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WARSAW – The campaign language ahead of this year’s Polish parliamentary election is apocalyptic – portraying it as an existential battle for the soul of the EU’s fifth most populous country – but the most likely outcome is a chaotic stalemate.
If the ruling nationalist party PiS (PiS) stays in power for a third term, there is not much it can do to ruin Poland without leaving the EU – and the prospect of that happening is slim. If the opposition scores a direct hit and wins, it will be so hemmed in by PiS-controlled courts and institutions and a hostile president that it will be unable to do much more than optimize the optics rather than surgically correct the growths created by the opposition to remove law and justice.
On the international level, Poland is too important to remain in the freezer forever; With a fast-growing economy, a large military and a key role in supplying Ukraine, it’s not Slovakia. A PiS victory would mean greater efforts to find an agreement with Warsaw; An opposition victory will dramatically improve the atmosphere, but even the comfort of an opposition-run Poland on many issues of crucial importance to the EU has its limits.
An opposition victory could weaken PiS’s institutional advantages, which it has used to skew the playing field in its favor – and potentially lead to a longer-term shift away from the right-wing party that has dominated Polish politics for the past eight years. But it’s not a quick fix.
None of this has stopped both sides from claiming that the October 15 vote was the most important in decades.
According to PiS, opposition leader Donald Tusk is a disloyal Pole who is working on behalf of Germany and Russia to turn the country into a puppet state by accepting hundreds of thousands of migrants.
Oh, and he also wants to raise the retirement age.
Jarosław Kaczyński, PiS leader and actual ruler of Poland, thundered to his supporters on Sunday: “Donald Tusk had to agree to make Poland subservient to Germany and thus Russia.”
“Stop Tusk. “Only the PiS can guarantee Poland’s security,” trumpets one election advertisement.
For the opposition, led by Tusk’s Citizens Coalition, another four-year term with Law and Justice at the helm poses a real threat to Poland’s future as a democratic country and undermines women’s rights thanks to a draconian abortion law, an LGBTQ+ minority that officials are attacking the ruling party is exposed to.
“Law and justice are poison,” Tusk said at a campaign rally this summer. “Every day, every month that they are in power represents a growing threat to our security.”
These fighting words are intended to move the electorate; POLITICO’s poll shows PiS at 37 percent, while the Citizens Coalition is at 30 percent – meaning any new government will have to put together a coalition with smaller parties.
Polish Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, Jarosław Kaczyński, has promised that if his party wins, he will continue the changes to the justice system that have so worried the EU | Marian Zubrzycki/EPA-EFE
It’s not all rhetorical spin.
“There is always a tendency to say that this is the most important election since 1989 [the election that ended communist rule], but this time there is a slightly stronger case for this argument. The level of polarization is evidence of this,” said Aleks Szczerbiak, a professor of politics at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom
High stakes
The result will be watched very closely from Brussels to Kiev.
For the European Union, the hope is that if PiS falls, Poland will return to Tusk, who served as Polish prime minister before becoming president of the European Council during a remarkable era of solidarity with the EU and Germany. As an added stimulus, Brussels is likely to quickly release 36 billion euros in loans and grants from the bloc’s pandemic recovery fund, which is being held up due to fears that reforms to the PiS court system are undermining judicial independence.
EU court cases, parliamentary resolutions, infringement proceedings and Article 7 efforts to strip Poland of its voting rights would also likely be put on hold.
The German government would also breathe a sigh of relief at seeing the back of a government that has harshly criticized Berlin at every opportunity and has also demanded up to $1.3 trillion in compensation for the destruction caused by the Nazi occupation; although the opposition has not evaded this demand.
Poland was one of Ukraine’s fiercest supporters during the war – sending tanks and jet fighters ahead of most other countries, offering diplomatic support, taking in millions of refugees who fled in the early days of the war and serving as a main transfer point for arms and weapons other help goes east.
But the election campaign has worsened this relationship.
Warsaw led the blockade of Ukraine’s grain exports, fearing it would undercut Polish prices and hurt farmers – a key voting bloc. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dared to criticize Poland at the United Nations, angry President Andrzej Duda compared Ukraine to a drowning man who poses a danger to his rescuers.
“We say to the Ukrainian authorities: do not do anything that goes against the interests of Polish farmers,” said Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who said last month that Poland would stop supplying arms to Ukraine while it rebuilds its own stocks.
Poland’s Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau skipped this week’s summit in Kiev. Bringing relations back to balance will require “a gigantic effort,” he said.
Tusk promised a new start: “We cannot allow good Polish-Ukrainian relations to depend on the negligence and chaos of the Polish government.”
Polish opposition leader and former Prime Minister Donald Tusk speaks to participants at a rally in Warsaw on October 1, 2023 Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images
A PiS victory will send shockwaves across Europe.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Kaczyński’s closest ally, has been building his illiberal democracy for over a decade. With Rome ruled by right-wing Giorgia Meloni, Slovak populist Robert Fico scoring a victory in last week’s election and the far-right Alternative for Germany party rising rapidly in the polls, the signal is that the right is gaining strength across the continent .
This is likely to further undermine the weak influence of centrist parties in the European Parliament in next year’s elections.
It will also block any chance of agreeing on a migration pact to tackle the thousands of people crossing EU borders and scuttle any efforts to reform EU institutions ahead of an expansion into the Balkans and Ukraine .
