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 PO makes of it and what can we expect?
Click HERE to read the previous part of the series
Click HERE to see all the chapters of the series so far.
1. Why does 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 1990’s and Tusk promising “warm water in the tap” could be enough, those times are long gone. The world is changing, society is changing, and people would like to see their country keep up too.
Meanwhile, 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 the 20th country in the world by GDP and 19th when adjusted for purchasing power parity (the 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 liberal economic expert a reason why can’t we have nice things like reasonable housing policy, progressive tax system, working healthcare, 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 how long would they like us to “clench our teeth and work hard”? Until we become richer than Luxembourg and happier than Finland? There were thousands of 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?
However, while economically the last 20 years were some of the best times in Polish history, we are falling behind in the social sphere. I am 45 this year, and things like abortion rights have been the major topic of the Polish political discourse since I remember – and I developed an 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 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 the 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 at this 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 quite elitist parties of major urban centres, supported by big business, people of high culture and celebrities. They appear disconnected from small city dwellers and rural population, and their attempts to come 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.
There is that 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’s 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 the 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 election in decades we had some newcomers promising to be that “third option” – from Ruch Palikota in 2011, through Ryszard Petru’s .Nowoczesna and Paweł Kukiz’s protest movement in 2015, and left left-wing populist party of Robert Biedroń in 2019, to the recent emergence of Szymon Hołownia’s Polska 2050. All those parties have one thing in common: they scoop 10% or so votes, then fail to deliver on their promises and, usually, 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 odds and young social democratic party Razem, that might not met 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”. Those 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 PO circles make of their yet 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 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 organised a useless referendum, trying to appease Kukiz’s 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 (PiS turned public media into North Korean’s style propaganda machine and introduced changes that facilitated voting for elderly – their core electorate – while making voting abroad (where 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 a lot of local and national government experience, speaking several languages fluently and standing together with progressive movements. This time, as I wrote in previous chapters 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. Just in the first term, Trzaskowski, who began his campaign with about 40% of predicted support, lost 10%. Meanwhile, the radical right candidates – Braun and Mentzen – unexpectedly gathered about 10% more votes than predicted.
And so during the two weeks between the first and second vote, Trzaskowski, understandably, tried to appeal to right-wing voters, but at the same time, did everything to scare the left from himself. Razem, that since 2015 is 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 unconditionally endorse Trzaskowski for the second term.
The whole thing could be summed up that 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 Trzaskowski’s team was sure enough of his success that they didn’t even consider it to be worthy of a try to have some conversation with the voters of Adrian Zandberg. They were so sure that Trzaskowski announced his victory after early exit polls, despite a well under a single percentage point of difference between him and Nawrocki.
When the 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 was no surprise 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 criticised 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 sacks of potatoes to be passed around, they themselves know very well who to vote for”.
– voters who stayed at home.
But after the initial shock came, the first calls for a radical change of course in Donald Tusk’s camp can already be heard.
3. What happens next?
Let’s get one thing clear: Nawrocki is, of course, another puppet of Kaczyński. But this means that it’s not an apocalypse yet. In fact, nothing changes. Yet…
But it means the 2027 parliamentary elections will be the last chance to save democracy in Poland again. As Razem is unlikely to radically improve their following in two years, unless Tusk manages to turn around his ship, Kaczyński’s 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 presidential election, learns from their mistake and comes victorious in 2027 than if victory of Trzaskowski would convince them nothing needs to be change and 2027 would be a disaster, because in the Polish political system you can achieve more if you control the government than if you have a 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 shown 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 under the 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, brings the question of why we have seen little effect of this hard work over the last 18 months. He seems to be aware of it, 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 waiting for him to live up to our expectations. As the screenshot above clearly shows, we have been waiting for it for nearly 15 years now. One thing is sure: this series is about to become interesting again.
This text was published in Czech in Britské Listy
Screenshot source
