The defeated Polish presidential candidate has his eye on the 2011 parliamentary elections, writes DEREK SCALLYin Warsaw
AFTER A nervous night, Poland’s election authority confirmed yesterday that acting head of state Bronislaw Komorowski was the winner of Sunday’s presidential election run-off.
The win by Komorowski, the moderate conservative candidate of the ruling Civic Platform (PO), has boosted expectations that Warsaw will pick up the pace on healthcare, pension and budget reform – and expedite Poland’s entry into the euro zone within the next four years. Komorowski won 53 per cent of the vote while his national conservative rival, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, polled 47 per cent, failing in his daring bid to succeed his twin brother.
As the election excitement subsided yesterday, feeling was growing in Warsaw that the surviving Kaczynski may turn out to be a long-term political beneficiary from the changes brought about by death of his brother and 95 other Polish dignitaries in a plane crash in Smolensk on April 10th.
After a subdued campaign, Sunday evening saw a gleam return to Kaczynski’s eye. This was no loser but a man with a plan. “The next campaign begins this year,” he said, referring to the parliamentary elections due in 2011. Then, quoting Gen Jozef Pilsudski, who re-established Polish independence in 1918, he added: “To win and rest is defeat, to lose and not to rest is victory.” Polish prime minister Donald Tusk should be very worried.
The presidential campaign has allowed Kaczynski to give his rewired national conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) a dry run. Its support is soaring, showing the party has recovered from the 2005 coalition with two extreme-right parties. That administration was characterised by mutual mistrust and emotional campaigns against everything from homosexuality to post-communist corruption, and collapsed after just two years.
The populist parties were wiped from Poland’s political map while PiS landed in opposition with a bump. There, the party’s decline continued apace: President Lech Kaczynski’s autumn re-election bid was looking uncertain; a defeat would have meant either the end of the Kaczynskis, or of their party, or both. But the Smolensk crash changed everything.
In the midst of his personal loss Kaczynski identified, correctly, that Poles were exhausted: by the Smolensk tragedy but also by years of spats between the one-time Solidarity allies now in rival camps of the national conservative PiS and the liberal conservative PO.
Uncertain times called for the certainty of a conciliatory political leader. And the portly, cat-loving bachelor decided to reinvent himself as a more considerate, thoughtful figure. Tabloid newspapers ran dozens of photos of him doting on his orphaned niece’s children while, in debates and speeches, Kaczynski found remarkably warm words for old communist leaders and even the Germans he once loved to hate.
It was all so disorienting that former hardline allies accused him of betraying his ideals. He may lose their support but Kaczynski is on his way to winning Poland’s middle ground.
In just three months, his party mobilised and doubled its share of the vote to almost 50 per cent. Huge numbers of young people volunteered in his campaign, motivated by national pride and the tragedy of “The Catastrophe” of Smolensk, an event and phenomenon now managed carefully by PiS strategists.
Komorowski and the PO, on the other hand, cannot be sure where they stand. Many voters on Sunday who gave their mandate to the new head of state simply voted for him to prevent a second Kaczynski president.
In Poland, disappointment with the PO government is palpable: for three years it blamed the presidential veto of the late Lech Kaczynski for not delivering on its 2007 campaign promises. Now it has a few short months to clear the backlog.
“I think we should not expect any serious reforms before local and parliamentary elections but I hope I am wrong,” said Aleksander Fuksiewicz of Warsaw’s Institute for Public Affairs (ISP). “Maybe the PO will try to show something attractive before elections but I would not expect any serious or controversial issues to be touched.” Warsaw’s window of opportunity may tighten further if Poland’s EU presidency in 2011 forces Tusk to move the vote forward. Jaroslaw Kaczynski is waiting patiently for his second chance at power.