One year of the new democratic Poland: what has changed and what has not

On 15 October, one year passed since the elections which opened the way to power to Poland’s ‘democratic camp’, or the opponents of the previous, national-conservative-sovereignist government. The anniversary was supposed to be a celebration of democracy, something like the fall of communism or of the Berlin Wall – Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk himself suggested this comparison. A too far-fetched comparison, as many of the ambitious promises of the Polish democrats remained promises only.

They had promised us a great purge, but in a positive sense: we were to see all the incompetent Law and Justice protegees removed from public institutions and state-owned companies. We were to witness a general and revolutionary improvement of the political, media, managerial and diplomatic culture. And, if Law and Justice people broke the law, they were to be punished. At the same time, everything that had been given to people was not to be taken away, all the social laws introduced by the right were to remain in force. In other words, the revolution was to address only the anti-democratic solutions while fighting for the rights of minorities and the downtrodden.

But is it really what the coalition rule over Poland is about a year after the elections?

At the outset, it is worth recalling that the current collation consists of four political parties, divided in addition internally within smaller coalitions, starting from the right side of the spectrum its members are: The Third Way coalition, divided into two parties, Poland 2050 and the Polish People’s Party, then the Civic Coalition, consisting of several parties, in which the largest — and the only one that counts — is the Civic Platform, from which Donald Tusk comes, followed by the New Left. To complicate the matters even more, New Left belongs to one parliamentary club with a smaller socialdemocratic party, Left Together, which refused to enter the government (and days after the 15 October anniversary, experienced a split).

Tusk government’s programme included reforms in the judiciary and the media, previously taken over by the right, infrastructure projects, and a series of socio-economic reforms. Let us therefore see what the state of implementation of the above ideas looks like one year after the elections, and nearly one year since the government was actually able to start working.

Not so legal revolution

The fight for the rule of law, one of the pillars of the ‘democratic forces’ campaign, now seems to have degenerated into an issue for hotheads and lawyers.

On the one hand, there are those who say that the judges elected by the Kaczynski camp can be dismissed because ‘they are not judges’; on the other, there are those who call for a reckoning to put an end to the legal chaos. Somewhere in the background, however, there are institutions such as the Venice Commission, which are trying to bring some kind of order to the whole mess and are also calling for a compromise. What is fascinating here is how a total legal collapse could be avoided? There are theories circulating in the current political debate — widely supported — that the decisions of certain judges can simply be rejected because of the way they were elected. But the fact that the elites are throwing around such claims does not seem to mean that anyone at the bottom is taking them seriously, at least for the moment.

In the midst of all this, Donald Tusk came out a few weeks ago with a statement which sounds controversial, to say the least. Literally, he announced that ‘we live in a time of militant democracy’ and so we will sometimes break the law to stop it being broken. But at the same time some things simply cannot be repaired as long as there is Andrzej Duda in the Presidential Palace, guaranteeing that not all the Law and Justice’s moves can be simply reverted.

At the same time, there is no hope of changing the constitution and working on a new kind of social contract for the judiciary; Polish democracy is not yet ready for that.

Political spoofs

The issue of public media was one of the most pressing, as public television, radio, and the state news agency were completely taken over by Kaczynski’s former ruling party. Daily news or media debates fully reflected the government’s line and were mainly attended by journalists who supported it. In addition, media material often simply targeted specific individuals or groups associated with the opposition, attacking them with homophobic or simply extremely aggressive half-truth narratives.

However, changes in the media were not so easy, as Law and Justice prevented them from being legally implemented by pre-selecting the statutory bodies and changing their legal environment. To make changes, the new government would have to wait for a change of president. However, a legal loophole was discovered that allowed to formally start a liquidation procedure of all state media, which allowed the media institutions to be taken over. It was done by force because they were occupied by Law and Justice politicians. Nevertheless, work on the new public media began at the beginning of this year.

But what is the state of the media more than half a year on? Firstly, hardly anyone watches them, let alone listens to them. The decline in popularity has been observed for the first time in eight years. Law and Justice voters moved towards private, openly right-wing media. Others prefer TVN, which is very close to Civic Platform, or to Polsat, which has so far tried to maintain its independence, with a hint of right-wing voters.

The current media, while far from the aggressiveness of those in power on the right, are also far from objective. Material that is unfavourable to Donald Tusk is removed, TV interviews are given only to people who are as close as possible to the current government, and news materials tend to portray the parties in power in positive light.

Even before the media revolution, there were various ideas of restoring ‘normalcy’ (pluralism, high reporting standards) to the Polish public media. As one might expect, these included ideas shared by different political camps, namely right-wing and centre-right liberal. Today, they seem to be a song of the past. It seems that political formations on both sides of the argument have found that it is easier to manage polarisation, no matter how exuberant, than to accept that the state media would be a neutral and pluralist platform praising and/or criticising everyone, according to their actions. The only question is how far in their one-sidedness the current media will go.

