Author Archives: Brian Porter-Szucs

Defeat

According to the exit polls, the results are as follows:

• PiS: 43.6%
• KO: 27.4%
• Lewica: 11.9%
• PSL: 9.6%
• Konfederacja: 6.4%

If these numbers hold, the Sejm will be divided as follows:

• PiS – 239
• KO – 130
• Lewica – 43
• PSL – 34
• Konfederacja – 13

There is a 2 percent margin of error in the exit poll, so things could still change. The window of hope is tiny, though. Even if PiS were to fall below 231, the presence of Konfederacja gives them an easy coalition partner.

Even though this is a very narrow victory, Kaczyński will seize the opportunity to push forward his vision without regard to the opposition. In the months ahead, we can expect:

• The continued purging of the judiciary.
• The loss of local government authority, replaced by officials appointed by PiS.
• The subordination of the media to a so-called “media ethics board,” which will be used to harrass and close down opposition TV, radio, and print journalism.
• A campaign to purge or discipline teachers, who up until now had been largely opposed to PiS’s plans.
• New restrictions on public assembly, and a few narrowly targeted arrests to ensure that protest is understood to carry risks. Protests will continue, but they will be small and ineffectual.
• Increased marginalization of Poland within the EU. Poland can expect a reduction in payments from EU transfer programs, and probably administrative sanctions as the aforementioned measures are taken. Support for EU membership will likely decline, as PiS supporters come to see Brussels as an enemy.
• Economic troubles as sanctions combine with the inevitable recession (all signs point to a downturn soon). This is probably the only remaining threat to Kaczyński’s power.
• Large scale emigration of Poland’s educated professionals, which will weaken the economy but facilitate the progress of the PiS revolution.

Poland has enjoyed almost three decades of unprecedented economic growth, cultural openness, and strong civil liberties. It is hard to see how any of that can be sustained after today.

Election Update

The 17:00 turnout numbers are in, and the picture has changed dramatically. The highest figures are coming from Poland’s urban areas, and the overall figure (45.94% turnout) is almost 7 points higher than at the same time in 2015.The map is from http://ewybory.eu/wybory-parlamentarne-2019. Polls close at 21:00 (3 pm EST).

Early Voter Turnout

As of noon Polish time, voter turnout is at a record high of 18.14%. That’s almost two points higher than the figure for noon on election day in 2015. Unfortunately, the regional pattern is grim: the biggest numbers are coming from the regions in the south and east where PiS enjoys overwhelming support (see the map below from http://ewybory.eu/wybory-parlamentarne-2019). If this pattern holds, it will be a dark day for those who care about the future of liberal democracy in Poland. But it isn’t quite time for despair yet, because it could be that this pattern reflects the custom in many rural areas of going directly from mass to the polling stations. Urban voters might simply be more likely to sleep in. Very soon we will have the figures for turnout as of 17:00, and that will tell us more.

This is going to be close.

The majority of the commentariat in Poland has reconciled itself to a victory for Jarosław Kaczyński’s “Law and Justice party in Poland’s parliamentary elections next week. With a nearly 16 point lead in an average of recent polls (since October 1), that triumph seems a foregone conclusion.

But there is winning and there is “winning.” If we fill out the details, here is where things stand:

But let’s be careful: the variability in the survey data is considerable. In fact, in the course of writing this post I have had to update the figures in this chart, because new polls are coming in so quickly. In September, different firms registered PiS at levels from 40% (Kantar on 9/26) to 48% (Estymator on 9/19). Although it might seem reasonable to just average out the results, we aren’t necessarily comparing like with like. Companies use different methodologies in everything from data collection (phones, in-person, computer) to sample sizes and demographic weighting. So caveat emptor.

