WARSAW — Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party is all but certain to win the country’s parliamentary election on October 13. But that doesn’t mean it can count on governing once the voting is done.
The nationalist PiS party is on track to rake in the most seats in parliament. POLITICO’s poll of polls has it at 47 percent — way ahead of the leading opposition party, the centrist Civic Coalition (KO), which is polling at about 28 percent.
But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Alarmed by what they say is creeping authoritarianism, Poland’s three most important opposition parties are likely to form a coalition government if they manage collectively to overtake the ruling party.
Running alongside Civic Coalition — built around the Civic Platform party founded by European Council President Donald Tusk — are the Left, a three-party grouping polling at 12 percent, and the center-right Polish Coalition, which is expected to take about 6 percent of the vote.
Put those three political groupings together, and they’re essentially tied with PiS for control of Poland’s 460-member lower house, the Sejm.
The nationalist PiS party is on track to rake in the most seats in parliament — but those numbers don’t tell the whole story.
“We’ll certainly have to form a coalition with other parties,” Civic Platform leader Grzegorz Schetyna told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper.
If they come out on top, it’s likely they will work together. The three groupings did so in a temporary union in May’s European Parliament election, and also largely agreed not to run candidates against each other in the 100-member senate — a less powerful body than the Sejm.
“Poland today is an authoritarian country ruled by an authoritarian government,” Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, leader of the Polish People’s party, told Poland’s Polsat news this week. “I feel that one-party rule doesn’t serve Poland well. It’s always better to have several groupings.”
A numbers game
There’s still plenty that could go wrong for the opposition. Its electoral gambit only works if Kosiniak-Kamysz’s group scrapes into parliament. It’s currently polling just 1 point above the 5 percent threshold needed to win seats. If the party falls below that level, there’s almost no chance that PiS won’t win an absolute majority of seats.
POLAND NATIONAL PARLIAMENT ELECTION POLL OF POLLS
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Poland’s complicated vote-counting system distributes the votes of parties that fall below the threshold to those that made it into parliament, and gives a bonus to the biggest parties. That’s the reason PiS won an absolute majority in 2015, when several squabbling left-wing parties split the vote that year and failed to make it past the threshold.
However, if PiS wins 45 percent or more, the vote distribution system means it would likely get a majority, no matter how the other parties do.
Another complicating factor is the far-right Confederation, a new grouping of radical parties whose most visible leader is professional gadfly and former MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke — best known in the rest of Europe for questioning the intelligence of women and whether they should be allowed to vote.
The Confederation is bouncing around the 5 percent threshold as well — complicating everyone’s calculations. Confederation candidates have been blocked from electoral debates organized by the opposition-leaning TOK FM radio station — ostensibly for their unappetizing views. State television, which has become PiS’s propaganda arm, also tried to minimize the party — ignoring it in a recent election forecast, despite the Confederation getting 5 percent in an opinion poll. The Confederation took state TV to court over the slight and won.
“If the Confederation falls below 5 percent, then it would be PiS against everyone, and it will be very difficult to tell who will get a majority,” said Jacek Kucharczyk, president of the Institute of Public Affairs, a Warsaw think tank.
If the right-wingers win seats, then neither PiS nor the other opposition parties are likely to have enough seats to rule on their own.
PiS has said it won’t work with the far right. The party’s leader Jarosław Kaczyński has denounced the Confederation as a “pro-Russian formation” and excluded a coalition, telling Polish media: “There’s nothing to talk about. I definitely rule it out.”
“The question is who can better motivate their voters to show up and vote” — Jacek Kucharczyk, president of the Institute of Public Affairs
PiS has proved to be ideologically adaptable in the past, but if it did have to clamber into bed with the Coalition, it would be an awkward partner, dismaying some of PiS’s more centrist voters and creating problems for Law and Justice ahead of next year’s presidential election.
There are two additional factors: undecided voters and the overall turnout.
Most polls show fewer than 10 percent of voters are yet to make up their minds. Because the opposition and PiS are so evenly matched, and few people cross from one camp to the other, those wavering voters are likely to be decisive.
Then there’s turnout. Poles don’t tend to be keen voters — turnout in 2015 was only 51 percent. But four years of a Law and Justice government has raised the political temperature in Poland to the boiling point, and voter participation is expected to be higher this time around.
That could be bad news for PiS, which has already mobilized its core voters — a surge in turnout would probably be a plus for the opposition.
“The question is who can better motivate their voters to show up and vote,” said Kucharczyk. “In the European election, PiS did a much better job of that — that’s not something we can figure out from looking out at opinion polls. We’ll be waiting for the results with bated breath.”