Donald Tusk, the leader of the largest opposition grouping Civic Coalition, speaks at the meeting with women during election convention in Lodz, Poland, on Oct. 10.KACPER PEMPEL/Reuters
Timothy Garton Ash is the author, most recently, of Homelands: A Personal History of Europe.
I walked to a Warsaw polling station on election day with the same old friends whom I had accompanied to Poland’s historic vote on June 4, 1989, which opened the door to democracy in the country. With delight, they each chose one name from the long list of parliamentary candidates. With equal delight, they refused to even take the ballot paper for the simultaneous referendum which – with its ludicrously biased questions about things like an alleged “forced relocation mechanism” for illegal immigrants supposedly “imposed by the European bureaucracy” – was effectively election propaganda for the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS).
Then, starting with the first exit polls at 9 p.m., our foreboding turned to relief and then joy.
Turnout, at a record nearly 74 per cent on the current count, was more than 10 per cent higher than in 1989. Reversing a continentwide trend, first estimates suggest that voters under 29 turned out in larger numbers than those older than 60. Despite the crude, mendacious propaganda pumped out by state-controlled media, the people spoke, and said they wanted a different government: The democratic opposition parties will have a clear parliamentary majority over PiS and its potential partner, the wild Konfederacja party, which should reverse Poland’s slide toward the kind of electoral authoritarianism practised by Viktor Orban in Hungary.
Why did the opposition win? We’ll need more time to understand this fully. Nonetheless, we can see that many voters simply got fed up with the crude, mendacious, corrupt, petty, backward-looking, obscurantist rule of PiS, led by the 74-year old Jarosław Kaczyński, a kind of one-man walking anthology of resentment. Some were alarmed by opposition warnings that the anti-Brussels course of PiS might eventually lead to Polexit, though the more immediate danger was that Poland would join forces with Mr. Orban, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and the Slovak populist Robert Fico to drag the entire EU further to the right. And with a reactionary, patriarchal party imposing one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in Europe, more women voted than men for the first time in Polish history.
Huge credit must go to Donald Tusk, the leader of the largest opposition list, the Civic Coalition, which has at its core the Civic Platform party he co-founded in the early 2000s. I must confess I was skeptical about the return of the 66-year-old former president of the European Council to the front line of Polish politics; it felt a bit like Tony Blair resuming the leadership of the British Labour Party. But he fought his way through a barrage of poisonous abuse, including ludicrous accusations that he was the German candidate; this victory is, in significant measure, his.
I came to Warsaw directly from Istanbul, where a united opposition failed to defeat Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier this year. Last spring, I watched a united opposition in Hungary go down badly against Mr. Orban. In Poland, my friends and I were also urging the opposition to unite – which it failed to do. Yet it may turn out that the fact there were three different opposition lists to choose from – Tusk’s Civic Coalition, the Third Way (combining two parties broadly acceptable to liberal Catholic voters) and the New Left – actually ended up maximizing the opposition vote.
It’s still early days. Mr. Kaczyński may yet have a few dirty tricks up his sleeve. President Andrzej Duda will give him the first chance of forming a government, so it could take months before power finally changes hands. Such a diverse opposition coalition may also prove fractious in government (think Germany).
Then there’ll be the huge challenge of reversing PiS’s creeping state capture. That will require restoring the independence of the courts, turning state media into proper public-service media, undoing deep political penetration of the civil service and state-owned enterprises, and redrawing constituency boundaries so they reflect population changes – all while Mr. Duda still has extensive veto powers.
Restored EU funding will help, but no one knows the true condition of Poland’s public finances, and there’s a war grinding on next door in Ukraine.
PiS also won the single largest share of the vote. In big cities, nearly half the votes went to opposition parties and less than a quarter to PiS, but in the countryside, it was the other way around. Civic Platform must show it has learned from its mistakes in the 2000s by respecting the concerns of a poorer, more conservative, Catholic, rural and small-town Poland. And the opposition needs to avoid the temptation simply to take revenge.
But sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof. Poland’s populist nightmare is almost over, and all Europe will benefit as a result.