A Prize For (Almost) Everyone

A Prize For (Almost) Everyone

While all of Poland’s political parties were
claiming victory in the local elections, a closer look shows that
the number of seats gained is not necessarily the clearest
indicator of who won or lost.

The recent Polish local elections were probably
the single most important political event to take place in Poland
this year.

There were four issues that political observers
were hoping these elections would help clarify. First, they were
seen as an opportunity to gauge the levels of support for both
government and opposition parties one year after the September 2001
parliamentary elections. That event saw the crushing defeat of the
post-Solidarity center-right government and the return to power of
the Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD), the communist successor
party, and the Polish Peasant Party (PSL). Second, analysts were
curious whether the first local elections in which citizens would
directly elect their mayor or “town president” would lead to an
increase in turnout. Third, the election for the mayor of Warsaw in
particular was seen as a kind of “primary” to determine who would
lead the center-right into the 2005 presidential election: the
leader of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, Lech
Kaczynski, or the liberal Civic Platform (PO) leader, Andrzej
Olechowski. Finally, it was hoped that these elections would
provide some pointers to the outcome of Poland’s EU accession
referendum, scheduled for spring/summer 2003.

The elections were held on 27 October, with a
runoff between the two leading mayoral candidates held on 10
November in those areas where no one secured more than 50 percent
of the vote in the first round.

As the results started to come in, observers had
a very difficult task making any solid judgments about who
precisely the winners and losers were. Computer glitches meant the
results emerged very slowly, and Polish parties, like their
counterparts in more established Western democracies, have
developed the knack of focusing on their best scores to assert that
they were the real “winners,” or at least to muddy the waters.
Given the large number of local seats being contested, every party
could claim some kind of success and seek to generalize its
significance. In reality, the single best indicator was probably
the aggregated share of the vote won by each party or grouping in
the elections to the 16 provincial assemblies that (unlike the
lower county and commune tiers) were dominated by national party
lists.

A DECEPTIVE VICTORY

According to the provincial assembly indicator,
the governing SLD–running in coalition with the smaller Labor
Union (UP) party–won the most seats. But those parties were
actually the biggest losers, winning only 24.5 percent of the vote
compared with 41.04 percent in September 2001. The SLD-UP
government, led by Leszek Miller, enjoyed virtually no electoral
honeymoon last autumn and has had a difficult year as Poland’s
economy has been sluggish and unemployment remains stubbornly high.
The result was even significantly below the 30-35 percent that the
SLD-UP had been recording in recent opinion polls, meaning this
grouping has lost nearly a third of its voters in the past
year.

However, the SLD-UP’s weak performance was
masked by the fact that it remained the largest grouping in terms
of seats won. That was due both to the fragmentation of its main
political opponents and the fact that the voting system rewarded
larger parties at the expense of smaller and medium-sized ones.
Nonetheless, the SLD-UP will still be forced to share power in all
but one of the 13 provincial assemblies in which it emerged as the
largest single party.

The biggest election winners were undoubtedly
Andrzej Lepper’s agrarian-populist Self-Defense party and the
Catholic nationalist League of Polish Families (LPR), which won 16
per cent and 14.5 percent, respectively. That was significantly
better than the 10.2 percent and 7.87 percent that they recorded in
September 2001 or their (slightly better) recent opinion poll
figures. Worryingly for the SLD-UP, Self-Defense appears to be
emerging as a force that is potentially capable of picking up
left-wing voters dissatisfied with the government’s economic
performance.

Meanwhile, the LPR seems not to have suffered
from the (public, at least) withdrawal of support from the
influential Catholic nationalist broadcaster Radio Maryja and
appears to have reached out beyond the 5-10 percent that comprises
the core “radical right” Polish electorate. Ironically, both
parties may have been helped by their involvement in seriously
disrupting the proceedings of the Polish parliament a week before
the first round of polling and the indecisive response of the
moderate opposition parties to this pre-election stunt. Whether
these two parties have reached their peak or can make further
inroads into the mainstream center-left and center-right parties’
vote is now one of the big questions that will determine the future
configuration of the Polish political scene.

