely 10%, plays no other role than to help the Polish PP-equivalent try to unseat PiS, VOX’s sister party, which has governed with much economic success and hopes to renew its mandate.

And it is here that the immense political importance of the elections in Poland lies. Because it is the first country where the colossal dilemma faced for the first time and existentially by the entire center-right, defined by Christian democracy and liberals, that has governed in Europe since the end of the Second World War, is going to be settled.

That dilemma bears down on all the center-right parties that are today in the European People’s Party and that have governed the EU in what has been a de facto grand coalition with the Socialist Group.

These two forces massively dominated the European Parliament, voted together on laws, directives and regulations previously agreed between them and normally, without much trouble, supported afterward by the group of liberals, Greens and communists, all of them part of the consensus that has marked the EU’s evolution toward a progressivism hostile to national sovereignties and ever more devoted to social engineering captive to radical environmentalism, climate alarm, Agenda 2030 and the enemies of growth.

The only ones marginalized were the parties of the right, habitually branded as far-right, without relevance and always ignored and outside the agreements.

Those times are ending. In the Polish elections the decision is already made. The center-right of the PP no longer exists in Poland.

Donald Tusk’s party, PO, is a supporter of each and every point of the cultural and social transformation of the progressivism advocated by the left. Its difference with the socialists is now almost limited to its origin.

The EPP member party in Warsaw has a program in the image of an Esteban González Pons who boasts of always voting with all the socialists.

The progressivism and woke subculture that does not vote for the socialists, not because of programmatic disagreements but because they come from the communist regime, votes for Tusk’s PP, Civic Platform.

Against them is PiS, VOX’s ally in the ECR, which defends a Europe of sovereign nations, the defense of the family, of borders, of agriculture, fishing and livestock farming, of traditional values, and is radically opposed to Agenda 2030 and social engineering.

The next European elections will be a long battle of trenches.

In one will be the defenders of the policy of the Green Deal and Agenda 2030, of putting an end to the primary sector in Europe, of building all European homes in the future according to a homogenized pattern, of punishing the mobility of citizens for considering it harmful to the environment, of imposing massive coercive measures on everything deemed in some way injurious to the climate.

Under the motto “Less freedom, to save the Planet.” There will gather socialists and communists, Greens and progressive-liberals, but also part of the European PP such as González Pons or Semper from Spain, many progressives of the EPP from various countries and, of course, Tusk’s party.

In the other will be VOX and PiS and all the parties of the ECR, but also those of Identity and Democracy, with more or fewer differences with the ECR but always in the same position with respect to halting the EU’s drift toward a centralist, interfering, socialist, anti-national and authoritarian megastate.

Under the motto “Freedom, creativity, entrepreneurship, trust in the human being.” All the parties of the two conservative and national groups are going to grow, according to the polls, while the two large traditional groups, the PP and the Socialists, will keep losing seats.

To the group of the national forces (ECR+ID) will join forces that were or are in the PP because they refuse to adhere to the leftist policy of eco-climatic fanaticism and to the permanent cutback of rights and freedoms.

Orbán’s Hungarian party may be joined by Janša’s Slovenian party and others that are in the EPP but have an electorate already definitively in revolt against the EU measures that systematically impoverish, harm and humiliate European citizens.

That impose brutal restrictions and penalties on sectors, trades and regions, all for the sake of improving the environment, when everyone is aware that the disproportion between the supposed benefits to the environment of certain measures and the terrible effects they have on the citizenry is radical and unbearable.

While the rest of the continents compete, produce and develop without imposing on themselves delirious self-punishing measures.

Protection of the environment yes, suicide for its sake, no. The EPP already votes divided on all questions of climate alarm, social engineering and the cultural battle.

In the Spanish PP in Brussels that division is visible, but also in the CDU and in other European center-right parties.

The Spanish PP has spent four years voting for all the measures in favor of Agenda 2030, and it voted against the Nature Restoration Law no doubt because it was in pre-electoral dates.

And before the elections it did not want to support something that VOX has denounced consistently since the beginning of the term. The entire European center-right party (EPP) is cracking apart because the ideological dilemma now implacably imposes on them a definition on capital questions.

The Spanish PP will fare like the others. It may decide to defend Agenda 2030 and the EU’s plan toward socialist centralism.

Part of the parties today members of the PP will follow many of their voters to the positions of defense of a Europe of Christian values and traditions, of sovereign nations that cooperate among themselves in a regime of freedom and voluntariness, that is, of the ECR and of ID.

Of rejection of a European government that imposes punishments and rewards by ideological criteria. That defends our way of life, protects our borders, expels the criminals who arrived and punishes those from here. That defends the sacred character of the human being.

In Poland in October, as in all of Europe in June, the voter will have two positions: the right of common sense, freedom and security, the economy of entrepreneurship and ideas, and opposite it the left with its egalitarianism, its total taxation, its cutback of freedoms and rights under the pretext of saving the planet, and controls, many controls. The PP has all these months to choose which of the two to be in. There is no third option.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.