Poland voted for Europe last weekend. The Europe which has transformed Poland’s prosperity in nearly 20 years of EU membership; the Europe which protects Poland against Russia and projects a free society; and the Europe which Donald Tusk, leader of the opposition alliance, personified as Poland’s best hope for the future.
This is my best take on Sunday’s turnaround election which sees Tusk, until five years ago president of the European Council, reincarnated as prime minister of Poland, the post he held before decamping to Brussels in 2014.
Almost all elections turn on leadership plus governing competence. Tusk’s return from Brussels to Polish politics two years ago as leader of Civic Platform, the party he founded two decades ago, rejuvenated the opposition to the two-term right-wing populist Law and Justice government which had become increasingly authoritarian and anti-EU in the style of Viktor Orbán in nearby Hungary. It also gave a credible prime ministerial leader to what was otherwise a rag bag of Civic Platform and centrist and leftist parties fighting the election in uneasy coalition against Law and Justice.
It wasn’t inevitable that liberalism would trump authoritarianism, and pro-EU trump anti-EU, as Orbán demonstrated by his landslide re-election in Hungary only last year. But whereas Orbán at age 60 is a strong and visible leader, highly popular at home and effective at spewing anti-EU rhetoric while gaining all the economic benefits of membership of the bloc, his Polish counterparts were less assured and skilled. Jarosław Kaczyński, co-founder and leader of Law and Justice, is now 74, unpopular and long ago retreated to the semi-shadows, directing the government from behind the scenes. His latest nominee for prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, a Rishi Sunak-like banker-turned-politician installed in the job six years ago, proved an inept politician unable to pull off the authoritarian-in-the-EU trick with anything like Orbán’s finesse, and looked weak and uncomfortable in defending his populist master.
After a long bitter campaign, it came down to electoral mobilisation. Tusk mobilised young, urban, liberal Poland, with record voter turnout among the young and in the cities, while conservative rural Poland was less enamoured with Kaczyński despite his grip on state media and a whole set of dirty tricks, including tendentious referendums on migration and other anti-foreigner issues alongside the parliamentary ballot.
Warsaw saw an astonishing 85 per cent turnout, and Poland’s other cities were not far behind. More under-29s voted than over-60s, and more women than men, partly because of Law and Justice’s clampdown on abortion and reproductive rights. While the populist right usually wins culture wars, in this election the defence of women’s and LGBT rights—same-sex unions are still illegal in Poland—threatened the basic freedoms of a majority of the electorate, not just the “luxury views” of the elite, as the populist right now frames its cultural offensives.
A lot else was going on in this election. It was the latest instalment of a bitter, public 20-year feud between Tusk and Kaczyński, both offspring of the Solidarity movement which freed Poland from Russian imperialism and Soviet communism in the 1980s. It was an argument about how to divide the proceeds of economic growth, with Kaczyński handing it out to his allies and voters to the increasing resentment of the rest. There was also a splintering of the religious right, with conservative Catholic but anti-Law and Justice groupings springing up in small-town Poland, which will make Tusk’s coalition extremely broad and hard to manage.
But the election came to be framed as predominantly an argument about how best to advance Polish prosperity and security—within the European mainstream, or by a continuation of authoritarianism plus a semi Polexit. Tusk and the pro-Europeans won.
In the wider global dimension, the election is a clear victory for the anti-populists, following Pedro Sánchez’s narrow success in holding off the far right in Spain. But the populists are still rampant. The persistence of Trump, the re-election of Erdoğan in Turkey earlier this year, as well as the fragile state of establishment parties across the rest of Europe, including in France and Germany, make the situation fraught. And the outcome of the Ukraine war, and with it the future of authoritarian Russia, remains deeply uncertain.
So liberals can smile about Poland. But not for long.
