Tusk’s and Poland’s accomplishment

As the vote count is now nearly done, we can breathe a sigh of relief that Polish exit polls are more accurate than their Slovakian counterparts, and appreciate the remarkable accomplishment of Donald Tusk and rest of the Polish opposition. The three lists who comprised the opposition are now just north of 52% of the popular vote. Seat allocation is complicated but it seems extremely unlikely they’ll be outside the 240-250 seat range; 231 is needed for a majority. It certainly appears to be the case that PiS was defeated in part through new turnout; the 73% turnout figure is easily the highest in Poland’s history, and a full 11% higher than 2019. The turnout boost appears to have been strongest in the West and the North, the more anti-PiS regions in the country.

I look forward to reading more post-mortems of this election–please link in comments if you’ve read one you’ve liked–but to kick it off, I enjoyed and learned from Daniel Tilles of Notes from Poland. Worth reading in full but I was struck by his discussion of the strategic logic of the opposition approach to this election:

After returning to lead his old Civic Platform (PO) party in mid-2021, Tusk spent most of the next 18 months trying – as previous PO leaders had done – to unite the mainstream opposition into a single, united anti-PiS coalition.

That never seemed like a good idea. First of all, there was little appetite from other opposition parties to be swallowed up by PO.

Second, as PO’s experience in previous elections should have made clear, being anti-PiS is not enough to win elections. And it would be hard for such a broad coalition – ranging from left to centre-right – to agree on any shared platform beyond opposing the government.

Eventually, by early this year, Tusk had abandoned the idea. Instead, the opposition coalesced into three main blocs: the centrist KO, dominated by Tusk’s PO party; The Left; and Third Way, a centre-right coalition of the Polish People’s Party (PSL) and Poland 2050 (Polska 2050).

As I argued last year, this was an optimal configuration for the opposition: it provided voters with a genuine choice – something impossible to do with a single opposition list – while also ensuring that each group was large enough to exceed the electoral threshold to enter parliament (unlike in 2015, when divisions on the left resulted in its two factions both falling below the threshold, thereby helping PiS win power).

Each of the three blocs conducted its own, separate campaign, yet they also largely avoided attacking one another and made clear that they would be willing to form a coalition government with one another after the elections. In particular, the independent presence of the centre-right Third Way appears to have been a boon for the opposition, offering an option for voters disillusioned with PiS but unwilling to vote for Tusk or the far right.

I haven’t devoted much thought to the strategic logic of how a cross-ideological coalition united by a shared enemy should best proceed, but this makes a lot of sense to me. This is particularly true given that PiS’s likely coalition partner, the “further right” Confederation, embraces the cut taxes and spending side of conservatism PiS does not. Third Way running independently gave free-marketeers an option that wouldn’t risk empowering PiS. From everything I’ve read, it seems as the though the three way alliance were fantastically disciplined at not attacking each other. It all seems to strike a balance–high information voters understand these three groups and fully united, but running nominally separately allows each of them to pick up ideologically aligned voters who may not be committed to ousting PiS. In the SMD-FPTP Senate, they even agreed to an arrangement where only the strongest contender would field a candidate, whom they would all endorse.

However they did it, the world owes these Poland’s opposition voters and politicians a debt of gratitude.