• Poland, dismay at extreme right-wing march photos with MEPs on the forks
  • Poland, Warsaw in the square reminds of Independence Day
  • Migrants, EU: road to sanctions in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic

Share

October 13, 2019 The latest polls leave no doubt as to the outcome of the vote today in Poland: between 42% and 48% of the 30 million eligible voters are preparing to express their preference for the PiS - Law and Justice, the whose leading candidate is outgoing Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki - and rewarding by doing so an electoral program based on nationalistic rhetoric and economic promises with the commitment to face "the radical destruction of the moral and cultural order" and the attempt of the EU to impose a reform of the controversial legal system of the country.

Another key theme of the PiS campaign was the anti-LGBT crusade, which prompted party president Jaroslaw Kaczynski during a rally in August to defend the archbishop of Krakow, Marek Jedraszewski, for whom LGBTQ activism can to be called "rainbow plague", "dangerous ideology", "anthropological error". It remains to be understood - and this will also depend on the number of parties that will be able to enter parliament - if the percentage of votes collected will be sufficient to allow the PiS to give life to a government: to achieve an absolute majority, it should win 261 of the 460 seats up for grabs.

The gap between the premier's party and the most significant opposition alliance, the Civic Coalition (KO) is significant: the free-conservative union that brings together different parties and organizations, from the Christian-democratic Civic Platform to the liberalist Nowoczesna, the liberals of Inicjatywa Polska and the Greens in the surveys it was 26-28 percentage points.

However, the PiS is also challenged by the Left Democratic Alliance (Sld), three left-wing parties, traveling around 10-14% of the votes, and the PSL, the Christian Democratic movement of the Polish People's Party (5-7% ), just above the 5% threshold. The entry or not of the Pls in parliament will certainly have profound repercussions on the distribution of the seats. On paper "the situation is more or less balanced", explains the political scientist Jaroslaw Flis. "The PiS is around 45%, more or less the equivalent of the three challenging formations put together".

The electoral system adopted in Poland, the d'Hondt method, however, is penalizing for small parties and the PiS would be rewarded. A fifth Konfederacja list (4-7%) of the extreme right also competes at national level, which could hardly become part of any coalitions.

In the absence of an absolute majority, the PiS will have to try to ally with the Pls or convince deputies of other forces to make defection. The alternatives would be those of a minority government of the PiS or a broad center-left coalition bringing together Ko, Sld and Psl, united by Europeanism and the commitment to dismantle the controversial institutional reforms introduced by the PiS in the last four years, among other things in the judicial system, and which put the country on a collision course with Europe.

But the issues on which the coalition parties diverge are more numerous, from the climate to the economy: to push them in favor of a coalition executive according to local analysts could only be the experience of four years of government of the PiS. If such a government were to materialize, the coalition would still have to deal with a hostile state leader with a reversible veto right only with the votes of the three fifths of parliament. Meanwhile, however, in the Senate - where a hundred seats are assigned with a majority system - the candidate of the ruling party will face a single challenger, an expression of the various opposition groups, who have decided not to challenge each other.