It is yet another time when I turned out to be right, but it does not bring me any joy. Donald Tusk’s party’s candidate, Rafał Trzaskowski, lost the presidential elections to his opponent, Karol Nawrocki, an “independent” candidate supported by PiS. Why did that happen, what do The Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska – PO) make of it and what can we expect?
1. Why does The Civic Platform keep losing elections?
For well over a decade, Donald Tusk’s party failed to keep up with reality. They tried to play it safe, promising Poles “more of the same”. But while in the early 2000s Poles might indeed have wanted some peace and quiet after the turbulent 1990s and Tusk promising “warm water in the tap” was probably enough, those times are long gone. The world is changing, society is changing – people would like to see their country keeping up, too.
While politicians of all parties love to brag about how well the Polish economy is doing, people still hear from them that we need “to tighten our belts” and “work hard” to “catch up”. But why can’t we start at least partially enjoying the fruits of our labour? Poland is ranked number 20 in the world as measured by GDP, and 19 when adjusted for purchasing power parity (Czech Republic, for comparison, is 47th on that last list).
At the same time, we are one of the hardest working nations in Europe (only Greeks and Romanians work more hours than us) and yet Trzaskowski in the last campaign was still saying we are “a country on the rise”, which is, according to many a liberal economic expert, a reason why can’t we have nice things like a reasonable housing policy, progressive tax system, working healthcare, a good educational system or protection of workers rights. It is also, allegedly, why we need to give tax breaks to international companies, so they use us as a pool of cheap labour, instead of supporting local, innovative enterprises.
But for how long would they like us to “clench out teeth and work hard”? Until we’ll become richer than Luxembourg and happier than Finland? There were thousands voters in those elections who not only don’t remember communist times themselves, but whose parents barely remember the 1990s. Maybe it’s time to let this “we suffered under communism, so now we have to work harder to catch up” mindset go?
PiS understood this a decade ago and seized power in large part due to their promises of a transfer of wealth, with their program of generous child benefit being a flagship of their campaign. All the while, PO was calling it “irresponsible” and predicting economic collapse (of course this never happened and nobody sane would demand reversing that move today).
But while economically-speaking the last 20 years have been some of the best times in Polish history, we are lagging well behind in the social field. I am 45 this year, and things like abortion rights have been the major topic of the Polish political discourse ever since I remember – and I developed interest in politics quite early. The issue of the LGBT rights came to the mainstream political discourse a bit later, but just like with women’s rights, the right-wing act on curbing their rights even further when they are in power, while politicians of all other options keep repeating their favourite mantra: “now is not a good time to talk about it, maybe after elections”. Spoiler alert: there are always some elections on the horizon.
Tusk is one of the main culprits here, as can be seen in a media headline in which he says “it would only be fair to work on the matter of civil partnership right after elections”. This headline is 14 years old today!
The third pillar of PO’s failure is the fact that they are a quite elitists party of major urban centres, supported by big business, people of high culture and celebrities. They appear disconnected from small city dwellers and the rural population, and their attempts to get closer to the masses are so clumsy that a popular joke goes like this:
– Elections are coming.
– How do you know?
– I saw a PO politician on a tram.
There is a whole genre of memes derived from pictures of Trzaskowski on the subway or riding a tram, in which he is portrayed as someone who is on a public transport for the first time in his life, where the concept of public transport amazes him “It’s like an Uber, but you don’t have to book it!”, where he tries to hold conversation with other passengers in French or just openly laughs that those poor sods have to travel like that every day.
So, to sum it up, Tusks fails on meeting the expectations of the Poles both in the field of living standards and their social and cultural evolution – because he is a representative of an elitist party that is out of touch with the reality beyond the biggest urban centres, which are significantly richer and more liberal than the rest of the country.
There is a misconception in the West that Tusk was winning elections despite all of this, but the truth is that his party hasn’t really scored a significant victory since 2011. Even his return to power in 2023, celebrated so much by many foreign commentators, was possible only due to PiS’ absolute lack of coalition capabilities. Kaczyński’s party still came first. The only reason why they are still so strong is that as the biggest opposition party they benefit from all the votes cast by people who’d rather have anyone else but PiS.
But as I mentioned before, Poles are hungry for change. They are fed up with PiS-PO duopoly dominating Polish politics for two decades. They would also like a party that is ready to do some reforms. This is why in every elections for decades we had some newcomers promising to be that “third option” – from Ruch Palikota in 2011, through Ryszard Petru’s .Nowoczesna [sic] and Paweł Kukiz’s protest movement in 2015 and the left wing populist party of Robert Biedroń in 2019 to the recent emergence of Szymon Hołownia. All those parties have one thing in common: they scoop 10 per cent or so of the votes, then fail to deliver on their promises and, usually, sooner or later dissolve into either PiS or PO.
The only two notable exceptions are right wing Konfederacja, a conglomerate of minor radical parties that somehow stay together despite all the odds; and the young social democratic party Razem, that might not have met the expectations of more enthusiastic left-wing voters but, with the other left parties currently dissolving into Platforma Obywatelska, are now emerging as the “default left”. These two are popular especially with the younger generations (although, admittedly, the populist right is vastly more popular than Razem), so the hope for breaking the de-facto two-party system is finally here.
2. What do those in PO circles make of another defeat?
The main problem with PO is that they are unable to learn. In 2015 they were so sure of Komorowski’s re-election that Adam Michnik (a former communist dissident and long time editor of the biggest Polish daily paper) even famously said “the only way for him to lose elections is if he gets behind the wheel drunk and runs over a pregnant nun on a pedestrian crossing”. After the results of the first round proved to be much worse than expected, Komorowski panicked and hastily organized some useless referendum trying to appease Kukiz’ voters, which backfired spectacularly.
