Two new presidents

Two elections, both for new presidents but otherwise very different: Sunday in Poland, then yesterday in South Korea.

As I suggested in last week’s preview, Poland’s voters opted to preserve balance at the top, choosing a hard right president, historian Karol Nawrocki, to go with their centrist coalition government. But the margin was close, as the polls had predicted: Nawrocki won with 50.9%, beating the government’s preferred candidate, Rafał Trzaskowski, by about 370,000 votes. Turnout was 71.6%, well up on the first round and on the 2020 runoff.

So prime minister Donald Tusk will have to continue putting up with obstruction from the head of state, and will know that voters are not as enthusiastically behind his government as it might previously have seemed. But he will at least have the consolation that there is someone to blame when things go wrong.

Most pundits love government. They see it as producing all manner of good things and can’t imagine why anyone would want to render it less effective. But centuries of history have taught Poles that government is mostly a vehicle for doing them harm, ranging from the merely stupid or incompetent to the unspeakably horrific. For them, regardless of their politics, the idea of weakening government by keeping it divided might not seem foolish at all.

Meanwhile in South Korea came the culmination of the saga that began just on six months ago when president Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law. Parliamentary resistance forced him to back down and he was then impeached and removed from office. He now faces trial for insurrection.

In those circumstances it’s no surprise that the opposition was a shoo-in for the presidency. Democratic Party candidate Lee Jae-myung, who lost narrowly to Yoon in 2022, scored a comfortable victory with 49.4%, almost 2.9 million votes ahead of the centre-right’s Kim Moon-soo, on 41.2% (voting is first-past-the-post). Most of the rest went to the Reform Party’s Lee Jen-seok, with 8.3%. (Official results are here, although they’re in Korean.)

That was the easy part. Cooling the passions that have been roused by Yoon’s coup attempt will be a harder task, as Joe Biden discovered to his cost in the United States. The Trump administration hinted that Lee’s victory (and presumably Yoon’s downfall) had been engineered by China, and while South Korea’s centre-right has done a better job of disowning authoritarianism than its US counterpart, it remains deeply divided on the subject and Yoon retains significant support.

PS: Jean Mackenzie’s report at the BBC is very good on the challenges facing Lee Jae-myung.