5
takeaways from Poland’s election
The
right’s return to power carries bigger repercussions for domestic
policy than abroad.
By JAN CIENSKI
10/25/15, 9:43 PM CET Updated 10/25/15, 9:48 PM CET
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.
Authors:
Jan Cienski
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