In 2020, they chose Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska, who was so bleak that even they realised it was a stupid idea and took advantage of the whole Covid kerfuffle to replace her hastily with Rafał Trzaskowski. Back then he lost very closely to Andrzej Duda, and it is probably very likely that if the elections were fair he would have won. PiS turned public media into a North Korean style propaganda machine and introduced changes that facilitated voting for elderly – their core electorate – while making voting abroad (where the opposition usually scores better) very difficult.
Back then Trzaskowski was a good candidate; he appeared to be the opposite of Duda – well-versed in literature, with lots of local and national government experience, able to speak several languages fluently and standing together with progressive movements. This time, as I wrote in a previous chapter of this series, they picked him over much more popular Radek Sikorski and decided to move him to the right, which was a huge mistake – brown-nosing the radical right never worked well for anyone but the far right. In just the first stage Trzaskowski, who begun his campaign with about 40 per cent of predicted support, saw his support fall to 30 per cent. Meanwhile, the radical right candidates – Braun and Mentzen – unexpectedly gathered about 10 per cent more votes than predicted.
And so, during the two weeks between first and second vote, Trzaskowski, understandably, tried to appeal to right wing voters, but at the same time did everything to scare the left. Razem, the party which since 2015 has been constantly blamed for allowing PiS to win election by standing in elections on their own (a very peculiar stance by self-proclaimed defenders of democracy, if you ask me), got especially bad bashing, with some of the pro-PO commentators openly calling Adrian Zandberg a “traitor” for refusing to endorse Trzaskowski unconditionally for the second term.
The whole thing could be summed up as follows: while Trzaskowski was trying to make friends on the right, all that PO had to offer to left wing voters was blackmail: “if you don’t vote for Trzaskowski, you’ll be to blame for PiS’s victory”. I guess his team was so sure of his success that they didn’t even consider it to be worth trying to have some conversation with Adrian Zandberg’s voters. They were so sure, that Trzaskowski announced his victory after early exit polls, despite a difference of less than one percentage point between him and Nawrocki.
When Monday morning shattered that illusion, I did a big round over the pro-PO stations, papers and social media circles to see what they say. There were no surprises here: Trzaskowski’s defeat was blamed on:
– those backwards people from rural eastern Poland who are too stupid to vote for the right candidate;
– the other pro-democratic candidates, because they criticized Trzaskowski and praised themselves, instead of running their campaign the other way around;
– Adrian Zandberg who refused to formally endorse Trzaskowski, saying that “voters aren’t a sack of potatoes to be passed around; they themselves know very well who to vote for”;
– voters who stayed at home.
The list goes on and on, one of the influential Catholic priests even accused environmental radicals from the Polish equivalent of Extinction Rebellion or NGO activists from Grupa Granica, the organization that saves lives of the people crossing the border with Belarus. Strangely enough, his long list of people to blame did not included the clergy, despite many recorded examples of priests campaigning for Nawrocki during church services.
But it has to be said after the initial shock came, the first calls for radical change of course in Donald Tusk’s camp can be already heard, although they might not be the radical change Poles might expect. Speaker of the parliament Szymon Hołownia – Tusk’s coalition partner and twice a failed presidential candidate himself – suggested that “voters are too emotional” and perhaps the president should be elected by the members of the parliament only, like in Germany.
3. What happens next?
Let’s get one thing clear: THERE IS NO NEED TO PANIC. Yet. Nawrocki is, of course, another puppet of Kaczyński. But so was the outgoing president Duda. For the purpose of every day politics, nothing has really changed.
But it means the 2027 parliamentary elections will be yet another last chance to save democracy in Poland. As Razem is unlikely to radically improve their following in two years, unless Tusk manages to turn around his ship, the Kaczyński dream of “having Budapest in Warsaw” will be realised on that date. Some say this shock was needed, as the last warning for Tusk. Some of my friends even deliberately refrained from voting in the second round, arguing that it’s better if PO loses the presidential election, learns from their mistake and comes out victorious in 2027, than if the victory of Trzaskowski had convinced them nothing needs to be changed. 2027 would be a disaster, because in the Polish political system you can achieve more if you control the government than if you have the president, as the latter has mostly disruptive powers. But this cunning plan has one big flaw: it heavily depends on PO being able to learn from their own mistakes. They haven’t show us that they are capable of this over the last 20 years.
So what happens next? Jarosław Kaczyński made a funny joke and proposed a new government led by some technocrat “who will be just as independent from PiS as president Nawrocki”. Meanwhile Donald Tusk announced he will submit his government to a vote of confidence (which he’ll most likely win) and then he’ll “continue his hard work” on delivering on his promises of social and economic reforms, as well as holding PiS responsible for their crimes. Which, of course, bring the question why have we seen little effects of this hard work over the last 18 months. He seems to be aware of the issue, as in the same speech he said “there is no point waiting any further”, indicating that his plan was to wait for Trzaskowski to win, so he would have free hand to propose bills that would be most likely vetoed by Duda.
I guess most Poles agree with him on that. We are fed up with waiting for him to meet our expectations. As the headline mentioned above clearly shows, we have been waiting for nearly 15 years now. One thing is sure: this series, in which I comment on the political situation, is about to become interesting again.
This article first appeared in Czech in Britske Listy and is reproduced by kind permission of the author