But for discussion’s sake, let’s run with the average above. Poland’s complex electoral law uses proportional representation within each of the country’s 41 electoral districts, each of which has a different number of delegates based on population size. Although Poland does not suffer from gerrymandering comparable to the United States, there are inevitable (though usually slight) deviations from a pure nation-wide proportional representation system. In a race as close as this one, that could matter.

But wait: what is close about a race with one party so far in the lead? First of all, being in first place isn’t enough to form a government. PiS (technically, the “United Right,” consisting of PiS and some small satellite parties) will have very few options for coalition partners if it fails to get 50% of the seats in parliament. The far right Konfederacja party is a coalition of groups that consider Kaczyński too soft. These include several white-supremacist, misogynist, antisemitic, ultra-nationalist, and authoritarian grouplets which are frustrated that PiS hasn’t pushed its revolution far enough. Nonetheless, they would almost certainly enter a coalition with PiS should the occasion arise.

The wild card is PSL, the Polish Peasant’s Party. This is the oldest political party in Poland, with roots in the 19^th century agrarian movement. As Poland has modernized and urbanized, this party was marginalized but never eliminated. Its ideological flexibility has allowed it to enter into coalitions with governments of many ideological orientations, based on purely tactical and clientelistic grounds. In recent years it has struggled mightily to retain a constituency, because PiS has drained away nearly all its rural support with appeals to Catholic conservative identity politics and (since taking power in 2015) with an ever growing patronage system in the countryside. There are countless personal animosities between PSL and PiS activists on both the local and national level, which would make a coalition very difficult. To date, every party that Kaczyński has entered into coalitions with has either been de-facto absorbed, or eliminated. The PSL leadership is well aware of this track record. Still, the common ground between these to parties can’t be ignored: both represent culturally conservative, rural, Catholic constituencies. It is by no means out of the question that they might abandon the democratic opposition (with whom they have generally aligned since 2015) and cast their lot with the far right.

But none of this necessarily matters, because everything depends on the application of the complex mathematics of the so-called d’Hondt method, which is the foundation of the Polish election rules. Click on those links for the details, but to make a long story short, this system eliminates parties that get less than 5% of the vote and then redistributes those votes among the larger parties, with a complex system that rewards the largest parties the most. Most of the time this deviates only marginally from a simple proportional representation system, but twice since the fall of communism in 1989 it has resulted in radically distorted results when an unusual number of small parties came in just under the limit:

This year, it doesn’t look like we will see a repeat of 2015 (not to mention 1993). Only two groups, PSL and Konfederacja, are polling close to the 5% mark. PSL has only fallen below that number in 3 outlier polls since July, and Konfederacja has only passed that mark in a small handful.

With all that buildup, here’s roughly what the current survey results would produce in terms of parliamentary delegates:

With this model, PiS is several delegates short of a majority. To get a sense of how close this is, if Konfederacja gets 5% instead of the 4.4% they currently have, the result could look like this:

To get a sense of how weird this mechanism can be, here is what would happen if we just took the best survey results PiS has had in the past month, the aforementioned September result from Estymator:

And here’s the other extreme: the worst poll Kaczyński has seen recently:

Given this range of possible outcomes, and taking into account all the additional complexities mentioned above, the only thing we can predict for sure is that this is going to be very close.

That leads to two very important conclusions:

• Whatever the result (unless all the polls have been wrong and one side or the other gains a truly decisive majority) we should be extremely cautious in making any generalizations about Polish public opinion. The country is divided roughly down the middle, with each side living in separate media ecosystems and experiencing different daily realities. That’s not going to change.
• If PiS does gain a majority, it will continue to rule as if it has an overwhelming mandate, with confident affirmations that it alone represents the voice of that “true” Polish nation. It will push forward even more radical measures to curtail liberal democracy, to advance authoritarian centralization, and to brutally marginalize those who don’t fit into its vision of Polishness. In a future post I will describe the proposals outlined in the PiS party platform, but suffice it to say for now that they are as ambitious as they are terrifying. In other words, the stakes of these elections are unspeakably massive, and the fate of Poland is almost certain to be decided by a very small number of votes.

