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Post by matureleft on Aug 14, 2019 8:14:51 GMT
This is set for 13 October. Polls suggest that Law and Justice (to outsiders a party name that would seem at least ironic) will win comfortably again.
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Post by Devil Wincarnate on Aug 14, 2019 11:02:41 GMT
They'll win again because the alternative parties have done little to convince anyone that they are of any use.
They are 6-8 percentage points higher now in polls than in 2015. PO are slightly higher. What seems to be the root cause here is the collapse of Modern/Nowoczesna (which has effectively joined PO), a squeeze on Korwin and the effective end of the bizarre Kukiz as an independent force. The left-wing parties have also contrived to go backwards since 2015.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 14, 2019 11:29:26 GMT
They'll win again because the alternative parties have done little to convince anyone that they are of any use. They are 6-8 percentage points higher now in polls than in 2015. PO are slightly higher. What seems to be the root cause here is the collapse of Modern/Nowoczesna (which has effectively joined PO), a squeeze on Korwin and the effective end of the bizarre Kukiz as an independent force. The left-wing parties have also contrived to go backwards since 2015. Similar situation to Hungary. One party has unchallengeable dominance because all the others are so utterly hopeless. |
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Post by tamar on Aug 16, 2019 21:10:59 GMT
They'll win again because the alternative parties have done little to convince anyone that they are of any use. It's not as if they are really trying to - PO in particular have blatantly concluded that this election is a write-off and their hope of power lies in wiping out all other opposition parties so that when the economic downturn they have convinced themselves will come soon causes people to sour on PiS, they will be the only plausible challenger for government. |
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Post by Devil Wincarnate on Aug 16, 2019 22:04:51 GMT
They'll win again because the alternative parties have done little to convince anyone that they are of any use. It's not as if they are really trying to - PO in particular have blatantly concluded that this election is a write-off and their hope of power lies in wiping out all other opposition parties so that when the economic downturn they have convinced themselves will come soon causes people to sour on PiS, they will be the only plausible challenger for government. Not seen you for a while...would you mind doing us a summary of your take when you've got chance? |
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Post by Devil Wincarnate on Oct 6, 2019 12:40:43 GMT
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Post by tamar on Oct 12, 2019 18:09:16 GMT
With election silence in place in Poland and the campaign officially over, I'll give some probably hilariously off-base thoughts. - The PiS government is going to be re-elected. At no point during the campaign, despite the fervent wishes of many, was this ever in doubt. While it's been tempting for the usual suspects to chalk this up to the innate stupidity of the public or some form of Ostalgie, PiS have simply managed a triangulation actually quite similar to the one that propelled PO under Tusk to a string of stunning electoral victories. They have persuaded the bulk of the public that they are working to satisfy their material aspirations while keeping their base riled up with the threat of an enemy within and without who wants drag the country far away from what they fervently want it to be. Of course Kaczynski's choice of enemies - the LGBT community, 'communist' judges, evil foreigners, etc. - is rather more disturbing than the liberal spectre of the reactionary mohair beret who will somehow turn the country into a theocracy and into PRL 2.0 all at the same time. Another key to their success is that they are no longer perceived to be a sclerotic one-man show and instead cultivate 'new faces' very effectively while cracking down on the more blatant cases of personal corruption. All this makes for a strong election-winning machine. I don't, however, think this means Poland is doomed to eternal Orbanism. For all its many faults, the Polish opposition is nowhere near as useless as the Hungarian one, and the fact that PiS have pulled off a successful triangulation and further augmented it through blatant disrespect for liberal institutions is not, in itself, enough to exempt them from what seems to be an iron law of Polish politics - that no matter how strong an aura of invincibility they may project for a time, all ruling parties eventually grow tired and arrogant and are subsequently thrown out. - While Tusk at his 2007-2012 peak had perfected the art of being Warsaw's top New Labour tribute act, always in touch with the zeitgeist and never rocking the boat, PO has degenerated rapidly and under Schetyna the party seems capable only of yelling slogans about the constitution and hectoring those who aren't persuaded of the urgent necessity of returning them to power. The switcheroo with making Malgorzata Kidawa-Blonska their candidate for Prime Minister doesn't seem to have given them any kind of boost, possibly since Kidawa-Blonska is a deeply unimaginative and boring hack and the party's attempts to promote her have ranged from telling the press she's qualified to be PM because her great-grandfather