For some time, progressive politics in Europe has looked to be in alarmingly bad shape. Around this time last autumn, voters ignored the post-fascist roots of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy movement and made her the country’s first radical right prime minister. In Hungary, a six-party opposition alliance was routed so badly last year that the doyen of national populism, Viktor Orbán, boasted his fourth successive victory could be “seen from the moon”. And so it has gone on. Slovakia has just elected, in Robert Fico, its own Orbán tribute act.
It is this pan-European context that makes Poland’s election result this week all the more remarkable, and potentially instructive. On Monday, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe reported that manipulation of state resources and media bias gave the ruling nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) a “clear advantage” over opposition parties. Its electoral strategy to win an unprecedented third term stuck to the traditional PiS playbook – maximising the votes of older and less well-off Poles outside the cities, through a combination of social spending and culture war rhetoric.
Similar tactics have been a feature of rightwing populist successes across the continent. But this time round they weren’t enough, as Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO) and two allied opposition parties comfortably amassed enough seats to claim victory. Extraordinary levels of turnout, reaching 85% in Warsaw, testified to the power of opposition warnings that Poland’s democracy would be imperilled by a PiS victory. But three other factors stand out, which progressive forces elsewhere could learn from as they attempt to turn back the populist tide.
To a significant extent, this was an election determined not by socially conservative over-60s, but by the effective mass mobilisation of more liberal twentysomethings. In Italy a year ago, huge numbers in the same age group failed to vote. On Sunday, close to 70% of Poles aged between 18 and 29 went to polling stations, compared with less than half in 2019. Only 14% voted for PiS and the largest proportion voted for KO, which promised to roll back draconian new abortion laws and back same-sex partnerships.
At the same time, KO pivoted away from the economic liberalism of previous defeats. It attempted to match PiS on social spending, pledging to deliver new childcare payments to young mothers, maintain welfare benefits and keep the existing retirement age. Planned pay rises for teachers and other public sector workers underlined an anti-austerity message.
Third, in contrast to last year’s united anti-Orbán front in Hungary, each of Poland’s loosely aligned opposition blocs maintained a separate campaigning identity. This allowed the centre-right Third Way grouping to peel off disillusioned PiS voters who would have been reluctant to vote for Mr Tusk. It also gave each bloc the chance to campaign positively for distinct programmes, rather than be defined merely by joint opposition to the status quo.
Those policy differences will now mean a difficult bargaining process, assuming PiS is indeed finally ousted from power in the coming weeks. But whatever the immediate future holds, Mr Tusk and his allies have given Europe’s mainstream parties fresh hope and inspiration.