How to Remember 1989

The following essay was just published by The Global Post

Thirty years ago, on June 4, 1989, there were free elections in Poland – the first multiparty elections since WWII, and the beginning of a cascade of events that culminated in the collapse of all the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Two years later, the USSR itself would cease to exist, and the Cold War would come to an end. There was doubtlessly an excess of liberal triumphalism in 1989, but it can’t be denied that it was a year of genuine triumph for the forces of democracy, pluralism, and openness. And it all started in Poland.

Sadly, it seems that what goes around, comes around. Three decades after those thrilling events, we are witnessing the re-consolidation of dictatorial regimes in Poland, Hungary, and Russia, while similar anti-liberal forces rise throughout the region. The rhetoric is a bit different nowadays, with the slogans coming from the nationalist right rather than the communist left, but the methods of authoritarianism are frighteningly similar. The Polish, Hungarian, and Russian courts, media, cultural institutions, and educational systems are all under the control of each country’s ruling party, which uses this power to reshape society and stamp out liberal values of tolerance, diversity, pluralism, and respect for legal norms. When we recall that the communists of the 1970s and 1980s had themselves become increasingly xenophobic and nationalistic, even the rhetorical differences fade. Perhaps, in retrospect, the changes of 1989 weren’t as dramatic as they seemed at the time. Should we even be celebrating this year’s anniversaries?

Yes, we should – but with an eye towards the unfulfilled promise of that amazing moment thirty years ago. As we celebrate, we ought to return to the actual hopes and goals of those who brought about the fall of communism, and push aside once and for all the radical austerity ideology that was imposed upon Eastern Europe afterwards.

When the activists of the Solidarity labor movement began negotiating with the communist authorities in early 1989, they had both political and economic demands. Those political goals were achieved beyond their wildest dreams: one of their own leaders would be Prime Minister by the end of the summer, and within a few years Poland had an independent judiciary, a wide-open media landscape, and a multi-party democracy. Solidarity’s economic goals, however, were immediately and ruthlessly discarded. Revisiting those demands today is like peering into an alternative universe, one in which it seemed plausible to demand that that wages be indexed to inflation, that full employment be guaranteed by the state, and that independent unions play a large role in managing firms. Though the label wasn’t used at the time, it was a formula for democratic socialism, not neoliberal capitalism. This is what was promised in the deal that emerged from the “Round Table Talks.”

That promise was never kept. As the new post-communist government embraced a series of radical austerity measures known as “shock therapy,” Poland plunged into one of the deepest recessions every recorded. In fact, if we combine the crisis of the late-communist era with the post-communist recession, and compare that to the Great Depression of the 1930s, we see a shocking result:

That second plunge in the late 20^th century recession, which came right after 1989, helps explain why so many Poles almost immediately felt an intense buyer’s remorse about abandoning the communist system. The CBOS survey firm has been asking Poles how they felt about the post-communist transformations, and until recently opinions have been divided, and subject to a lot of fluctuation:

In part, the much-delayed consensus that the overthrow the Polish People’s Republic was worthwhile comes from the fact that the country’s overall economic success has become undeniable. In the aggregate, Poles now are richer than they have ever been before—by a lot.

But note that drop in 1978 and the even deeper drop after 1989. Those who experienced the events of those years would be forgiven for wondering why so many outsiders were celebrating the fall of communism. Moreover, even as incomes eventually recovered and then rose to new heights, it came at the expense of significantly longer working hours, incomparably more stress, frayed family relations and social bonds, and massive cultural change. For all these reasons, those old enough to remember the Polish People’s Republic remain ambivalent even today about the transformations. The growing consensus that 1989 was worthwhile comes primarily from those who came of age after the 1990s, whose “memory” of communism comes from schoolbooks, novels, films, and TV shows that consistently depict the old system in uniformly dark colors.

