Key consequences of Polish parliamentary elections

According to the election results in Poland, the country’s former Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his pro-European Civic Platform party got a chance to form a governing coalition together with other opposition parties. At the same time, the ruling Law and Justice party represented by President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki won the most seats in the parliament.

Parliamentary elections in Poland on Oct. 15 were held simultaneously with a manipulative referendum initiated by the sitting government. The four questions concerned the economy, migration, and pension reform, and were framed in such a way as to criticize Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party.

However, Tusk claimed victory after Civic Platform came in second, suggesting he expects to form a coalition government with other political opponents of Law and Justice.

NV summarizes the main results of what happened in the elections in Poland and its consequences.

The democratic opposition will most likely form the government coalition, despite the victory of the Kaczyński and Morawiecki ruling party

According to the latest updated exit poll data, five parties are entering the 460-seat Polish Sejm:

• the Law and Justice party (PiS), the ruling conservative political force of Yaroslav Kaczyński and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki – 36.6% (about 198 seats in the Sejm);

• the opposition liberal Civic Platform (PO), led by the former prime minister, former president of the European Council, Donald Tusk – 31% (161 seats);

• coalition of centrist parties Third Way (Trzecia Droga, TD) – 13.5% (57 seats);

• political union of left-wing parties Lewica — 8.6% (30 seats);

• the alliance of far-right Eurosceptic forces Confederation (Konfederacja) – 6.4% (14 seats).

Accordingly, as the Polish mass media have already calculated, not the formal winner of the elections, namely PiS, but the democratic opposition, including Tusk’s party, the centrist Third Way, and Lewica can form a majority in the Sejm, which will have about 250 seats. In this case, it is this coalition that will have the right to form the government.

That’s why in the first minutes after the exit polls were announced, Tusk was happy with his party’s second place and announced the victory of the democratic forces in Poland.

“I’ve been a politician for many years. I’m an athlete. Never in my life have I been so happy about taking seemingly second place. Poland won. Democracy has won. We’ve removed them from power,” Tusk told his supporters.

“This is the end of the bad times, and this is the end of PiS rule. We did it.”

The final results of the vote can still change the picture, but Tusk’s fellow party members are confident that they will be able to form a majority government.

“The next 40 hours, 60 hours will show how we’ll build this coalition. But it’s obvious to us that the [government] coalition is us, the Third Way, and Lewica,” said Borys Budka, head of the Civic Platform parliamentary faction.

Poland’s democratic forces “stopped Polexit” — Budka said about Warsaw’s policies in recent years violating EU laws and values.

“Democracy in Poland stopped Polexit because a third term for PiS would mean Polexit,” he said.

A historic half-record: PiS is on the verge of losing power after eight years of Poland’s ultra-conservative course

The conservative Law and Justice party, founded by the Kaczyński brothers, has ruled Poland for the past eight years and hoped for a historic third term in power.

Over the years, insisting on preserving Poland’s “Catholic values,” the ruling party has pushed the country on an ultra-conservative course, which has repeatedly caused criticism of the European Union.

As reported by The Guardian, PiS, which has governed Poland for eight years, has turned public television into a propaganda arm of the government, restricted abortion rights, and demonized LGBTQ+ people, migrants, and refugees. It has also put Poland on a collision course with Brussels over rule of law issues, which has led to tens of billions of euros in European funding being frozen. In particular, this happened due to the notorious judicial reform, as a result of which the appointment of the National Council of Justice was made dependent on the parliamentary majority’s decisions.

Due to these policies, the European press wrote about the threat of Poland’s transformation into a new nationalist “Hungary” that opposes Brussels. That is why extraordinary attention was paid to the elections in Poland. The results of the vote seem to reduce these risks.

However, formally, PiS has still managed to win the parliamentary elections for the third time in a row – something that no other political force in Poland achieved in the post-Soviet period. The party ran a populist election campaign, claiming to be the only political force that could protect Poland from the “invasion” of refugees.

Party leader Yaroslav Kaczyński called such a result a great success but admitted that PiS still “doesn’t know” whether it will be able to form a government.

“We have days of struggle and tension ahead,” he declared.

The notorious far-right party got a lower result than expected

The far-right Confederation coalition was projected to get around 9% of the vote, but it managed to get just over 6%. It was this political force that offered to limit Polish support and military aid to Ukraine.

The Confederation was formed just before the 2019 European Parliament elections after the New Hope, the National Movement of Poland, the Confederation of the Polish Crown, and the Union of Christian Families political parties merged.

The movement has united right-wing populist forces that profess even tougher rhetoric about migrants and the EU than PiS. The Confederation tried to woo more voters by calling for lower taxes.

At the same time, its representatives were known for a number of controversial statements, including sexist and anti-Semitic ones. One of the political force’s founder, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, opposed women suffrage, saying that only after the age of 55 “when estrogen stops working, a woman reaches the age when she can finally vote.” At the same time, Professor Ryszard Zajączkowski, another candidate from the party, claimed that after WWII, the Poles allegedly suffered genocide “at the hands of Jews who worked together with the Communists.” Declaring that communism was worse than fascism, he said: “Compared to this, Auschwitz [Nazi German concentration camp] can be called a resort camp.”

The turnout in the elections was the highest in more than 30 years

According to preliminary data, about 73% of Polish voters took part in the elections – this is a record high for parliamentary elections in Poland since 1989, reports Polskie Radio.

“There were so many people that election commissions had to extend the voting time, for example, in Krakow, where over 1,500 voters registered overnight,” said Sylwester Marciniak, head of the National Election Commission.

