Big win in Poland

Not all authoritarian governments succeed in putting themselves beyond the reach of electoral retribution. Sometimes they can be beaten: Poland’s was, on Sunday. (See my preview here.)

This is probably the biggest thing to have happened in Europe this year. As the BBC reports, even “Supporters [of the opposition] appeared stunned” when the exit poll results were released yesterday morning (Australian time). It took a day’s counting to confirm that they were right, but the far-right government of Law & Justice has gone down to a heavy defeat, winning just 35.5% of the vote, down 8.1% on its 2019 result.

The three opposition parties, who will combine to form a (possibly fractious) government, won 53.6% in total: 30.6% for the centrist Civic Coalition (up 3.2%), 14.4% for the centre-right Third Way (up 5.8%) and 8.6% for the centre-left New Left (down 4.0%). The only other party to clear the 5% threshold was the further-right Confederation on 7.2% (up 0.4%); the regionalists were well short with 1.9%, followed by the anti-vaxers with 1.6%. (Official results are here.) Turnout was 73.4%, up a remarkable 11.7% and a record for post-Communist Poland.

There is no official seat allocation yet (a handful of polling places, mostly from overseas, are still outstanding), but doing a D’Hondt calculation on the constituency results gives me Law & Justice 194 (down 41), Civic Coalition 157 (up 23), Third Way 65 (up 35), New Left 26 (down 23) and Confederation 18 (up seven).* The German minority party, with 0.12% of the vote, lost its single seat. That’s a 36-seat opposition majority, which is exactly what the exit poll predicted (although it slightly overstated the two major parties and understated both Third Way and Confederation).

Civic Coalition leader (and former European Union president) Donald Tusk will be the new prime minister, although it might take a month or two: president Andrzej Duda is a Law & Justice loyalist and will be able to stall proceedings a bit. But the outcome is not in doubt. There’s no sign of an actual concession of defeat from Law & Justice leader Jarosław Kaczyński – “a kind of one-man walking anthology of resentment,” as Timothy Garton Ash calls him – but prospects for a coup attempt seem remote.

The EU is jubilant at the result, as are most of Poland’s neighbors, especially Germany and Ukraine. It’s a bad result, on the other hand, for Vladimir Putin; while Kaczyński had always been anti-Russian, he had started to soft-pedal on support for Ukraine in recent months. It’s also very bad news for Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has lost his main supporter within the EU: he will now have a lot less bargaining power in disputes with Brussels.

More generally, at a time when so much of the news is bleak, it’s a major boost for the supporters of democracy worldwide. Civilisation is not predestined to fall. Its fate is in our hands, and in the hands of the many millions, like the voters of Poland, who are not willing to let things go without a fight.

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* Confirming my contention that you can do a D’Hondt calculation with a spreadsheet in thirty seconds, I did 41 of them in about half an hour, which included downloading the data and translating the labels from Polish. I was pleased to see that my figures agreed with whoever had posted totals on Wikipedia, although the latter were later taken down as amounting to original research.

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PS: I should also mention the Senate, which is a hundred members elected (first-past-the-post) from single-member districts. Last time the opposition won a narrow majority in it by carefully rationing the seats among themselves; this time they have greatly expanded on that. By my count they’ll have a total of 61 seats (41 Civic Coalition, 12 Third Way and eight New Left) to 34 for Law & Justice and five independents, most of whom support the opposition.

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UPDATE 11.30pm Tuesday (Polish time): With counting complete the seat totals are now official. They’re all as I said above, except the Senate is 11 Third Way and nine New Left, not 12 and eight. Of the five independents in the Senate, four are aligned with the opposition, giving them a 30-seat majority.

As I mentioned in my preview, all the tickets are in fact broad coalitions; Wikipedia has a nice table showing the full party breakdown within them. There are 17 different parties with seats in the new lower house (Sejm), plus 41 independents!