21^st century politics in Poland—and throughout Eastern Europe—has been dominated by a battle between neoliberals (who want to defend both the economic and political system established after 1989) and nationalists (who emphasize the darker sides of the new order, but blame it on a vast conspiracy of foreigners and hidden ex-communists). Now the latter are in power, and they are dismantling all the gains of the former—political and economic alike. The authoritarian regime of Jarosław Kaczyński’s “Law and Justice” party is distinctly awful, and I wouldn’t want to imply a symmetry between them and their liberal opponents. Nonetheless, today’s tragic erosion of constitutional norms is at least in part a consequence of the failures of the 1990s and early 2000s. Missing from the political scene back then was an agenda that would implement all the aspects of the Round Table Accords: an agenda that combined liberal democratic freedoms in the political and cultural realm with democratic socialism in the economic realm.

This year, as we celebrate the anniversary of 1989, let’s remember that path not taken. It’s too late to recover it now, because the living memory of the communist era has been replaced by the politics of memory, and that’s been thoroughly poisoned by the competing distortions of both liberal anticommunism and nationalist anticommunism. No one shouldwant to recover communism—there is, despite everything, something to celebrate with this year’s anniversaries. The sigh of regret that accompanies those commemorations is for the vanished and vanquished agenda of the 1980s: the program that didn’t want to throw the egalitarian baby out with the communist bathwater.

Is Democracy Doomed in Poland?

In the aftermath of last week’s EU elections in Poland, there has been an abundance of lamentation and jeremiads by commentators on the left and center-left. Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or PiS) achieved its greatest electoral success ever, both in absolute and relative terms. Last Fall, during local and regional elections, there were signs that the opposition had won enough support in Poland’s towns and cities to make victory in the next parliamentary elections plausible. Now that objective seems further away than ever.

Matters seemed to get even worse this past weekend, as news emerged that the Polish Peasant’s Party [Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, or PSL] was considering a break from the anti-PiS, pro-democracy European Coalition [Koalicja Europejska, or KE]. For quite some time, supporters of liberal democracy have hoped for the creation of a broad front of allied parties from the center left and the center right, on the assumption that PiS could only be defeated if everyone joined together and put aside the issues that would otherwise divide them. After all, there is little sense squabbling about this or that budget priority, or this or that economic plan, when the very foundation of liberal democracy is at stake. Well, that coalition was finally created, including the PSL, the center-right Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, or PO), the liberal Modern Party (Nowoczesna), the social democratic Alliance of the Democratic Left (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej, or SLD), and the Greens (Zieloni). Only the anti-clerical, left-liberal Spring Party (Wiosna) and the far-left Together Party (Razem) ran on their own. For their part, PiS had subsumed nearly the entire nationalist right, except for a small group that we might call the counter-cultural right (Kukiz 15) and an alliance of antisemitic even-further-right fringe parties calling itself The Confederation (Konfederacja). The results were unambiguously a disaster for the center and the left, even if we bring together all the various parties on the PiS and anti-PiS divide. The gap of slightly over one million votes is huge, considering that parliamentary elections tend to bring out 15-16 million voters (out of about 30 million eligible voters).

But let’s not be too hasty to predict a PiS victory in the next elections, which must take place this coming Fall. This balance of power, if it were to carry forward, would not necessarily lead to a significant PiS majority in the next Sejm (the Polish parliament). Polish electoral law requires a party to get at least 5% of the vote, which would cause Konfederacja, Kukiz 15, and Razem to fall by the wayside. The remaining balance would be a Sejm with 232 seats for PiS, and 228 for the opposition (197 for KE, and 31 for Wiosna). That’s an even smaller majority for PiS than they currently enjoy (238 votes), and they would no longer have the cushion of the 26 seats currently held by Kukiz 15, nor the 20 seats occupied by right wing politicians who declared their partisan independence since the last elections. Put differently, if last week’s vote were repeated in the Fall, PiS would be a mere 115,000 votes away from losing power to a coalition of KE and Wiosna.

