Poland's regional elections - Overturning the card table

[Martinus]

Poland's regional elections
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Overturning the card table

The Law and Justice party's latest conspiracy theory challenges Polish democracy itself
Nov 25th 2014 | Europe

POLAND has been victimised by foreign powers so often that Poles have got used to thinking of their country as a bit of a martyr. (The 19th-century romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz portrayed his country as the "Christ of Nations".) But martyrdom can be a hard habit to kick, even when you become a winner. On November 23rd Polish election authorities announced that the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party had narrowly won regional elections held a week earlier. Exit polls, however, had suggested Law and Justice was further ahead. The party's leader and former prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski (pictured), responded with accusations of vote-tampering and calls for a rerun, putting Poland's hard-won democratic stability at risk in a fit of conspiratorial pique.

Mr Kaczynski certainly had reason to complain about the mechanics of the voting. It took authorities a week after the November 16th regional elections to tally the results, due to shoddy software. The number of spoiled ballots was unusually high. So were the stakes of an accurate count: the final outcome was tantalisingly close, with PiS taking 26.85% of the national vote compared with 26.36% for Civic Platform, the centrist governing party. When seats in the 16 regional legislatures were counted, Civic Platform actually came out slightly ahead, taking 179 to 171 for PiS.

In the end, while Law and Justice's performance was its best in nine years, it came as a big disappointment to Mr Kaczynski. Exit polls released just after the voting had put PiS a full four percentage points ahead of Civic Platform, predicting wins in eight of Poland's 16 regions. Instead, Law and Justice will rule in only a single region, which it already controlled before the election. Civic Platform and its junior coalition partner, the Polish People's Party (which came a strong third), will rule pretty much everywhere else.

That is very bad news for Mr Kaczynski, who hopes to retake power in next year's general election. He was counting on voter fatigue with Civic Platform, which has been in power since 2007 and is led by an untried new prime minister, Ewa Kopacz. She is straining to fill the shoes of Donald Tusk, the former prime minister who left in September to become president of the European Council. Mr Kaczynski had built pacts with smaller right-wing parties in an attempt to break through PiS's traditional ceiling of about a quarter of the electorate. But he was unable to form alliances with other mainstream parties, which recall how PiS gobbled up two coalition partners during its stint in government in 2005-07, adopting their positions and taking over their voters.

Ultimately, PiS failed to persuade more voters that it is a safe pair of hands. Since the election results were announced, Mr Kaczynski has exacerbated that mistrust, inflaming the passions of his core electorate by claiming the vote was fraudulent. In an interview with Wprost, a news weekly, he called the results "completely unbelievable", and added that Poland has "a new system which is not democratic".

Mr Kaczynski has long dabbled in conspiracy theories. He believes that the modern Polish state was flawed from birth by a corrupt deal in 1989 between Communist Party apparatchiks and the leadership of the Solidarity trade union. More recently, his party has developed increasingly bizarre theories about the 2010 airplane crash over Smolensk, Russia, that killed his brother Lech (then Poland's president), along with many other senior officials. While all the evidence points to pilot error, PiS activists have suggested that Russia deliberately generated an artificial fog, that a bomb brought the plane down and that Russians murdered Polish survivors. Believing in a Smolensk conspiracy has become a quick litmus test for ideological conformity in right-wing Polish politics.

Michal Szudrzynski, a columnist with the newspaper Rzeczpospolita, suggests that the situation over the local elections is becoming similar to that around the Smolensk disaster. Rather than digesting the results, supporters of Law and Justice are "becoming morally outraged and preparing to protest"; some are opining that "anyone who does not question the election results is not a true patriot". Meanwhile, Ms Kopacz and Bronislaw Komorowski, the popular president, are calling for calm and criticising Mr Kaczynski's bomb-throwing. That approach worked, after the Smolensk crash, to wean moderate Poles away from PiS, and it may be working again. A new opinion poll shows Mr Komorowski, backed by Civic Platform, is trusted by 80% of Poles; Ms Kopacz is second with 62%. Mr Kaczynski is trusted by only a third of the public, not much more than PiS's core electorate. With a bit of cool-headedness, Poland's democratic order may escape martyrdom at the hands of Mr Kaczynski's martyr complex.

I love Polish politics... 