“A PiS government will block reforms on issues such as taxes and foreign policy that threaten national veto rights. There is also a different approach to migration,” warned a senior Polish government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We have a different model of the European Union.”
Reality bites
But despite the rhetoric, the reality is that the election is unlikely to represent a radical deterioration in relations between Warsaw and Brussels.
Kaczyński has promised that if his party wins, he will continue the changes to the justice system that have so worried the EU, after admitting that previous reforms have not worked. He promised: “This time it will succeed.”
But his party has already sent peace feelers to Brussels and tried to reverse some changes in the top courts to get the Commission to release the blocked funds, but has so far failed.
If Law and Justice wins a third term, EU institutions will have to decide whether to continue the confrontation or make peace with a Poland that has decidedly chosen a populist course.
“It always takes two. “Perhaps there is a willingness to compromise on both sides,” said the Polish government representative.
Permanent ostracism is also untenable, as Hungary showed this week by playing a clever game and getting the EU to release blocked funds to prevent Orbán from vetoing aid to Ukraine.
Despite opposition accusations that PiS wants to pull Poland out of the EU in a Polexit – an outcry from parts of the far right – Law and Justice says it has no intention of following the UK out of the EU.
The results of the Polish parliamentary election could have an impact on the upcoming European Parliament election and the Polish presidential election in 2025 | Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images
“The direction of PiS has always been towards the EU,” said PiS MP Radosław Fogiel.
And a Poland led by the opposition would not be an easy partner for Brussels. After the first wave of warmth, recurring problems will arise, such as Poland’s continued dependence on coal-fired power generation, its reluctance to join the euro and suspicions of large refugee flows – also raised by Tusk during the election campaign.
“Even if there is a change of government, there will still be very strong public resistance to changing migration policy,” said Jacek Czaputowicz, a former foreign minister in the PiS government, at the Warsaw Security Forum.
Poland’s large and powerful agricultural sector will be a major problem for Ukrainian grain exports and for future efforts to rebalance the EU to accommodate new and poorer members.
Ukrainian politicians hope that the war of words with Warsaw will subside after the election.
“The war is stressful for Ukraine and also for Poland, so the emotions are felt on both sides, besides, the election campaign in Poland is designed to politicize everything, including economic issues,” said Andriy Deshchytsia, former Ukrainian ambassador to Poland , adding, “However, the Russian threat is still there, just as it was a year ago… so we have no choice but to sit and look for a compromise.”
As bad as it can get
Even at home, the election is unlikely to have the earth-shattering impact that was expressed in the election campaign.
PiS has done a lot of damage over the last eight years, and it is hard to imagine how much more it can do while remaining a member of the EU. The state media is a Euro-lite version of North Korea, state-controlled companies are rife with party hacks, the highest courts are firmly under political control, much of the Roman Catholic Church functions as PiS supporters, the police don’t mind the prosecutor’s office has become a political toy by caning the odd opposition demonstrator. She stops investigating well-connected people and at the same time fiercely pursues the regime’s opponents.
However, extending this control will be difficult in an economy with a large and dynamic private sector, a strong civil society and a strong private media.
Non-state media operators are owned by foreign companies that have shown no signs of withdrawing from the Polish market; An earlier attempt to take on America’s TVN, the country’s largest private television network, was quickly quashed by Washington.
The EU is also working on a set of rules aimed at ensuring the independence of the media from political pressure and promoting pluralism; Commission Vice-President Věra Jourová warned that this “will be an important warning signal for Member States”.
An opposition victory would dramatically change the optics with Brussels, and a new government would scrap further legal changes to the courts. But any attempt to undo these reforms and other PiS laws will face a significant hurdle: President Duda.
There is a chance that Poland’s President Andrzej Duda will cooperate as Tusk has threatened to prosecute him for violating the constitution Leon Neal/Getty Images
There is no poll that predicts a victory for the opposition so gigantic that it would achieve the two-thirds majority of MPs needed to override the president’s vetoes. The country’s highest courts are staffed by judges appointed by the current government, meaning the legislature will also be embroiled in endless legal battles.
“Even if they win an absolute majority, which seems unlikely at the moment, it is an internally divided opposition and they face a president who can veto their legislation,” Szczerbiak said.
However, there is a chance that Duda will cooperate, as Tusk has threatened to prosecute him for violating the constitution.
“Duda is a dealmaker,” said Wawrzyniec Smoczyński, a political analyst and president of the New Community Foundation. “Tusk represents a big risk to him and the way to reduce that is to make a deal.”
If Duda doesn’t play along, a non-PiS government could limit itself to purging state-owned companies, the government and the media of PiS loyalists.
“Overnight you will get the public media back. Everyone will be thrown out of there,” Tusk promised.
These small steps are unlikely to satisfy opposition supporters yearning for revenge on law and justice and a clean break with the last eight years.
“This is all shit for Poland,” said Paweł Piechowiak, who took part in the big opposition march in Warsaw last week, waving huge Polish and EU flags, his cheeks painted in rainbow colors. “You can’t destroy this country any more than it is.”
But these personnel changes could have longer-term consequences as they shift the public media away from supporting PiS, which could undermine that party’s support base in rural and small-town Poland.
This could change the political dynamic, especially if the next government is short-lived and there are early elections; it could also have an impact on the upcoming European Parliament election and the Polish presidential election in 2025.
“The general election could be seen as the first round of a longer election campaign,” said Szczerbiak.
Veronika Melkozerova contributed reporting from Kiev.