Polish politics has always been characterized by “wasted” votes—that is, ballots cast for parties that didn’t make it past the 5% bar. Typically these don’t shift the overall balance of power, because there are fringe parties scattered across the political spectrum. But twice in the history of the Third Republic there have been spikes of significant “wastage,” leading to major distortions: in 1993, when the law was first instituted and the right was almost locked out of the Sejm because it hadn’t yet coalesced into a single movement; and then again in 2015, when PiS benefited from that very system. If the results this coming Fall are close to what they were last week, it is very possible that the shoe will again be on the other foot.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is no reason to believe that the vote in the Fall will be a replication of what happened last week. Historically, votes to the EU parliament have been poor predictors of national elections. In this specific case, the dynamic could be altered significantly if PSL does indeed decide to break from the coalition. I might have to acknowledge that my own hopes for a unified opposition were mistaken, because the increase in votes that PiS got in the last election came almost entirely from areas that had once been the strongholds of PSL. That party is unique in modern Polish politics. It is the only currently active party that has a continuous existence from before WWI until the present day, and its ideological identity has been somewhat fluid over that long history. In both the Second and Third Republics, the PSL has served in governing coalitions with both left and right wing parties, and precisely because of their flexibility they have come to specialize in a distinctive form of clientelistic politics. This has made it impossible to expand beyond a narrow base in a few rural areas, but it has also allowed the party to consistently remain above (sometimes barely) the 5% cutoff. It seems that the party’s constituents were willing to accept government coalitions with various larger parties, regardless of ideological profile, because that allowed the PSL leadership to retain control over government offices that could be used to sustain patronage networks. But merging into a coalition before an election meant that the PSL name was not on the ballot, and that the rural voters who would usually vote for the party had to choose between KE (a bloc dominated by urban liberals and leftists) or PiS. Not surprisingly—in hindsight—they went for the latter or just stayed home. This alone could account for most of the increase in the size of the PiS electorate. Significantly, PiS did not gain new voters in any of the districts known for more intense nationalism or religiosity; instead, their gains were in rural areas in the north and west of the country that had up till now demonstrated a somewhat more centrist (perhaps coldly pragmatic) profile. In other words, these are not areas that are ideologically aligned with PiS, but rural areas that can be swayed to vote for Kaczyński’s party if the economy seems strong (which it does) and if all the other options are linked to the cosmopolitan sensibilities of Poland’s liberal elite. Meanwhile, the remaining parties within KE will not have to worry about the concerns of the PSL, allowing them to offer a clearer message that aligns with the priorities of their urban, liberal base. That, in turn, could help them generate some more excitement and spur higher turnout.  

But big questions remain. If PSL does run on its own, will their voters switch back in the Fall, or will they feel betrayed by their old political patrons and instead stick with PiS? Kaczyński will doubtlessly work hard over the coming months to demonstrate his party’s largesse to precisely these swing districts. Even if these voters do return to the PSL, will it be enough to keep the party about the 5% level? If not, that will just draw votes away from the anti-PiS opposition. Finally, what will happen to the other three small parties that either just missed or just passed the 5% line: Konfederacja, Kukiz 15, and Wiosna? In all three cases, a tiny shift in the vote totals one way or the other could make an enormous difference, and completely change the balance of power.

The bottom line is that the results of the parliamentary elections are by no means a foregone conclusion. Surveys have shown that among the overall population, the divide between pro-PiS and anti-PiS is well within the margin of error. No matter what happens, there won’t be an overwhelming mandate in either direction (despite the claims that the winner is sure to make). Given this context, everything will depend on the complex and tedious details of partisan maneuvering and campaign strategy. That’s the kind of politicking that rarely inspires enthusiasm, but at stake this year could be the future of liberal democracy in Poland.