KOD Warsaw, February, 2016. Flickr/Jaap Arriens. Some rights reserved.The Polish political scene has been deeply polarised since the government
led by the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party took office last autumn following
its decisive victory in the October parliamentary election. The catalyst and
main focus for this has been a bitter political and legal struggle over the
membership and functioning of Poland’s constitutional tribunal, a powerful body
that rules on the constitutionality of laws.
Constitutional
crisis
The opposition has been extremely successful in promoting its narrative
that the government’s actions represent an attempt to interfere in the independence of the judiciary. This has
provided government opponents with a highly emotive touchstone issue which they
have bundled up with a number of other measures, such as a new law that they
claim politicises public broadcasting, to accuse Law and Justice of undermining
the fundamentals of democracy and the rule of law.
For their part, the government’s supporters deny these charges vigorously
and defend its actions as necessary to restore pluralism and balance to state
institutions that they say had been colonised by supporters of, and milieu
associated with, the previous governing party. More broadly, they argue that many
Polish institutions have been expropriated by an extremely well-entrenched and
often deeply corrupt, post-communist elite.
Nonetheless, the opposition’s narrative has been picked up by the EU
political establishment and western opinion-forming media, with whom the
government’s opponents enjoy strong links and many of whom share their dislike
of Law and Justice.
In January, the European Commission initiated an unprecedented
preliminary investigation under an EU monitoring mechanism to establish whether
rule of law in Poland was under ‘systemic threat’. The government’s
constitutional tribunal reforms were also criticised by the Venice Commission,
an advisory body on constitutional matters to the Council of Europe human
rights watchdog.
Schetyna lacks
an effective strategy
With 138 deputies in the 460-member Sejm, the more powerful lower chamber
of the Polish parliament, the main opposition grouping is the centrist Civic
Platform (PO) which was the main governing party between 2007-15.
Civic Platform has a large number of experienced parliamentarians, considerable
financial resources, a relatively well developed grassroots organisational
network, and controls 14 out Poland’s 16 regional authorities. In January, the
party elected a new leader, Grzegorz Schetyna, who was foreign minister in the
outgoing Civic Platform government led by the then party leader and prime minister
Ewa Kopacz, having been previously marginalised by her predecessor, Donald
Tusk.
However, although he was not in the party’s inner circle for a number of
years, Schetyna is still associated with the previous, discredited government
which many Poles see as representing an out-of-touch and complacent elite
disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people and tainted by scandal.
Grzegorz Schetyna also lacks charisma and, most importantly, does not, as
yet, appear to have an effective strategy for re-building the party’s support. His
approach, dubbed ‘total opposition’, seems to comprise: presenting himself as
the most uncompromising opponent of the government; trying to outflank it on
social spending pledges by, for example, arguing that the government’s flagship
‘500 plus’ subsidy programme for the first children of poorer households and
every second and subsequent child in all families should be extended to include
every child; and using Civic Platform’s international contacts to attack the
ruling party in European forums.
However, although experience suggests that Polish voters often prefer hard-line
rather than more nuanced opposition parties, Schetyna’s approach often comes
across as opportunist and overly negative. Civic Platform is unlikely to win
the backing of those voters favouring greater social welfare spending, for whom
Law and Justice will always be more credible, and is in danger of simply
damaging its hard-won fiscal credibility among the party’s one-time core
liberal electorate.
Moreover, while Poles support their country’s EU membership
overwhelmingly, Civic Platform could appear to be weakening the country’s
international standing by drawing European institutions into domestic political
disputes.
In electing Schetyna as leader, Civic Platform members hoped that, as an
experienced political operator, he would restore a sense of discipline and
purpose to the party. However, Schetyna often gives the impression that his
main priority is shoring up his own leadership and exacting revenge on those who
once helped to marginalise him within the party. This has started to produce a
backlash, one consequence of which was that, following a purge of Schetyna’s opponents
which led to the defection of a number of Civic Platform councillors, the party
lost control of the regional authority in Lower Silesia, once his local power
base.
Petru’s
‘newness’ begins to wear off
Meanwhile, a significant challenger for the leadership of the opposition has
emerged in the form of the ‘Modern’ (Nowoczesna) grouping, formed last May by financial
sector economist Ryszard Petru.
Petru’s party won 7.6% of the vote in the October election to emerge as
the fourth largest grouping in the Sejm, picking up support from voters who
felt that Civic Platform had drifted away from its free market roots. However, it
was the constitutional crisis that provided ‘Modern’ with an opportunity to
broaden its image from being simply a technocratic pro-business liberal party.
While Petru is a reasonably effective parliamentary and media performer he is
not a hugely charismatic figure and his party’s greatest asset was its ‘newness’,
which stood in sharp contrast to the more compromised figures associated with
Civic Platform.
Without the political ballast of having to defend eight years in office, Petru’s
harsh criticisms of the Law and Justice government appeared more authentic and
credible and, as a consequence, ‘Modern’ started pulling ahead of Civic
Platform in opinion polls, and in some even ran neck-and-neck with Law and
Justice.
However, as the effect of this ‘newness’ began to wear off Petru’s party lost
some of its initial momentum and the two main opposition groupings are now
fairly evenly matched in the polls, both lagging well behind Law and Justice. The
‘Pooling the Poles’ micro-blog that aggregates voting intention surveys showed
support at the end of May for ‘Modern’ at 19% compared with 17% for Civic
Platform and 38% for the ruling party.
Part of the problem is that Petru’s party lacks both grassroots
organisational structures and experienced, battle-hardened politicians in its
small 29-member parliamentary caucus. Moreover, none of its other leaders have
the same public profile as Petru, whose novelty value has declined as a series
of gaffes have allowed the party’s opponents to portray him as an over-promoted
political lightweight: most notoriously when he sent a Twitter message implying
that he was defending Poland’s historical
Constitution of May 3, 1791, when it was only in force for a little over a
year!
‘Modern’s’ biggest weakness, however, lies in the narrowness of its programmatic
appeal. Experience suggests that the social base for a purely economically liberal
party in Poland is relatively small, a problem exacerbated by Petru’s links
with the large banking corporations which, for many Poles, symbolise the hated
political-business nexus (often referred to disparagingly as ‘banksters’) that
motivated many of them to vote for anti-establishment parties like Law and
Justice in the first place.
Initially, the polarisation of the political scene helped Petru’s party
neutralise this weakness by presenting itself as the ‘defender of democracy’
rather than simply a narrowly focused liberal grouping. The party’s leap in
support was, therefore, the product of a very specific political conjuncture
and this began to change as voters started once again to evaluate ‘Modern’
through the prism of its relatively unpopular liberal socio-economic policies.
A coalition of
opposition parties appears unlikely
In fact, the main focus for mobilising opposition to the government has
been the Committee for the Defence of Democracy (KOD), formed last November to
protest against the constitutional tribunal reforms, but subsequently broadened
out into a more general anti-Law and Justice civic movement.
Government supporters argue that the Committee’s activities are
orchestrated by opposition politicians and vested interests hostile to its
plans to radically reconstruct the Polish state and introduce sweeping
socio-economic policy reforms. For sure, many of those who identify with the
Committee represent the post-1989 business, cultural and political establishment,
and its protest rallies have frequently been addressed by opposition party
leaders. However, the Committee has been able to project itself successfully,
both domestically and internationally, as a large, bottom-up movement of
ordinary citizens genuinely concerned about the apparent risk to democracy,
civic freedoms and the rule of law in Poland.
Thousands of Poles have participated in the Committee’s street
demonstrations, the largest of which was held in Warsaw at the beginning of May
around the slogan ‘We are and will remain in Europe’, conflating the government’s
apparent undermining of democracy with the danger that the country could leave the
EU (although Law and Justice supporters argue that the government remains fully
committed to Polish EU membership).
This demonstration was, according to the (Civic Platform-controlled)
Warsaw city council, attended by some 240,000 people (a figure picked up by the
international media); although Law and Justice strongly contests this claim, citing
police estimates (which opposition supporters, in turn, argue are biased in favour
of the government) of the number present being only 45,000. In fact, even if
one accepts the lower figure as more accurate, there is clearly a substantial
number of Poles who feel (rightly or wrongly) sufficiently concerned that the
government represents a threat to democracy to join the anti-Law and Justice
protests.
In May, knowing that only a more formal political grouping is capable of ousting
Law and Justice from office in an election, the Committee also launched a new
coalition of opposition parties called ‘Liberty, Equality, Democracy’ (Wolność,
Równość, Demokracja) with the stated aim of ‘protecting European values and the
constitutional order’.
Interestingly, a survey conducted by the TNS polling agency found that
38% of respondents said that they would vote for a united opposition coalition
compared with only 33% supporting Law and Justice. However, while Petru appeared
to endorse the idea of such an alliance, Schetyna (while careful not to rule it
out in principle) prevented Civic Platform from joining the ‘Liberty, Equality,
Democracy’ coalition.
Even assuming that the anti-government protests can sustain their
momentum beyond the summer break, with no single leader and lacking even a
minimal common programme on the socio-economic issues that are likely to be
most important to voters, the prospect of a coalition of opposition parties
contesting the next election currently looks unlikely (although this could
change as the next parliamentary poll is not due for three-and-a-half years).
Little prospect
of an effective challenge
While the ongoing constitutional crisis has galvanised the government’s
opponents and given them a sense of energy and purpose, it is questionable whether,
as things stand, the divided opposition can mount an effective challenge to Law
and Justice.
The party’s victory last year reflected widespread disillusionment with the
country’s ruling elite and a
strong
prevailing mood that it was time for change. So most Poles do not simply want a return to the pre-election status quo.
The government’s opponents are, however, spending much of their time
focusing on (arguably too abstract) constitutional issues and failing to address
ordinary citizens’ more pressing social and economic concerns. It is not
surprising, therefore, that the ruling party retains a clear opinion poll lead,
which could solidify when voters start to feel the full impact of its generous
(but costly) social spending programmes, such as ‘500 plus’.
This article is published in association with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which is seeking to contribute to public knowledge about effective democracy-strengthening by leading a discussion on openDemocracy about what approaches work best. Views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of WFD. WFD’s programmes bring together parliamentary and political party expertise to help developing countries and countries transitioning to democracy.
