Reversing the Poles

With 27.18 percent of the vote Civic Platform (PO) was the clear winner of the recent elections to voivodship parliaments, whereas Law and Justice (PiS) came second with 25.08 percent. Of PiS' coalition partners, the pugnacious Self-defense (SO) received only 5.64 percent, while the League of Polish Families (LPR) had 4.74 percent. The Leftist bloc scored 14.25 percent and, with 13.24-percent support, the Peasants' Party (PSL) turned out to be the dark horse of the elections. For the ruling coalition, the voting reflected a loss of some one million supporters since the parliamentary elections.

Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński obliquely offered PO an olive branch, suggesting the formation of localized coalitions without mentioning specific partners. "We don't want a [political] war. PiS does not want to move the conflicts to local governments. PiS is ready to form coalitions, is ready to put away everything that divides and is ready to create effective local authorities," said Kaczyński.

PO will find it hard to gain a majority without cooperation with PiS, but it would prefer to cooperate with PSL, with which it allied during the campaign. "PSL is our partner and the party with which we are going to talk about coalitions," says PO's secretary Grzegorz Schetyna, but he adds that local representatives will make the final decisions concerning coalition partners. Waldemar Pawlak, PSL's leader, shares Schetyna's opinion. Probably no decisions will be made before the second round of voting.

Marek Borowski, who ran for Mayor of Warsaw, had suggested that he would conditionally support PO's Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz in the second round. He later rejected this, however, because of what he called PO's "unclear positioning" and the lack of a guarantee against a PO-PiS coalition in the capital.