The Polish Election – Looking Forward
While the official results for today’s Polish election won’t be announced until tomorrow, there doesn’t seem to be any doubt at this point that Andrzej Duda of the right-wing “Law and Justice” Party (PiS) is the next President of Poland. What will this mean? The actual power of the presidency is limited, so this won’t lead to any dramatic new domestic legislation or a change in Poland’s foreign policy. But that hardly makes this result irrelevant. Quite the contrary: the ramifications of today’s events are enormous, both in Poland and more broadly in Europe.
The first consequence is political. Since 2007 it has been hard to imagine a return to power for PiS. The international mockery and domestic turmoil of the brief years when the Kaczyński brothers were in power (2005-2007) created an “anyone-but-PiS” electoral coalition stretching from the left to the center-right. The Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, or PO) party that has governed since then has been a thin institutional structure for that coalition, generating little affection or enthusiasm for its own sake. The party didn’t stand for much other than a rejection of PiS, and their election campaigns focused on a bland message of administrative efficiency and competence. Donald Tusk, the leader of Civic Platform until his rise to the EU Presidency last year, was fond of saying that Poland had entered a post-ideological era. That was probably a sincere stance, but it was also a convenient position for a political organization that couldn’t afford to have an ideology lest it alienate some part of its unwieldy anti-PiS constituency.
Given this, one of two things will happen now. It is possible that the shock of today’s vote will shatter PO, as different elements of the party seek blame for the loss. The aura of invulnerability that the party enjoyed until a couple weeks ago is gone, and it may be that that aura was the only thing holding the party together. The other possibility is that this will serve as a wake-up call, and those people who didn’t vote today, or voted for Duda because of frustration at Civic Platform’s monopoly on power, will return to their former voting patterns when the Parliamentary elections come in the Fall. After all, Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz remains relatively popular, though whether she can weather the coming storm is impossible to predict.
Ironically, the PiS leadership, particularly Jarosław Kaczyński, is still deeply unpopular. As of March, his negative rating was at 47%, with a positive rating of 32%. This compared with a 12% negative for now ex-President Komorowski and a 75% positive. Back then, Duda had positives only one point higher than his party leader, though his 20% negative score was much lower. Given this, there probably won’t be a clear transferal of today’s victory to the parliamentary elections. Kaczyński himself has been very quiet during the past few months, but that won’t be possible any more. He will want to make it very clear that he, not Duda, remains the leader of PiS. In the past Kaczyński has taken great care to eliminate possible rivals from contention, something he won’t be able to do so easily with President Duda. But he will certainly assert his importance, and that is bound to reflect negatively on the popularity of PiS. Duda’s popularity going forward will depend on his ability to avoid seeming subservient to Kaczyński, while at the same time holding on to the hard-right base of PiS support. That’s going to be tricky, to say the least.
The odds will still be against a parliamentary victory for PiS next Fall, even after today’s fiasco for PO. There will undoubtedly be a swing in the polls towards PiS in the coming weeks, but it is extremely unlikely that the party as a whole will ever come close to the 53% that Duda just won for himself. Given that, the only scenario for a PiS government is a coalition, and nearly all the smaller parties are dead set against working with Kaczyński. It will only take one speech in which the PiS leader returns to his conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric to remind those outside the PiS base what sort of party it is. Duda just demonstrated that he could personally rise above that, but the party as a whole will find it a lot harder to do the same.
I said above that today’s election will reverberate outside Poland’s borders. For those who support European integration this is very bad news, though the real disaster for them will only come if PiS somehow does rise to full power with a parliamentary victory to match today’s presidential triumph. For the past few years Brussels has had a persistent headache thanks to Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian, far-right regime in Hungary, but that problem has been pushed to the back burner because Hungary is a relatively small country and because other crises have been more pressing. But the creation of a “Budapest on the Vistula” (once a PiS slogan, until Orbán began cozying up to Putin) won’t be so easily ignored. PiS combines the economic populism of the south-European left (Syriza or Podemos) with the xenophobia and authoritarian strains of the right (National Front or UKIP). Imagine the Greek defiance of austerity economics combined with the Hungarian defiance of liberal democracy, then magnify both by a factor of four because of Poland’s size: that’s what is in store for Europe if today’s election turns out to be the start of a trend.
In real terms President Duda won’t be able to accomplish much on his own. His office is largely symbolic. But his victory has uncovered some tendencies in Polish political life that can’t be ignored–not in Poland, and not elsewhere in Europe either. If this can happen in the one European country not to suffer through a recession so far in the 21st century, in a country enjoying unprecedented aggregate growth and prosperity (and I emphasize “aggregate”), then it can happen anywhere. The protest votes cast for Duda–and even more important, the protest of disengagement expressed by those who didn’t vote at all–carry a message that every European should be listening to.