The electoral coalition, comprising the two main
center-right opposition parties, the PO and the PiS, performed
broadly in line with opinion poll predictions, finishing second
with 16.5 percent. However, that was 5.5 percent below their
September 2001 combined vote of 22.18 percent (12.68 percent for
the PO and 9.5 percent for the PiS). Indeed, the PO and the PiS
found it extremely difficult to run a coherent and unified national
campaign, exemplified by their failure to register joint lists in
all 16 regions (and the resultant denial of free TV and radio
airtime). That lack of a clear message was no doubt exacerbated by
the fact that the parties’ leaders, Kaczynski and Olechowski, were
running head-to-head in a fairly aggressive mayoral race in the
capital.

IN GOVERNMENT, STILL POPULAR

The SLD-UP’s junior coalition partner, the PSL,
performed respectably, winning 11 percent of the vote. That
represented a small increase on its September 2001 share of 8.98
percent, although the party will be disappointed that it lost
further ground to Self-Defense, its main rival for the
rural-agrarian vote. Clearly, the party has been able to distance
itself somewhat from the government’s unpopularity–helped by its
leader Jaroslaw Kalinowski’s relatively effective performance as a
defender of farming interests in EU accession negotiations in his
role as deputy prime minister and agriculture minister.

The introduction of directly elected mayors did
not have a significant impact on local election turnout that, at
around 45 percent, remained broadly at the same level as in the
previous local elections, held in 1998. However, that seems a
fairly respectable figure for local elections, and the additional
interest created by mayoral polls may have kept the numbers from
falling even further. Poland’s real problem is, in fact, in
securing a decent turnout for parliamentary elections–which is
roughly the same as for local polls (45-50 percent) and has topped
50 percent in just one out of the last four elections.

The race that attracted the greatest interest
was undoubtedly that for the mayor of Warsaw, which ended in a
tremendous victory for PiS leader Lech Kaczynski. Kaczynski, who
fought a campaign on his by now familiar anti-crime and
anti-corruption themes, finished just a few hundred votes short of
victory in the first round and then went on to beat SLD-UP
candidate Marek Balicki, winning 71 percent of the vote in the
second round. At the same time, Andrzej Olechowski–PO leader and
Kaczynski’s challenger for the mantle of the center-right’s 2005
presidential candidate–finished third with a humiliating 13
percent of the vote, virtually ending his political career in the
process. Kaczynski is now extremely well placed to lead the
center-right in both the 2005 pr esidential and parliamentary
elections, although he will clearly be held to account for his
ability to deliver on his pledges to tackle crime and corruption in
the capital.

EU REFERENDUM IMPLICATIONS

Finally, some commentators have argued that the
local elections indicate that the pro-EU camp will be hard put to
win the accession referendum scheduled for the spring or summer of
next year. They point to the 30 percent of the vote won by the
Euroskeptic Self-Defense and LPR parties (to which can be added a
further 6 percent won by other right-wing anti-EU parties such as
the Union of Real Politics). In fact, it is impossible to
extrapolate the likely size of the anti-EU vote in an accession
referendum from the vote won by those two parties. The voters who
support Self-Defense (which argues that it is, in principle, in
favor of Polish EU membership) are almost evenly divided on the
issue of accession, while one-third of LPR voters would also vote
“Yes” in an EU referendum.

Other commentators point out that local election
turnout was below the 50 percent required to make an accession
referendum constitutionally valid (although the most alarmist
remarks emerged after early predictions indicated that it might be
as low as 35 percent). The turnout issue does remain a potentially
serious obstacle to winning an accession referendum. However, the
Polish parliament is about to debate a law that would make it
possible for parliament to confirm a “Yes” vote even if turnout
falls below the 50 percent threshold.

The 2002 Polish local elections, therefore,
contained enough for almost all the major political actors (except
Andrzej Olechowski) to claim some kind of a victory, be they
government or opposition, radical or moderate, left, right, or
center, Euroskeptic or Euroenthusiast. In fact, the only ones who
can be really satisfied with the outcome are Lech Kaczynski and the
radical populist Self-Defense and LPR parties. The grouping for
whom these results should be cause for the greatest concern is,
paradoxically, the apparent “winner”: the SLD-UP coalition.

Aleks Szczerbiak is a lecturer in contemporary
European studies at the Sussex European Institute, University of
Sussex. His current research interests include Central and East
European party and electoral politics, particularly focusing on
Poland. He is the author of Poles Together? The Emergence and
Development of Political Parties in Post-Communist Poland (Central
European University Press, 2001).

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