Poland’s liberal opposition dealt bitter blow in knife-edge presidential race

Sometimes the pendulum of history swings upon the finest of margins. So was the result of Poland’s latest Presidential election, announced this morning, which showed the very narrowest of victories for the country’s incumbent, Andrzej Duda. After winning his second five year term, Duda will now have the chance to help advance a radical conservative political agenda over the next five years.

With 99.97% of the votes counted, the Polish electoral commission announced that Duda had won 51.21% of the ballots cast. His opponent, the centrist Mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, was close on his heels with 48.79%. The opinion polls leading up to the vote had predicted a close contest.

Candidates in Polish elections are not allowed to stand for a political party and must run as independents, but they can be endorsed by a party. This contest was a showdown between the national conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) backing Duda, which leans to the right on cultural issues but to the left on economics, and the liberal conservative Civic Platform, which sponsored Trzaskowski.

Civic Platform was Donald Tusk’s party when he was prime minister of Poland between 2007 and 2014, and it traditionally combines centre-right economics with support for European integration. The party has been thrown onto the backfoot by the populist brand of Eurosceptic patriotism and social conservatism which has become synonymous with PiS. This mirrors a wider fault line which has opened up within conservative politics across Europe.

Rarely have two figures so personally embodied the distinctly divergent possible paths for Polish politics. Duda, a devout Catholic who has spent his career as a legal academic in Poland, took on Trzaskowski, an expert in European integration who studied at Oxford and in Paris as well as in Warsaw.

The stakes of the election were accordingly high. The campaign was hard-fought and divisive, centring on several highly controversial issues.

Duda stood on a promise to continue advancing the generous welfare spending of the Law and Justice Party. He also pledged to continue the party’s efforts to clamp down on LGBT freedoms as well as reforms to the judiciary which would effectively enable the party leadership to appoint members of the country’s courts and censor judges who speak out.

Critics fear that this would politicise the judicial branch, turning it into an arm of PiS, which has commanded a majority in the Polish parliament, the Sejm, since 2015 and is now likely to continue expanding its control over judicial appointments. This, it is feared, will eventually free PiS from the constraints of liberally-inclined justices, who have consistently provided a brake on the party’s efforts to create “LGBT ideology free zones” and resisted the party’s efforts to reshape the judicial system in its own image.

Trzaskowski, on the other hand, sought to fight back on this territory, defending the independence of the Polish judiciary and, in February 2019, signing a pledge to defend the rights of LGBT groups. He promised to mend damaged relations with Brussels and at the same time veto the social and constitutional agenda of the Law and Justice Party in the Sejm.

Yet now, with the presidential veto in the hands of Duda, the chance to provide a legal brake on this programme has faded. The Law and Justice Party remains in a minority in the Polish upper house, the Senate, but opposition here can be overcome by their majority in the Sejm. Polish liberals hope that the European Union, which is a net contributor of subsidies to Poland, will provide constraints.

Yet the EU is caught in an awkward bind when it comes to Poland and its fellow Vizégrad state, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Although the EU sees itself as a set of institutions and ideals based upon a rules-based order, it lacks a mechanism for expelling those who break the rules. Brussels, in the end, is built upon such gravity-defying paradoxes.

With the next parliamentary election set for late 2023, PiS and its leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, have the time and levers to take on the courts and transform the country. The result looks likely to set Poland down the path towards becoming a more authoritarian, less liberal state.

The party already has control of the state broadcaster, which was used effectively in this presidential campaign to provide videos overwhelmingly supportive of Duda and critical of Trzaskowski. The free press is under stifling pressure. The constitutional protections essential to the liberal society are being slowly eroded by the state.

The aggregate result is unlikely to be dictatorship but a more managed form of democracy grounded in an illiberal majoritarian impulse. This election is reflective of a political landscape where western liberalism is in retreat. After enjoying a period of dominance at the end of the Cold War, history’s pendulum appears to be swinging against liberal internationalism.

Nowhere are these tides of fortune more visible than in Poland. For liberals, the route back to power here, and elsewhere, is looking increasingly tough.