Since joining the European Union (EU) on May 1, 2004, Poland has received 245,5 billion euros from European funds, it has paid 83,7 billion euros, so that two decades of membership have brought it 161,6 billion euros net, it calculated Polish Ministry of Finance.
Funds from the common European treasury in that period represented about 2,1 percent of GDP per year, while foreign investments, which were also encouraged by membership in the Union even in the expectation that Poles would join the European Community, amounted to about 3,4 percent of national GDP. -a.
About 65 percent of money from European funds was invested in Poland within the framework of cohesion policy, and more than 30 percent within the framework of agricultural policy, where it received 78 billion euros for the countryside and farmers, of which 50 billion were spent on direct subsidies, 26 billion on program financing development of rural areas and 1,8 billion for market interventions.
The transformation of the countryside and the conditions in which farmers operate has made it possible for Poland to increase its export of agricultural and food products 11 times compared to the period before membership, to 51,8 billion euros in 2023.
Despite the anti-European campaign during the previous eight years when radical conservatives from the Pravo i Pravda party of former Prime Minister Jaroslav Kaczynski were in power, when some of the funds for Poland were blocked due to controversial reforms, especially the judiciary, only a fifth of Poles view EU membership negatively.
In the most recent poll for the Polish newspaper Djenjik Gazeta Pravna and radio RMF FM, 70 percent of Poles positively evaluated the two decades of membership, while only 22 percent of those polled viewed them negatively.
Even almost half of the voters of the current opposition party Pravo i Pravda, 47 percent of them, also positively assess the contribution of two decades in the Union to Poland, while the positive assessment of the contribution to membership among the voters of the pro-European democratic ruling coalition, which came to power in the October parliamentary elections, reaches even 84 percent.
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