Turning-point in Poland?

Two big stories from Poland this week. First, giant rallies in Warsaw and other cities on Sunday marked the effective start of the opposition’s campaign for this year’s parliamentary election, expected in October. Donald Tusk, former prime minister and leader of the opposition Civic Platform, appeared alongside Nobel laureate and former president Lech Wałęsa.

Then the following day saw a further step in the long-running dispute – or complex of disputes – between the European Union and the Polish government, led by the Law & Justice party and its leader, Jarosław Kaczyński. The European Court of Justice upheld the EU’s view that Kaczyński’s changes to the Polish judicial system are in breach of EU law because they undermine the independence of the courts.

Kaczyński has been feuding with the EU for years, as it tries to prevent both Poland and Hungary from weakening the rule of law. (Here’s a report from back in 2020.) But its powers of enforcement are limited to financial penalties, and the process for applying them is tortuous; according to Politico, this particular dispute has so far resulted in the imposition of 557 million euros in fines, of which about two-thirds has actually been collected.

As long as Poland and Hungary stick together, they can veto the most drastic measures that the EU might try to take. And Kaczyński, whose control over the country is less comprehensive than Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary, has shown some readiness to compromise rather than push the dispute to a full-on confrontation.

With the war in neighboring Ukraine, Poland has taken on a new geopolitical importance. Although many of his natural allies (including Orbán) are in Vladimir Putin’s corner, Kaczyński has stuck to his anti-Russian guns and been a firm ally of Ukraine. Added to the long-running economic expansion that since the fall of Communism has made Poland into a major regional power, it means that this year’s election will be the focus of a lot of interest.

While the Polish opposition and the EU have a common opponent in Kaczyński, their interests are not identical. Tusk, himself a former EU president, is naturally on the EU’s side, but he knows it would be a bad look politically to be seen as a puppet of Brussels. The EU, conversely, would like to see the back of Kaczyński, but not at the cost of Polish instability. It needs to preserve as much as possible its ability to work with whoever is in power in Warsaw.

The natural expectation would be that the war will be good for incumbency. So far, however, the polls are not looking so bright for Kaczyński. Law & Justice was elected to a second term in 2019 with only 43.6% of the vote (see my report here) and a ten-seat majority in the lower house; recent polls have its vote down in the mid-30s. Its support dropped sharply in late 2020 after its packed constitutional court tightened Poland’s anti-abortion laws, and it has only partly recovered.

But the opposition is not united. Civic Platform and its immediate allies have about 30% of the vote, and another three parties or coalitions are hovering around 10% each: Confederation (far-right), Third Way (centre to centre-right) and the Left (centre-left). The last two would almost certainly co-operate with Civic Platform, but Confederation would be a wild card; it would be an uncomfortable partner for either Tusk or Kaczyński, especially due to its streak of sympathy for Putin.

If the polls are right, the opposition certainly seems well placed. Orbán, however, won re-election last year in a landslide that the polls failed to predict, and various other authoritarians have outperformed their polls in the last couple of years – including most recently Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. It may be that polling is unable to fully account for the advantages of incumbency.

For all his current troubles, Kaczyński should not be written off.