The PiS and the PO: subtle shifts in Polish politics

Here's a full (and, exclusive to Constitutional Lore, hyperlinked) copy of an article penned for this month's DA International News Review:

In a general election on October 21 Poland voted the free-market Civic Platform (PO) into office, ending a turbulent two year period of government led by the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS). The outcome was widely welcomed across Europe, with hopes for a fresh, constructive approach to foreign relations and domestic reform. The aftermath sees an altered political landscape in Poland, with the PiS forced into opposition and its old coalition partners annihilated after failing to reach the 5% threshold required to secure representation in the Sejm, the Polish lower house. Yet this election was no earthquake. The new government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, sworn into office on November 16, will seek to distance itself from the PiS in terms of style, but much practical policy is set to remain the same. Both parties were born of the rightwing then-governing Solidarity Electoral Action coalition in 2001, and have been tussling ever since to emerge as the dominant party on the Polish centre-right. The PO may have won this electoral battle, but the PiS are still a powerful player on the political scene, and the wider struggle between them remains unresolved.

The PiS-led government was dominated by two men, the twins Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński. As President and Prime Minister respectively, they were inspired by a staunch Catholicism, leading a government which was socially conservative and committed to a relatively generous system of welfare. They focused abroad on a pugnacious defense of Poland’s national interest, and at home on rooting out corruption and the remnants of the old Communist order. Both prongs begat more acrimony than success. The PiS succeeded in alienating many European partners, through crass stunts such as invoking Poland’s war dead as justification for obstructing EU voting reform, and attempting to humiliate Denmark by enumerating its abortions at a ministerial working lunch. Domestic reform and privatization were stalled as the PiS tried to hold its shaky coalition together and focused instead on lustration laws forcing disclosure of communist-era collaboration.

Under the PO the emphasis will shift from righting historical wrongs to achieving concrete improvements in the present. The government has plans to press ahead with privatisation, tax reform and cuts to social spending and direct taxation, and hopes to speed up Poland’s entry to the euro. In Europe, Tusk will benefit from widespread goodwill for simply not being a Kaczyński. He has been busily mending ties with Russia, with a spat over Polish meat imports drawing to a close and greater skepticism over American plans to build missile interceptors on its soil. At a time of growing suspicion between Russia and the EU, Poland might pull off the feat of simultaneously improving relations with both. This is related to a weakening of Poland’s transatlantic relationship, with Tusk hoping to pull Polish troops out of Iraq in 2008.

Yet while it may do so with a little more grace and sophistication than the PiS, a PO-led government will continue to mount a vigorous defense of Polish interests, even when these run counter to those of larger EU powers. It will fight its corner in forthcoming EU debates over measures to counteract climate change and reform agricultural subsidies. With the US missile defense shield still not shelved, and Poles still angry at a gas pipeline from Russia to Germany bypassing eastern Baltic countries, Poland will not lift its veto over an EU-Russia trade agreement just yet. At home, the PO’s reforming zeal will be tempered by slowing rates of economic growth, restrained by their centrist coalition partners, the Polish Peasants Party (which in a previous incarnation sent deputies to the 19th Century Reichsrat in Vienna, no less), and hamstrung by the need to secure the support of the centre-left Democrats and Left party if they are to overcome a presidential veto, which will lie in the hands of Lech Kaczyński until at least 2010. Poland remains a deeply Catholic country led by a pious Prime Minister who took the time to pray with the Archbishop of Gdansk, Tadeusz Gocłowski, in the aftermath of victory.

This election has not, of itself, ushered in a new era in Poland’s politics and closed the door on the PiS’s vision of the centre-right. The Kaczyńskis have proven themselves formidable election winners in the past. They capitalised on Lech’s undoubted popularity as Justice Minister in the outgoing government to secure 44 seats for their new party in the elections of 2001, and the following year Lech was voted President of Warsaw. PiS twice came from behind in opinion polls to best the PO first in general and then presidential elections in 2005, and led going into the final week of campaigning this time around. They only lost after a bumbling performance by Jarosław in televised debate with Tusk, and a hike in turnout among the expatriate community and young professionals, galvanised by the referendum on PiS’s rule which the general election essentially became. The Kaczyńskis will not make the same mistake with a televised debate again, and the PO cannot rely on future high turnouts among their base of support, once anger against the PiS is dimmed by the passage of time and the limitations of the PO’s own programme.

Polish voters are notoriously fickle; since the fall of communism in 1989, no Polish government has ever been re-elected. The current PO-led government faces poor odds to be the first, especially if the economy begins to falter as it now forecasted. Enthusiasm for extensive economic reform might well recede rapidly, and Poland could witness a resurgence of the left, in the doldrums since the Democratic Left Alliance was routed from office in 2005. With Lech still in the presidency, however, able to pose as the protector of the Polish people by picking and choosing which of the PO’s initiatives to veto or allow, it is the PiS, with its own programme of social welfare, who are arguably best placed to capitalise on any increasing hardship.

Donald Tusk and the PO may have only just won a convincing electoral victory, but they face a difficult task if they are to win a second term, or if Tusk is to fulfill his own personal ambitions and become Polish president in 2010. The PO must repair damaged ties with EU partners without giving PiS a pulpit to decry relinquished Polish interests. It must either press ahead with domestic reform and risk a backlash in favor of the stronger social safety-nets which it is committed to dismantle, or vacillate and risk the disillusionment of its own supporters who believed they had voted for change.

When the PiS and the PO emerged as the largest parties in the Sejm in 2005, most pundits expected them to work together in government; now they are all but sworn enemies. While there still remains space on the Polish political spectrum for two big parties on the centre-right, Poland would be unique in Europe if it maintained such a situation for long, particularly as the memory of communism fades further and Polish society opens up under the influence of her prosperous EU partners. The PO, holding the reigns of government, currently has the edge over their more socially conservative brethren. But the governments of Europe, for now relieved at the Kaczyński’s diminished influence on Polish policy, may well in the not too distant future have to deal with a PiS-led government again.