Poll protest
A map of majority support for the parties in the 16 voivodships shows that Civic Platform (PO) claimed all the six westernmost provinces, while Law and Justice (PiS) made a clean sweep in the eight easternmost regions.
The remaining two provinces, Śląskie and Kujawsko-Pomorskie, are squeezed in right along the border between these two blocks. The final result had it that PiS just slipped past PO in those two voivodships, by two points in Kujawsko-Pomorskie, and just one in Śląskie.
Artur Wołek, professor of politics at the Warsaw School of Economics, chalks up the geographical divide to the difference in culture in the two regions, which led to two different types of protest vote against the current Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) government.
Wołek says that while PiS was the party of protest for the more traditional, religious voters in the east, Samoobrona emerged as the party of protest in the more secular west.
"These western parts of Poland, most of these parts are so-called 'redeemed lands' with resettled people from the east. They are descendents of this communist political culture, and this is what Samoobrona builds on," Wołek explained.
"So the PO electorate is more or less the same in the east and west, but the other part of the electorate - the anti-SLD electorate - voted for Samoobrona [in the west] and not for PiS." Thus the protest vote gave PO the edge in the west, but added to PiS' support in the east.
The biggest protest came from the 60 percent of the electorate who decided not to vote at all. "This is just the follow up to the previous elections - a vicious circle where people trust a party and are disappointed, so they don't vote for the opposition, they rather don't vote at all," says Wołek. Their decision not to participate may have backfired however, as 11 percent of those who did show up to the polls were die-hard SLD supporters that gave the governing party 55 seats in the Sejm - far more than had been expected.
Interestingly, the Polish expatriate vote showed a much stronger distaste for the SLD. While within Poland the combined PiS/PO vote garnered just over 50 percent of votes, in the US, for example, it numbered around two thirds. In New York and Chicago, PiS won out over PO, taking over 40 percent of the vote in each city. In Washington DC, PO took over 50 percent of the vote. In each of these cities, the SLD did no better than fourth place.
