At the election held last Sunday in Poland the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) lost to Opposition leader Donald Tusk and his Civic Platform party alongside two smaller partners who won a combined 248 seats of the 460 seats in the lower house of parliament or Sejm. PiS got 194 seats.
There are still a number of procedural steps and Tusk will most probably get to be prime minister and form a government only in December.
Tusk had already served as prime minister from 2007 to 2014 and then served as president of the European Council for five years.
The Opposition presented the election as a last chance to salvage democracy in the largest EU member state in central and eastern Europe and stop a slide towards authoritarianism and an eroding rule of law.
PiS claimed Poland is facing a struggle to preserve national sovereignty and that Tusk is a stooge for Brussels, Berlin and even Russia.
Tusk promised to reposition Poland on a pro-European path, restore the independence of judges and unlock billions of euros of EU funding that had been withheld by the European Commission because of the PiS judicial reforms.
Voters responded by flocking to the ballot box – the turnout of 74.6% was the largest since Poland’s return to democracy. Some voters waited five hours to cast their vote.
After eight years of divisive politics and corrosive, violent political rhetoric – including from Tusk’s own camp - bringing unity to the country will be a tricky task. Millions of PiS voters have been conditioned to see Tusk variously as a spy for Germany or even a Nazi, a Russian stooge or a Brussels patsy, out to sell out Poland.
Tusk was set up as the man PiS voters love to hate. “When Donald Tusk says he respects working people, all working people must start to be afraid,” outgoing prime minister Mateusz Morawieki told an election rally in Katowice days before the election. “Tusk is like a python that hugs, hugs, hugs until he suffocates. Watch out for him.” This is the sort of ad hominem arguments used. PiS leader and Poland’s de facto ruler Jaroslav Kaczynski dubbed Tusk as “the personification of evil in Poland, pure evil.”
At the rally, Morawieki claimed Tusk would privatise Polish public companies and raise the retirement age, as he did the last time he was prime minister. PiS then reversed the pension age increases – to the consternation of economists worried about the country’s rapidly aging population. This time Tusk says he has no intention of reopening this issue.
Had PiS won another term, it would have meant more democratic backsliding, a consolidation of the party’s control of the national and local media, the courts fully subjugated to political bosses and LGBTQ+ and women’s rights eroded. For the fourth year in a row, Poland holds the worst record on LGBTQ+ in the EU, according to an annual survey by ILGA-Europe, an advocacy group.
PiS created a dense web of patronage by handing out jobs and contracts from state-controlled companies that are a crucial lifeline for thousands of people. With the change of government, they may all lose their jobs and some may even face prosecution.
In Europe, the Polish result has wreaked havoc on the ambitions of the European Conservatives and Reformists which was hoping to become the third-largest force in the European Parliament. Now there will only be Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban’s Fidesz party as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni will rejoin the European People’s Party.
The Polish result is a relief for Brussels, although EU leaders remain aware that hard-right forces are obtaining good results in the polls in Germany, France and Austria.
These are early days and there are many challenges ahead. There is much more to be said. But what should interest us Maltese most is that a party apparently solidly in power can still be overcome if the forces in Opposition play their cards well. As can be seen from the preceding paragraphs there are many similarities between Poland and Malta. And some dissimilarities too.
The most recent poll showed Labour registering less support than the Nationalist Party but the margin is still slight. Labour seems to be suffering from voter disenchantment. Tusk won because he headed a wide coalition, a broad church. The media spin against him was, as I have shown, more fierce than anything we have here. And yet he won.
There is still a need to knock some heads together and for some people to get off their pedestals. Otherwise Malta could still continue to slide further towards the triumph of illegality and mayhem that we were reminded of on the sixth anniversary of the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
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