In Polen wird der amtierende Präsident – ein früherer Kommunist, der sich in einen Pro-Europäer verwandelte – durch einen Kandidaten der Konservativen abgelöst werden, der davon spricht, dass der Staat einen größeren Einfluss auf das Leben der Menschen haben sollte. Hierüber schreibt Wojciech Kosc in Transitions Online.
Heading into their 23 October runoff for the Polish presidency, Law and Justice Party candidate Lech Kaczynski and Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk sharpened their rhetoric, each trying to attract to their camps the constituents of two very different politicians, fiery populist Andrzej Lepper and social democrat Marek Borowski.
In the end, it was Warsaw Mayor Kaczynski who managed to swing the votes, making up for Tusk’s early opinion-poll lead to emerge triumphant with 54 percent of the vote to Tusk’s 46 percent. He will succeed the outgoing head of state, Aleksander Kwasniewski, who was ineligible to run again having served two terms in office. Kaczynski overcame his second-place showing in the first round of voting on 9 October, when he won 33 percent of the vote to Tusk’s 36 percent.
The second round of presidential voting brought to a close a long and wearying election season during which Poles cast their ballots three times in the space of four weeks. Voters’ fatigue, or perhaps a general distrust of politics, was evident from the number of those who stayed away: turnout, traditionally high at presidential elections, was just 51 percent – and that was an improvement by two points over the first round.
At least temporarily, Polish politics is now in the tight grip of identical twins, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski. The two founded Law and Justice, a party marked by a conservative outlook on behavior combined with a faith in the state’s role in the economy, and managed to lead it to victory in parliamentary elections on 25 September. However, the party gained too few seats in parliament to form a government on its own. Partly due to concern the brothers would hold the two highest elected offices in the land if Lech were to win the presidency, Law and Justice and Tusk’s Civic Platform, the pre-election favorite, postponed talks on forming a new government until after the presidential elections. After the parliamentary victory Jaroslaw stood down as the party’s choice for prime minister in favor of backbench deputy Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz.
The new Solidarity
Kaczynski’s first words when exit poll results incontrovertibly showed him with an unbeatable lead on 23 October were that Poland needed to take a deeply critical look back over the entire 16-year era of its modern-era democracy.
“But Poland needs accord even more,” he said.
Understandably, Tusk’s remarks when the results came in were much briefer. “We, the people who believe in freedom and solidarity, will care for Poland,” he said, a reference to his liberal vision of Poland.
This is the second time in a month that Law and Justice has made up a deficit in the opinion polls to overtake Civic Platform, and it is not Tusk’s vision but Kaczynski’s denunciation of Civic Platform’s proposed liberal economic measures as “liberal experiments” that now prevails. During the campaign, Kaczynski perfected the use of the word “liberal” in the negative context, implying – and often outright declaring – that Tusk’s liberalism would benefit only the rich.
Kaczynski, who like Tusk was an activist in the Solidarity movement in the 1980s, stressed that it is the responsibility of the state to build more solidarity between those who have succeeded in the new capitalist Poland and those who have not. During a televised debate on 20 October, Kaczynski reacted to Tusk’s words about diminishing the state’s role, saying, “Sometimes I think you’re not only advocating doing away with a lot of the duties a state should perform, but also doing away with the state as such.”
This kind of talk resonated in deprived areas such as the southeastern Podkarpackie province, one of the poorest in Poland, where Kaczynski won nearly 73 percent of the vote. In regions like this, a strong state is often held up as the defender of the people’s interests against the ravages of unemployment and low pay.
Promising that under his administration the weak would not be left on their own, Kaczynski won decisively in the poorer eastern areas in and around the cities of Rzeszow, Lublin, Bialystok, and Kielce. However, observers point to the nearly 40 percent of Polish voters who live in rural areas as crucial to his victory. Kaczynski trounced his rival in the countryside by 67 percent to 37 percent. He also won convincingly among those with lower levels of education.
By contrast, Tusk was the choice of people with university degrees. He easily outpaced Kaczynski in the larger cities and also narrowly won the votes of small towns.
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