Some regional commissions ran out of ballots due to the large number of voters, he said. Voting continued even after 2 a.m. in one of the district polling stations in Wrocław. At that time, several hundred people were still standing in line to vote.

Poles also voted very actively outside the country. In Canada, the turnout exceeded 90% in nine out of 12 polling stations. In total, more than 600,000 Poles living outside the country registered to vote abroad.

“Poland is back”: the elections pave the way for the country’s pro-European reorientation

Piotr Buras, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Warsaw, said “the opposition’s victory is the result of growing fatigue with the PiS government in society – outside of those groups that traditionally support the liberals.”

“The liberals won an absolute majority, but the process of forming a government may not be easy or simple,” Buras emphasized, adding that the opposition’s victory “paves the way to a massive reorientation of Poland’s domestic and European policies.”

Siegfried Muresan, member of the European Parliament from Romania and vice-president of the European People’s Party, wrote on Twitter that “Poland is back” – this is how he reacted to the results of exit polls.

“By far the most important election in Europe this year is the Polish national election. It ended tonight with a victory for democracy. Opposition won majority of seats. The eurosceptic Polish government lost. Congratulations to Donald Tusk!” he wrote.

“This evening could be a massive game changer for Europe. Having Poland back at the table of constructive negotiations in the EU will make all of us stronger. In a moment of so many common challenges, this is absolutely crucial for everyone in Europe,” Terry Reintke, co-president of the Greens faction in the European Parliament, tweeted.

Tusk may lead the government again: he called Ukraine’s support “existential” for Poland and criticized the government for its conflicts with Kyiv

If a government coalition with the participation of the Civic Platform is formed, 66-year-old Tusk will celebrate a major return to Polish politics. He is considered one of the most likely candidates for PM.

A former member of the anti-communist Solidarity movement, Tusk already served as the Polish prime minister in 2007-2014. In the same period, he became the co-founder and leader of the Civic Platform party, which managed to form the government for two consecutive elections.

Later, Tusk reached stellar political heights in the EU: he was the president of the European Council in 2014-2019 and headed the European People’s Party in 2019-2022. Although Tusk later abandoned his EU career to return to Poland and lead the Civic Platform once again, the ruling PiS party has built its current political campaign on criticizing Tusk. Kaczyński’s fellow party members tried to present him as a foreign puppet, saying that his party supposedly acts in the interests of Germany and Brussels, not Poland.

Instead, Tusk called the election a “last chance” to stop the ruling Law and Justice party from doing irreparable damage to Polish democracy.

During the election campaign, Tusk also criticized the Polish authorities for a political conflict with Ukraine over agricultural exports in 2023.

In particular, Tusk made the following statements on Ukraine before the elections:

• called Kyiv “an absolutely key partner” for Poland. “Good relations and support for Ukraine, Ukraine’s independence, its presence in the defense and European community – this is probably an existential question for us, to be or not to be,” Tusk said.

• criticized the Polish authorities for manipulating the topic of Ukrainian refugees. Tusk recalled that the Polish government, formed by PiS, accepted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, but “didn’t organize any infrastructure for them, such as clinics or schools,” so he considered speculation on this topic inappropriate. “From the very beginning, we had to seriously consider what we can afford when it comes to helping Ukrainian refugees,” Tusk stressed.

• claimed that the Polish government “started an unexpected dispute with Ukraine at a time when the fate of the war is probably being decided.” Tusk emphasized that in the grain dispute, PiS was only trying to win votes, but “in no way did it protect Polish farmers.”

• admitted that “sometimes they must be persistent” regarding Ukraine but added that the country’s authorities should have conducted a dialogue with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “as a partner” [and not suddenly change the tone before the elections] from the very beginning. According to Tusk, it is necessary to help Ukraine, “but at the same time be sensitive to what is in Poland’s interests and what is not.”

“There is no alternative to the pro-Ukrainian policy, but there must be measures that protect Polish interests in this policy. However, under no circumstances can we afford a sudden change of strategy,” he said.

The referendum that the government tried to use against the opposition seems to have failed

Simultaneously with the elections, the Polish government organized a referendum with four questions being put forward. Their wording caused a wave of criticism, as they were apparently designed to reduce support for PiS opponents, particularly Tusk’s party. Even the OSCE noted that such questions should “mobilize voters sympathetic to the ruling party.” Here are these questions:

• Do you support raising the retirement age, including restoring the increased retirement age to 67 for women and men? [during the Tusk government, a reform was approved with a gradual increase in the retirement age to 67, PiS canceled these changes]

• Do you support removing the barrier on Poland’s border with Belarus? [the fight against migrants has become one of the main topics of the PiS campaign]

• Do you support admitting thousands of illegal migrants from the Middle East and Africa, in accordance with the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?

• Do you support the sale of state enterprises to foreign entities, leading to the loss of control by Poles over strategic sectors of the economy? [PiS advocated conservative-nationalist economic measures]

In response to this referendum, the opposition, particularly Tusk’s party, called on its supporters to refuse to participate in it and demand only parliamentary election ballots at the polling station. Such a move would have an effect, since more than 50% of voters must participate in the referendum to be recognized as valid. Even one of the former heads of Poland’s election commission joined these calls.

According to preliminary data from exit polls, the boycott was successful, and the referendum can indeed be declared invalid. While the turnout in the elections was a record 72.9%, according to the Ipsos survey, only 40% of voters used ballots for the referendum (a minimum of 50% is required).

The opinion was unanimous among those who participated in the referendum: more than 96% of those who participated voted “no” for each of the four questions.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine