Poland — whose eight years of euroskeptic, conservative rule under the Law and Justice (PiS) party put it in the same illiberal camp as Viktor Orban’s Hungary — now looks headed for closer ties with the EU. Sunday’s early parliamentary election arithmetic suggests Donald Tusk is set to return as prime minister, aiming to restore the rule of law and align Poland’s foreign policy along a more pro-Ukraine line. The optimism among financial markets and Western corridors of power is warranted — but so is caution over the uphill climb ahead.
The election was PiS’ to lose, and lose it effectively did, despite technically coming in first among the parties with a 35.4 percent share of the vote. Record turnout and frustration with the country’s illiberal turn and stalling economic growth gave a boost to anti-PiS forces led by Tusk’s Civic Platform party; joining forces with Third Way and the Left would give the group an estimated 248 seats in the 460-strong lower house of parliament.
“The pendulum has swung back,” Lukas Macek of the Jacques Delors Institute think tank said, adding that voters appear to have rejected PiS’ polarized culture-war narrative.
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
This is a big deal, politically and economically, as the bounce in investor optimism suggests. The chance to repair ties with the EU after years of bust-ups means a potential re-anchoring of a major economy in a central region once described by writer Milan Kundera as belonging culturally to the West and politically to the East. At stake is the release of more than 35 billion euros (US$37 billion) of EU funds earmarked for Poland, but trapped in a fight over judicial independence; better relations with Berlin and Paris; increased support for Ukraine after a grain dispute; and liberalization of abortion laws. Poland’s economy has been a success in recent decades, but its more nationalist-statist turn under PiS has worried some foreign investors.
After what felt like a clean sweep of victories for authoritarian leaders in Hungary, Turkey and most recently Slovakia, Poland is a warning to politicians who expect the recipe of polarization, scapegoating and budget giveaways to work every time.
Tusk might be a divisive figure, seen by some as too socially left and too economically right, but bashing him as a covert agent of Germany or Russia seems to have had the opposite effect than intended by turning voters off to an all-or-nothing clash of ideologies. Rising support for centrists also suggests that the PiS tactic of spending cash “like a firehose,” on everything from expanded child benefits to the elderly, can also backfire. Its high-welfare, high-conservatism vision has failed to rally Poles this time.
With the optimism, however, comes caution. The challenge facing Poland is big — nothing less than a “new chapter in the history of European democracy,” said Piotr Buras, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Warsaw office.
As the ugliness of the campaign rhetoric suggests, the months ahead will be rough: PiS-backed Polish President Andrzej Duda is still in power until 2025 and will likely make life difficult for Tusk and his would-be coalition partners, both in forming a government and adopting reforms necessary to shift the still-divided country in a new direction.
Poland is a young country in its current form: It entered the post-Soviet era in 1989, joined NATO in 1999, joined the EU in 2004, and has been successful in catching up economically to the West and in carving out its own foreign-policy path. This is now another slice of uncharted territory for a country facing challenges common to many of its neighbors — an aging population, higher inflation and the pressure of decarbonization in a carbon-intensive economy. A change in parliament is only the first step.
“This is the end of the bad time,” Tusk said.
Let us hope he is right.
Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist writing about the future of money and the future of Europe. Previously, he was a reporter for Reuters and Forbes. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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