Poland’s Ruling Party Heading for Resounding Defeat

WARSAW, Poland _ Law and Justice, the combative political party founded by Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twin brothers who serve as Poland’s president and prime minister, has lost its gamble on early parliamentary elections.

What had been expected to be a close vote on Sunday turned into a rout, with the opposition Civic Platform getting 44 percent of the vote to Law and Justice’s about 31 percent, according to exit polls.

Official results will not be available until Tuesday afternoon, but if the tallies stand up, the center-right Civic Platform could have a large enough majority to form a government without coalition partners _ the first time this has happened since the 1989 collapse of communism.

But it will hardly be smooth sailing for Civic Platform as Lech Kaczynski’s term as president does not expire until 2010.

The resounding defeat for Law and Justice appears to reflect the electorate’s disenchantment with the Kaczynski brothers’ knack for turning potential allies into enemies and their obsessive focus on rooting out former communist collaborators from all aspects of public life.

“Decency won today. We all know that this is not a victory for a political party, but for the people,” said Donald Tusk, the Civic Platform leader who is expected to replace Jaroslaw Kaczynski as prime minister.

The Kaczynskis draw most of their support from Poles who did not fare well in the country’s transition from socialism to a free market economy, who are suspicious of change and who share the brothers’ piously Catholic and nationalistic world view. These tend to be older voters living in small towns and rural areas.

Unfortunately for the Kaczynskis, voter turnout was unusually high for Poland _ 55.3 percent compared to little more than 40 percent in the last parliamentary vote _ and it was especially high in large cities. Several polling stations in the capital ran out of ballots and election officials were forced to keep the polls open for an extra three hours while emergency ballots were distributed.

Turnout also exceeded expectations among young people. According to election officials, participation for 18- to 24-year-olds was about 48 percent.

In Britain and Ireland, where tens of thousands of young Poles have arrived in recent years in search of higher paying jobs, people lined up outside the Polish Embassy for up to five hours to cast their ballots.

Tusk, whose party clearly benefited from the high turnout, called it “a sign of responsibility on the part of those who voted, and a sign for Europe that we remain democratic.”

The Kaczynskis alienated large numbers of voters with their conservative social agenda, their penchant for gay bashing and their hostility toward the European Union, especially Germany.

They also reopened deep wounds when they introduced a process called lustration that relied on decades-old secret police files to expose citizens who may have collaborated with the former communist regime. The lustration law was canceled earlier this year by Poland’s constitutional court.

“I voted for Civic Platform. Well, actually I voted against Kaczynski,” said Mikolaj Zielonka, 25, a nightclub manager in Warsaw.

“Poland needs to be more tolerant, more open,” he said. “I’m against lustration. I’m against the Kaczynskis’ foreign policy. I think they have been an embarrassment for Poland.”

Roman Juszkiewicz, 55, also rejoiced at the Kaczynskis defeat. Juszkiewicz, a physicist at Warsaw University, said he was outraged earlier this year when he was asked to sign a declaration that he had never been a communist collaborator.

“They don’t try to prove that I am guilty of something; they want me to prove that I am innocent,” he said. “It’s really scary stuff.”

In his concession speech, Lech Kaczynski put a positive spin on the defeat, noting that Law and Justice had actually increased its proportion of votes and nearly doubled its vote total from the previous election.

He blamed the defeat on the media and on the secret “nexus” of ex-communists, former secret police and corrupt business oligarchs that the brothers believe still pull the levers of power in Poland.

The soon to be ex-prime minister promised to remain feisty in opposition, and with brother Lech as president, the twins will still exercise considerable sway over Poland’s politics.

Both Law and Justice and Civic Platform are center-right parties that have their roots in the anti-communist Solidarity movement of the 1980s. Their differences tend to be more of tone and style than of substance, and analysts speculate that Civic Platform’s success will encourage a significant number of high-level defections from Law and Justice.

The reformed communists, driven from power in the last election by a series of scandals, received 12 percent of the vote, about the same as their 2005 showing. The rural Peasants Party, a potential coalition partner for Civic Platform, got 8 percent.

The Kaczynskis called this election two years early after they dumped their two coalition partners, the ultra-Catholic League of Polish Families and the scandal-prone populists of Self-Defense.

Many of those who voted against Law and Justice celebrated the complete collapse of its two former partners, both of which failed to reach the 5 percent threshold required for representation in parliament. The League of Polish Families got 1.2 percent, while Self-Defense fell to less than 1 percent, according to one exit poll.

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(c) 2007, Chicago Tribune.

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