Polish eurozone enthusiasm falls – poll finds

Support for introducing the euro in Poland has decreased in the last year, pollster SW Research found, in a survey commissioned by the Economic Freedom Foundation. 

The proportion of Poles who back joining the eurozone in Poland “in the coming years” decreased year-on-year, from 34.9% in 2023 to 30.7%. Overall, however, nearly 40% of those polled backed Poland to start preparing to adopt the euro, the survey found.

Political affiliation determining factor  

Political divides are the main driver of attitudes toward the euro, above factors such as education, age or location. Voters of the centre-left Civic Coalition, led by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, the main party of the ruling coalition, expressed the highest support at 57%, although this figure dropped by 10.6 percentage points year-on-year.

On the other hand, supporters of the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS), which ruled Poland for 8 years until last year, andthe far-right Confederation party reject the country joining the common European currency. Almost 80% of PiS voters oppose even implementing preparations for euro adoption.

Gender gap over euro support

The pollster found a particularly sharp decline among women, 28.5% of whom now favour adopting the euro “in the coming years”, down from 33.9% in 2023. Among men, meanwhile, support has dropped from 36% to 34.1%, amid a broader rise in opposition to the euro, which grew from 50.8% to 56.5%. 

When joining the EU, countries commit to eventually adopting the euro as part of the EU treaties, although timings vary based on fulfilling the necessary economic criteria which pertain to price stability, sound public finances, the durability of convergence, and exchange rate stability. Most of the EU member states outside the eurozone are found in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), as CEE countries Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Romania, as well as Denmark and Sweden, are the only EU-27 countries that have yet to adopt the currency. 

Polish economists weigh up pros, cons of euro adoption

Last year Polish economists Jakub Karnowski and Andrzej Rzonnca wrote that there are clear advantages and disavantages when discussing Poland’s potential euro adoption. 

They point out that “Poland has become deeply integrated with the euro area, and some links (e.g. foreign trade) between Poland and the euro area are even stronger than among this area’s members. The potential benefits for Poland from euro adoption would stem from deepening this integration, in a paper entitled ‘Should Poland join the euro area? The challenge of the boom-bust cycle.’

“By contrast, a decrease in cost of capital, considered to be a benefit of adopting the euro in the existing cost benefit analyses, appears to represent a source of the most significant threat. As long as Poland keeps growing faster than the euro area, the interest rates set by the European Central Bank (ECB) will be too low for the Polish economy. This might easily result in a credit boom-bust cycle, the risk and costs of which would be exacerbated by the underdeveloped rental market. 

“Before joining the euro area, Poland should also improve its flexibility to reallocate labour and capital across companies and sectors as it lags far behind Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) top performers on that score,” Karnowski and Rzonnca conclude.