Peasants' Party

Peasants' Party (, PCh) is a Polish political party founded by the former Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland activists in 2018. The party was registered in April 2018 by Krzysztof Filipek, a long-time vice-chairman of Samoobrona, who seceded from Samoobrona for the regionalist Party of Regions in 2007 before founding the Peasants' Party. The party includes former MPs and agrarian activists of Self-Defence such as Danuta Hojarska and Renata Beger. The party announced that it would not run independently in elections, and started cooperating with agrarian trade unions and sought coalitions with left-wing parties. In August 2018, the party entered an agreement with the left-wing Democratic Left Alliance to run on the party's electoral list. The party is based on the Samoobrona party, whose former members are the founders of the Peasants' Party. The party wants to focus primarily on agricultural problems, and represents the interests of farmers and the countryside at large. The Peasants' Party argues that the countryside had been neglected by Polish politics ever since the electoral demise of Samoobrona in the 2007 Polish parliamentary election, and believes that the countryside remains the most marginalised place in Poland. The party wants to continue the legacy of the Samoobrona's late leader Andrzej Lepper and presents a strongly left-wing stance, portraying itself as "the true left, the one that stands on the side of ordinary people". The party calls itself a "social agrarian" alternative to left-wing rural voters. History The party was founded by Krzysztof Filipek in March 2017, and formally registered a year later on 3 April 2018. Filipek is a left-wing politician formerly associated with agrarian socialist Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland. As the MP of Samoobrona, Filipek became a prominent agrarian and regionalist activist known for organising rural protests; in 2007, he was prosecuted for dumping imported grain during one of the protests. In November 2007, Filipek was one of the founders of the regionalist Party of Regions, a split from Samoobrona. The Party of Regions was founded by former Samoobrona members disappointed by the lack of reforms within the party, and wanted the Party of Regions to succeed Samoobrona as a party with the same goal and program that would be free from scandals. The party aspired to be a grassroots, bottom-up, decentralised and regionalised organisation.