The parties of the ruling coalition in Poland, led by liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk, passed their first electoral test this Sunday since coming to power last December, by adding around 51.9% of the votes in the first round. of the municipal and provincial elections, according to the Ipsos exit poll. Law and Justice (PiS), the ultra-conservative party that governed Poland for eight years, obtained 33.7% and came in first place, ahead of Tusk’s KO party (31.9%), but was far surpassed by the Prime Minister’s coalition as a whole.
Some 30 million voters were called to the polls to elect mayors, councilors and provincial assemblies among almost 200,000 candidates. On April 21 there will be a second round of municipal voting where there is no clear winner, as has been the case in Krakow or Wroclaw. The mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, a member of Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO) party and very close to the prime minister, was re-elected with 59.8%. Historically, Civic Platform has always obtained good results in large cities, unlike PiS, which does not govern in any municipality with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants.
The coalition supporting Tusk won the elections in 10 of the 16 provincial assemblies, and the PiS, in the other six. The coalition is made up of three groups that range from the left to the center-right: Civic Coalition (KO), led by Tusk’s party, the liberal Civic Platform (PO); Third Way – an alliance of the centrist Christian Democrat Poland 2050 and the Polish People’s Party (PSL), heir to the old peasant party –, which contributed 13.5% to the government total; and the leftist Lewica, who did so with 6.8%. The far-right Confederation party received 7.5% of the votes.
Despite the symbolic significance on a national scale of this appointment with the polls, and the prospect of the European elections on June 9, the campaign focused on local issues, such as transport, housing and the reinforcement of local power after years of centralization defended by PiS. In addition, it was marked by farmers’ demonstrations against the EU’s climate policy and against the transit of grain and other agricultural products from Ukraine; due to financial scandals linked to the previous PiS Executive; and by the fissures between the parties of the ruling coalition regarding the abortion liberalization law.
After one hundred days in power, the Tusk Government faces the difficulty of its ideological heterogeneity, and has also not been able to implement some of its plans due to the institutional obstacles of the president, Andrzej Duda, originally from Law and Justice. Although Tusk and his people have managed to get Brussels to commit to releasing 137 billion euros of European funds for Poland, which were frozen due to violations of the rule of law during the previous Government, some voters criticize the slowness of the changes.