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21634934-law-and-justice-partys-latest-conspiracy-theory-challenges-polish-democracy-itself-overturning?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/polandselections

[Tamas]

These PiS people are idiots, but the eventual too high cost of peaceful "revolution" via a deal between lead opposition figures and the communists is a frequent topic in Hungary. I am not sure how exactly it went in Poland, but there is somethng to say for letting the previous apparatus keep its power and influence and above all the identity of their myriad of agents within the opposition movements itself.
Was decidedly a double edged sword in Hungary's case.

[Tamas]

For example, ALL political parties formed during the regime change times have always worked together in stopping the name of agents and informants be publicly accessible. Even when they fight over the must mundane things, they close ranks when it comes to that.

FIDESZ has been at the forefront of this, and for example, the new state secretary of the interior ministry is infact an admitted officer of the internal secret service of pre-1989. He was working on surveailling the funeral of Imre Nagy, where Orban busted into the political scene doing an anti-Soviet speech.

[Martinus]

These PiS people are idiots, but the eventual too high cost of peaceful "revolution" via a deal between lead opposition figures and the communists is a frequent topic in Hungary. I am not sure how exactly it went in Poland, but there is somethng to say for letting the previous apparatus keep its power and influence and above all the identity of their myriad of agents within the opposition movements itself.
Was decidedly a double edged sword in Hungary's case.

There was really no alternative. This was the price of getting the former communists to buy into the new system. And if it means that a few children of former apparatchiks are now wealthy capitalists? So what? Many today's rich families in the West originally got rich from slave trade, nazi gold or other unseemly pursuits.

[Tamas]

These PiS people are idiots, but the eventual too high cost of peaceful "revolution" via a deal between lead opposition figures and the communists is a frequent topic in Hungary. I am not sure how exactly it went in Poland, but there is somethng to say for letting the previous apparatus keep its power and influence and above all the identity of their myriad of agents within the opposition movements itself.
Was decidedly a double edged sword in Hungary's case.

There was really no alternative. This was the price of getting the former communists to buy into the new system. And if it means that a few children of former apparatchiks are now wealthy capitalists? So what? Many today's rich families in the West originally got rich from slave trade, nazi gold or other unseemly pursuits.

I agree, but I wonder if their education, training, and inclanations not help in a great deal in enacting the rapid turnbacks to authocracy we have been witnessing in Russia and Hungary. In those two cases, a considerable portion of said turnback is orchestrated and manned by previous servants of the communist system.

[Martinus]

I would say it's quite the opposite here - the authocratic tendencies are mainly displayed by those who are fighting with the "nomenclatura", not those who are a part of it. The post-communists were the most exemplary democrats.

[Tamas]

I would say it's quite the opposite here - the authocratic tendencies are mainly displayed by those who are fighting with the "nomenclatura", not those who are a part of it. The post-communists were the most exemplary democrats.

Well on the surface its the same in Hungary. Then you start scratching and realise that most of the loud anticommunists were part of the system, on different levels, but there. From secret service to youth movement and local party organisations, but there.

[Martinus]

I would say it's quite the opposite here - the authocratic tendencies are mainly displayed by those who are fighting with the "nomenclatura", not those who are a part of it. The post-communists were the most exemplary democrats.

Well on the surface its the same in Hungary. Then you start scratching and realise that most of the loud anticommunists were part of the system, on different levels, but there. From secret service to youth movement and local party organisations, but there.

Oh you get people like this here as well. But there is no way to deal with it - it's an issue of mentality, mainly. The only alternative is to summarily execute everyone who was over 25 in 1989.

[Tamas]

Yeah, I guess there is no easy way around it.

[Martinus]

So, after the second round today, it seems like Poland is going to have its first openly gay mayor. Robert Biedron - the first openly gay MP - has been elected the mayor of Slupsk, a 100,000 town in North-Western Poland.

[Admiral Yi]

Putin was right!

[Sheilbh]

So, after the second round today, it seems like Poland is going to have its first openly gay mayor. Robert Biedron - the first openly gay MP - has been elected the mayor of Slupsk, a 100,000 town in North-Western Poland.

I love that name

[Martinus]

Would you like it more if I said I dumbed it down for you, non-Poles? Because it is spelled "Słupsk", with the l being dashed in a special Polish way.

It's pronounced "Swoo-psk".

[Ed Anger]

PO TATO.

[Sheilbh]

Would you like it more if I said I dumbed it down for you, non-Poles? Because it is spelled "Słupsk", with the l being dashed in a special Polish way.

It's pronounced "Swoo-psk".

That's less fun to say and less onomatopoeic for something than 'slupsk'