Quarter of Poles Say They Would Volunteer to Defend Country if Attacked

Around a quarter of Poles would volunteer for the army or organizations supporting the army in the event of foreign aggression against Poland, a new survey has shown.

The poll conducted by research firm IBRiS found that 25.6% of Poles would voluntarily sign up to the army or supporting organizations, such as medical ones, while 20.4% would wait to be drafted into the armed forces.

Results also showed that 22.3% of Poles would move their loved ones to a safer place within Poland, while 12.7% said they would try to flee abroad with their families.

Conversely, 36.5% of respondents said they would try to protect their families in their place of residence.

Less than 5% of those polled said they do not know how they would react and 15.2% said they would do nothing.

Political divide

The results showed a clear divide along political lines, with respondents who support opposition parties or are undecided about who to vote for being far more likely to volunteer for the armed forces than those who voted for the governing Civic Coalition bloc.

A third of those who said they would volunteer for the army or aid organizations were undecided voters, while 29% backed opposition parties. Within these two groups, most respondents were men in their fifties, residents of small towns and people who had completed primary or vocational education.

People in this category mainly supported the far-right Confederation alliance in the 2023 parliamentary election and either far-right candidate Grzegorz Braun or left-wing candidate Adrian Zandberg in this year’s presidential election.

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Respondents who said they would wait to be conscripted into the army also mostly voted for opposition parties and were most often men over thirty, rural residents and highly educated.

Most of the people in this group voted for the opposition conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party in the last parliamentary election and for far-right candidate Sławomir Mentzen in this year’s presidential vote.

Those surveyed who said they would leave Poland in the event of foreign aggression mostly consisted of people who backed Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition in the last parliamentary election and centrist Rafał Trzaskowski in the latest presidential election.

These respondents were predominantly women, people in their forties, rural residents and had also completed higher education.

The survey was conducted October 10-11 for Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita on a sample of 1,067 respondents.