Regional elections in Poland: The former PiS success formula is taking revenge

The local elections in Poland are the first test of sentiment in the country since the PiS government was voted out. The new Prime Minister Tusk and the new opposition are therefore hoping for a nationwide signal. But the PiS has a problem nationally.

“Go vote!” shouts Krystian Majewski and waves a flyer. But only a few people take advantage. An older gentleman is happy because he recognizes Majewski – the young PiS candidate in Konin, almost exactly in the middle between Warsaw and the Polish-German border. Majewski is also happy. Politics is a drug, he says: “When people get the feeling that they can influence reality, that they can change something that remains, then that is tempting. Then they keep going.”

And Majewski keeps going. At 16 he started in local politics, at 20 he was on the city council, now at 30 he is number 1 on the PiS list. Majewski is a local politician by heart and there is a lot to do in Konin. The city grew up with an open-cast coal mine. But it hardly yields anything and the industry that had arisen around the opencast mine, mechanical engineering, the smelting industry, is dying with it.

“The communist state invested a lot of money in the growth of Konin,” says Majewski. The city grew from 15,000 inhabitants after the Second World War, as desired by the state, to a good 90,000 inhabitants during the time of the People’s Republic – but the population has now declined again.

Konin’s mayor from the PO, the party of Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, wants to save the city as a model project for the energy transition and is relying on hydrogen buses and free local transport. Majewski sees the future more in the nuclear power plant that is to be built here – a PiS project, but it is not clear when or if it will come at all.

Because of the social policy in the PiS

Majewski is a PiS member not because of her nationalist program, not because of her attitude towards Europe and especially Germany, or because of the constantly propagated culture war against sexual minorities and refugees. He sees himself as an advocate for the elderly and weaker. He is a patriot from a working-class family and their needs have so far been primarily addressed by the PiS’s social policy.

The party became the strongest force in Konin in the recent 2018 elections, but ended up in the opposition due to a lack of coalition partners – just as it did nationally in the parliamentary elections.

It’s also about the government

Almost four months after the change of government, Tusk also turned the local elections into a vote on the new Polish government. Tobias Bochenski, the PiS candidate in Warsaw, is happy to accept the challenge. He is in third place in the polls and has no realistic chance of becoming the next mayor of Warsaw.

So he prefers to talk about national tax law during his election campaign appearances. At the beginning of April, he explained at the Warsaw Old Town Market that the Poles had to decide “which politicians should solve Poland’s challenges, whether they transfer the costs to the residents and to Poland, like the current government is doing. Or whether they adopt policies like that The government and the PiS politicians do it.”

Bochenski brought the former Prime Minister and the former Defense Minister of the PiS with him. Together they propose new rules for VAT – nothing that would actually be up for debate in regional elections. The 100 measures that Tusk promised for the first 100 days of his government are more like 100 lies, PiS representatives explain during the election campaigns across the country.

In fact, less than a quarter of the promises have actually been implemented so far. After the elections, Tusk could be held responsible by both his own people and his government’s coalition partners for any mandate he lost.

Is the direction correct?

The government’s record so far is unlikely to be decisive for the election, says political scientist Agnieszka Lukasik-Turecka from the Catholic University of Lublin. People are aware that Tusk does not rule alone and that he has to negotiate compromises with very different coalition partners. In addition, President Andrzej Duda, who is close to the PiS, can simply prevent many reform projects with his veto power.

“I think it was clear to every sensible person that it would not be possible to implement such serious projects in the first 100t days,” says Lukasik-Turecka. From the perspective of at least the people who elected the government, what is more important is “whether the direction is right so that changes are in sight.” And that is definitely the case.

PiS in a difficult situation

According to election researcher Marcin Palade, there is no sign of a PiS comeback: the party’s situation is “much worse” than in the 2018 regional elections. At that time, it formed the president and the government in Warsaw. Buoyed by this success, it was also able to score points in the regions and govern alone or co-govern in eight of 16 voivodeships, i.e. in half of all state parliaments. This time, says Palade, it could slip to a single parliament in the PiS stronghold of Podkarpacie.

The party is not doing badly in surveys outside the big cities. It could once again become the strongest force in many communities and districts. However, it is considered hardly capable of forming a coalition – and therefore not capable of governing.

And the party has a fundamental problem: Due to its centralized structure, it is “not well anchored in the local administrations.” Now the fact that the entire party is circling around one man in Warsaw, Jaroslaw Kaczyński and his increasingly radical course, is taking revenge.

Krystian Majewski in Konin pays three times for it. The ideologically charged politics of the PiS headquarters in Warsaw are also noticeable in the city council. The major national disputes “that so divide Poland,” he says, would also make cooperation across party lines increasingly difficult in Konin. “But in a city with 60,000 inhabitants you can’t use polarization. That destroys everything.”