LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty 5 takeaways from Poland’s election The right’s return to power carries bigger repercussions for domestic policy than abroad.

WARSAW — Poland’s parliamentary election on Sunday upended one of Europe’s most stable political scenes and ousted one of the EU's longest-serving governments.

Voters had enough of eight years of the Civic Platform. No matter that the economy stayed the EU's consistently strongest; nor that Warsaw had built good ties with its neighbors or won a front-row seat at the power tables in Brussels. The center-right party looked exhausted, scandal-ridden and out of ideas, and its listless campaign showed it.

The victorious Law and Justice Party — more to the right of Platform on social issues, to the left on economics — built on its surprise victory in May's presidential election to secure its hold on government for the first time since 2005. The last PiS government, as Law and Justice is known by its Polish acronym, had a tumultuous and short two-year run. Since then, the party has modernized its pitch and appealed beyond its core of older, religious Poles to young voters in larger cities. If the exit polls from Sunday night are correct, it will be the first time in Poland's post-communist history that a single party will have an absolute majority in the Sejm, or parliament.

Here are the most significant takeways from this election.

1. The prime minister designate isn’t the most powerful politician in Warsaw. Beata Szydło may be Poland's next government chief, but PiS's chief and founder Jarosław Kaczyński is in charge — pending further notice. Szydło, deputy leader of PiS, was little known before Kaczyński tapped her to be the face of PiS's campaign and presumptive prime minister. Although core supporters of PiS adore him, he is one the country’s least-liked politicians. He failed to win the presidency in 2010, after the death in a plane crash of his twin brother, President Lech Kaczyński. A year later, he led his party to defeat in the 2011 parliamentary poll.

Kaczyński stepped off center stage in this electoral cycle, putting a backbencher from the European Parliament, Andrzej Duda, out to run for president. Building on that success, Kaczyński used the same formula in the parliamentary election.

None of this means the the 66-year-old political veteran won't be running the show. He controls PiS's parliamentary group: Every candidate for the Sejm was approved by him, and he has always shown little tolerance for internal dissent. Duda’s office is staffed with Kaczyński loyalists. The president has so far shown no sign of bucking his patron.

2. A vibrant economy still left millions angry. Poland grew 23.8 percent between 2008-2014, and was the only economy in the EU to avoid recession in 2008, which the country last saw in 1992. Civic Platform did a terrible job in selling this economic record and PiS a great one in tapping into persistent discontent. The average post-tax monthly salary is 2,940 zlotys (€700), a third of the level in Germany. During the campaign, Szydło dismissively said, “Statistics won’t feed us.”

Law and Justice promised a lower retirement age, a monthly subsidy of 500 zlotys per child and a minimum wage. The total bill for the new social spending promises will be 39 billion zlotys, a sum the party says can be scrounged up with better tax collection. Bashing business is as popular in Poland as anywhere: PiS wants to limit the growth of foreign retail outlets, to impose a new bank tax and to force banks to absorb losses in turning hundreds of thousands of expensive mortgages denominated in Swiss francs into zloty loans.

The left, mostly centered around the Democratic Left Alliance (heir to the old Communist Party), is a spent force in Polish politics, leaving that space open to a nominally right-wing party like PiS. Free market economists and PiS critics say the party's policies may jeopardize this rare EU economic success story. Marek Belka, the central bank governor who is close to the Civic Platform, in a recent interview with POLITICO warned with uncommon vehemence for someone in his job that such rich campaign promises can lead to "huge hangovers and sometimes culminate in disasters.”

Radosław Bodys, head of macro research at Poland’s PKO BP bank, called the idea to lower the retirement age “idiotic," saying that most of the big-ticket promises won’t be implemented. Even if they are, however, Poland still has a firm economic foundation that will be hard to undermine. Public debt is only 50 percent of GDP, lower than in most other EU countries; growth is expected to come in at 3.3 percent this year and 3.4 percent in 2016; and unemployment has dropped below 10 percent. “We think the market is largely getting over the worst of its fear about PiS,” said Peter Attard Montalto of Nomura, the investment bank.

3. Don't expect a revolution in Polish foreign policy. The outgoing government of Ewa Kopacz wasn’t keen on accepting migrants and battled EU emissions policies while defending the use of coal. Her Poland was a stalwart NATO ally, suspicious of Russia, and in no rush to join the euro. The new crowd is more or less in the same place on every one of those issues — though PiS may be less polite in getting its point across.

One notable difference with the Civic Platform: PiS wants to build stronger ties with the rest of Central Europe, a bloc that Warsaw hopes to lead. The focus will be “region, region, and once again region,” said Witold Waszczykowski, a PiS MP tipped as a potential foreign minister. Last time in power, Law and Justice had frosty ties with Germany, driven in part by Kaczyński’s own distaste for the country; his parents fought the Germans during the war. PiS has mellowed on the western neighbor during its eight years in opposition. Duda’s wife is a German teacher, and Szydło hasn’t made Germany a campaign issue. The external threat is Russia.

4. Poland will be hard to work with in Brussels.

Here are some of the key issues for Poland and the EU:

— Brexit. PiS sits with the U.K.’s Conservatives in the European Parliament’s Reformists and Conservatives grouping and is London’s natural ally when it comes to the defense of national sovereignty. But Warsaw will also look closely after the interests of about a million Poles now living in Britain, and won't like Cameron's proposed cuts to benefits for non-British citizens or any other limitations on freedom of movement in the EU.

— Migrants. Poland’s outgoing government was reluctant to take in migrants, and ended up doing so only under fierce pressure, while refusing to accept the idea of mandatory quotas to resettle them. Kaczyński (backed by Duda) has warned that migrants carry diseases. Expect Poland to join the Hungary-led camp of those most fiercely resisting the resettlement of large numbers of Muslim asylum-seekers.

— Climate. Warsaw has long ruffled green feathers with its strident defense of coal, which supplies about 90 percent of the country’s electricity. The new government will be just as tough. This could well cause big problems next year, when the EU tries to figure out how individual countries will meet its overall target to have renewables supply 27 percent of the bloc’s energy by 2030.

— Donald Tusk. The former Polish prime minister's term as president of the European Council expires in 19 months. Kaczyński reviles Tusk; the feeling may be mutual. Now Kaczyński has to decide: Is it better to leave an enemy (and a Pole) in a top job faraway in Brussels, or humiliate him by rejecting his candidacy for a second term?

5. Big changes will happen at home. PiS is almost certain to follow in the footsteps of every previous Polish government and purge state institutions, like the central bank, the broadcast authority and the competition watchdog, as well as state-controlled companies. “My bosses are all preparing their resumes. They expect to lose their jobs very soon,” says a mid-level executive at a Polish state-owned bank.

Kaczyński sees Civic Platform as part of a deeply corrupt post-communist elite that has seized control of Poland. The last PiS government turned to prosecutors and police agencies to try to clean the out the system, and the new one will likely do the same.

In particular, Kaczyński wants to reinvigorate the investigation into the 2010 plane crash in Russia that killed his twin brother. The official investigation blamed undertrained Polish air force pilots who were asked to land in a dense fog. PiS takes a conspiratorial view. Some party activists see a tangled scheme involving government collusion with Russia.