was also PM in the 20s to invocations of feminism increasingly reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's campaign at its worst. It's telling that the only thing the party showed any enthusiasm whatsoever for during the entire campaign was criticising PiS' plan to raise the minimum wage and change the rules for calculating social security contributions - not only did it show they are most comfortable as a right-liberal pro-business lobby and nothing else, but it played into the perception that they are against everything but have no idea what they would like to actually do. PO did actually make an attempt to boil their manifesto to a set of bullet points, calling this supposedly appealing package of reforms 'Schetyna's Six', but the only effect of this was to spawn a stock joke as awkward interviews quickly revealed PO politicians generally had no idea what the hell 'Schetyna's Six' actually was. All they had left by the final stretch was desperately trying to scrape every last left-wing tactical vote possible by trying to force the once inspiring but now grotesque Barbara Nowacka and other left-wing turncoats into our eyeballs, even as they fill their lists with PiS defectors in safe spots and talk up the Confederation in a contrived attempt to draw a few PiS voters away. They were never going to win this election or even come particularly close but they have done everything in their power to make the defeat as painful, as humiliating, and as deserved as possible. - My expectations for the left were at absolute rock-bottom going into this election, but somehow, the alliance of SLD, Wiosna and Razem managed to achieve synergy and despite the campaign very much playing it safe, is on track to at least repeat the 2007 LiD result and maybe even exceed it by a bit. This would be a strong comeback for the left after a term where it looked to be on its deathbed at times, despite fears/hopes that it would be destroyed by SLD's dirty politicking, Wiosna's ideological and financial ambiguities or Razem's tendencies towards ideological purity. Bizarrely, the three perpetually warring strands of the Polish left - post-communism, secular liberal populism and idealistic social democracy - seem to have combined into something the electorate finds vaguely credible, and if the alliance comes a strong third and a decent amount of the many credible activists running as its candidates win seats, I think there could be room for further growth. .N is now a stock joke, but it nevertheless led PO in the polls for over a year - a large chunk of the electorate saw a tired PO on the one hand and a witty Ryszard Petru with a coterie of intelligent, pugnacious, mostly female newbies behind him on the other and switched sides almost immediately. I also think that the mix of tendencies now fighting under the SLD's flag of convenience is easier to maintain than many think - the SLD's base is dying and the party needs to undergo generational renewal to survive, and bringing in Wiosna (as is guaranteed) and the pragmatic wing of Razem (as I think is probable) would achieve that by default. It's also notable that the SLD's voter coalition this time round is likely to be different to the one it's had in the past - the under-the-radar shift that began at the 2015 election will probably continue and give them much stronger results in Poland's large cities, even those not traditionally known for left-wing tendencies. - Again, around three months ago, I would have told you PSL was finally on its deathbed. PiS' unexpectedly large victory in the European Parliament elections came off the back of massively increased provincial turnout, something that seemed to prove PSL's waning appeal, and their deal with Kukiz seemed so bizarre and so obviously an alliance of convenience that most observers assumed that the electorate couldn't possibly take it seriously. This may not come to pass after all - they continue to poll a steady 6-7%, even a bit more than that in a few final-week polls, and most surprisingly, the alliance with Kukiz actually seems to have been received positively. This is perhaps not surprising, as they share the conviction (Kukiz out of naivety, PSL out of material self-interest) that all of the country's problems can be resolved by a few good (male, heterosexual) chaps making common sense decisions and politics need not enter into it. We should perhaps be glad they did not persuade the Bezpartyjni Samorzadowcy gombeen to join the alliance, we could have had a real mini-Fianna Fail monster on our hands. Another factor in PSL's continued survival is their leader, Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, who is their first figure to have any sort of noticeable appeal since..... 2000 and whose performances in TV debates have been received well. They are not guaranteed to get in - if turnout is very high it could sink them as it sank Kukiz in the European elections. (Although I think at that time everyone was wondering how on Earth he could be polling 5-6% in spite of basically not running any kind of campaign) However, if they do make it, this new PSL mutation could prove to be quite a headache for PiS if/when things start going wrong. - The Confederation. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. This alliance between the Korwinistas, the National Movement and Grzegorz Braun's monarchist cult has been every inch the clown car everyone expected it to be, with splits left, right and centre, in-fighting over who will control the state subsidy before they even get said subsidy, and blatant campaign finance violations, its main issue in the European elections (the JUST Act and PiS' alleged failure to respond to it strongly enough, which by the end of the campaign seemed to mean reopening Auschwitz) has disappeared from the political agenda, and yet it continues to hover alarmingly close to the 5% threshold. (Note: any polls you may have seen with them in the 7-8% range are garbage, these people should have guessed from the last few election results that their methodologies are probably off but they just keep doing it) This seems to be entirely down to the fact that Korwin has turned out to have actually been massively ahead of his time, in that the rock-solid base he brings to any political project was composed of incels all along. The last few days featured a rather odd outbreak of cheerleading for them among a few Polish liberals based on 1) the probably somewhat off-base idea that they could pose a threat to PiS and 2) the incel Bosak's rambling about a 'Singapore-style healthcare system' (read: full privatisation now) in one of the TV debates. Their main problem is that their supporters are the least motivated to come out and vote, and therefore they need turnout to be as low as possible to even stand a chance of getting a hair over the 5% threshold, at a time when it is almost guaranteed to be the highest it's been in a post-1989 Polish parliamentary election. I suspect they will therefore fail miserably and spend the next four years fighting like cats in a sack over the state subsidy (if they even get to keep it), but even if they do get their 5.1% they will probably get a low single-digit amount of seats, be completely irrelevant in the Sejm and have nothing better to do than fight like cats in a sack over the state subsidy anyway. I conclude with pollster Marcin Palade's projection of possible results for each of the five contenders: (In another tweet, he also projects turnout to be around 58%) |
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Post by Georg Ebner on Oct 13, 2019 16:01:07 GMT
TurnOut-InCreases look - relatively - good for KO:
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Post by Andrew_S on Oct 13, 2019 17:19:30 GMT
What time do we get exit polls?
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Oct 13, 2019 17:37:12 GMT
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Oct 13, 2019 19:03:27 GMT
Exit poll:
PiS 43.6%
KO 27.4%
Lewica 11.9%
PSL 9.6%
KON 6.4%
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Post by tamar on Oct 13, 2019 19:48:00 GMT
Exit poll: PiS 43.6% KO 27.4% Lewica 11.9% PSL 9.6% KON 6.4% Numbers quite possibly subject to significant change - the same pollster conducted the exit polls for the local and European elections and made significant errors in both. The PSL number is suspiciously high but they clearly had momentum in the final week of the campaign thanks to their leader's good debate performances so I don't think it'll go down too much. They've clearly managed to expand far beyond their old social base. |
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Post by Andrew_S on Oct 13, 2019 22:09:10 GMT
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Post by Andrew_S on Oct 13, 2019 23:15:01 GMT
Are they counting votes tonight? I can't find a page that's updating with the latest results.
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Post by tamar on Oct 13, 2019 23:47:15 GMT
Are they counting votes tonight? I can't find a page that's updating with the latest results. Poland doesn't have live updates from counts, which is probably for the best as our esteemed Electoral Commission would probably find a way to mess them up. Partial results should be up here by 9am UK time. |
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Post by tamar on Oct 14, 2019 0:03:17 GMT
LATE POLL (changes from exit poll in brackets):
PiS 43.6 (-)
PO 27.4 (-)
SLD 12.4 (+0.5)
PSL 9.1 (-0.5)
KONF 6.4 (-)
Now this is a bit odd.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Oct 14, 2019 14:38:31 GMT
Looks like PiS will get a narrow overall majority in the Sejm with 237 out of 460 seats.
But they have lost their majority in the Senate - only 48 out of 100 Senators. It was set up using first past the post, to guarantee the government got a majority...
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Post by tamar on Oct 14, 2019 16:09:45 GMT
It was set up using first past the post, to guarantee the government got a majority... This isn't correct - it was set up that way in 2011 by PO, because they had, once upon a time, made changing the electoral system to FPTP a flagship manifesto commitment in order to, as they justified it, reduce the power of party leaders, make politicians more directly accountable and accessible and reduce the cost of politics. When they ended up in government they felt the need to try and implement it, but there was no majority for doing so across the board, so they settled for implementing it just for the Senate and some local councils. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 14, 2019 18:53:31 GMT
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Post by tamar on Oct 14, 2019 18:55:46 GMT
PiS 43.59% - 235 Sejm seats (-) - 48 Senate seats
PO/KO 27.40% - 134 seats (-32) - 43 Senate seats
SLD/Left 12.56% - 49 seats (+49) - 2 Senate seats
PSL - Polish Coalition 8.55% - 30 seats (+14/-8 if you count Kukiz) - 3 Senate seats
Konfederacja 6.81% - 11 seats (+11)
German Minority 1 seat (-)
Independents - 4 Senate seats
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