Infrastructural salami

As we wrote a few months ago, grand infrastructure projects — such as nuclear energy, transshipment ports on the Polish Baltic coast, or high-speed rail, as well as the previous government’s flagship project, the Central Port of Communications, which is to become the main hub for air, but also rail transport in Poland — are not on the highest priority list of the current government. The vast majority of these projects are still subject to a kind of merry-go-round of potential delivery dates, which are moving closer and further away from their original assumptions. The whole strategy resembled a kind of verbal salami, with its chaos designed to cover the emptiness of the core issue. Within many of the ongoing projects, the current cabinet has focused on witch-hunting and potential corruption rather than actual implementation. It is no different with the Central Port project, but here there has been an intervention from Prime Minister Donald Tusk himself.

At the end of July, he asserted that Poland would become one big megalopolis. And we will see this in just a few years. All the big cities in Poland will be included in this modern communication project.

Despite his words, which could potentially indicate a transport and urbanist revolution, as experts point out, not much has changed in the project itself. It is still not a megalopopis encompassing all Poland, but a huge airport integrated with a railway network. What has happened, however, is that the narrative has changed. The passion for giant investments, for which Law and Justice had been criticized, has suddenly become the ambition of the Civic Platform government. But is there enough political will for an actual completion of the project?

According to its popularisers, experts, activists, and politicians gathered in the ‘Yes to CPC’ coalition, no. Nevertheless, only the future can unequivocally answer this question.

Continuity

On social and societal issues, one can, and indeed should, speak of continuity. It may not be a kind of confident takeover of the postulates of Law and Justice and their Catholic solidarism, aiming to deepen its programmes and develop them into a kind of new social contract, but… nothing new has been invented. It is to carry out a kind of correction of certain areas of its operation that are ailing, through monetary transfers.

In addition to this year’s continuation, the coalition has introduced two projects of its own. The first is the so-called widow’s pension, which from next year allows people who are entitled to at least two pension benefits, including a survivor’s pension from a deceased spouse, to receive one of these benefits and a fraction of the other. The second reform is the introduction of the so-called ‘granny transfer’, which is intended to provide a childcare subsidy for a family member or a transfer to cover the cost of childcare. However, since its introduction, it has resulted in pre-schools, including those organised by the local authority, charging a fee equal to the benefit. However, it is possible that the law will be changed so that this is no longer possible.

At the same time, the project to extend the tax-free amount to PLN 60 000 or EUR 12 000, one of the flagship projects of Tusk’s party, has not been introduced, most likely because of the fragile budget does not allow it. In the end, the generous cash benefit policy could not withstand the clash with the degressive and hollow tax system.

The question of further reforms, apart from the fact that it is not obvious what could they be, remains open. The question is whether the current government will be able to articulate any projects for the future, and that is because the coalition is, to say the least, shaky.

Coalition in-fighting

The two thirds of its seats belong to the neoliberal Donald Tusk’ party, the rest is divided equally between the NL, P2050 and PPP. Such a breakdown strongly favourites right-wing parties, associated with the big business and elites. Thus, it’s no surprise that one of the parties continuously losing support is the NL. There is no talk about introducing the abortion right, gay marriages (just some talk on registered couples), improvement of the labour rights and regulations. Raising wages in the state sector, to attract more people to consider state official’s career? Impossible.

Nevertheless, the Left, as we mentioned, is not the only grouping that is losing. The other is the Third Way coalition, i.e. the PPP and P2050. Its leaders, Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz and Szymon Holownia, the first and second parties respectively, entered the political game on 15 October in forceful positions.

The former was offered the Prime Minister’s portfolio by Law and Justice, giving his party, consisting of 28 members of the Sejm and four senators, extraordinary political weight. Kosiniak-Kamysz, however, did not take up the offer, becoming after six months the main whipping boy as Minister of National Defence, who, according to Tusk’s tweet, ‘reports to him’ on the Prime Minister’s desk.

The other, Szymon Holownia, was entering the new parliament as Speaker of the Sejm and a potential future major player for the presidency in 2025. His performances, often turning parliamentary theatre into a comedy talent show, familiar to him due to his TV career. Did anything come of it? Tusk played Holownia against the president when it was necessary to strip the immunity of two Law and Justice MPs sworn in by the president, or when it was necessary to rat on the left and abortion issues. Now Holownia is literally a nobody, his 32 MPs in the Sejm and five senators could split to the PPP and Tusk’s Civic Platform at any time, literally one signal would suffice.

The right wing of the governing coalition, which is shaky as a leaf in the wind and to which Law and Justice non-stop cozies up, is still nothing when you look at what is happening on the left.

On the right, however, the loss of support does not cause panic, the PPP always survives somehow, this party is always around the 5% electoral threshold, a proverb says in the end that he is the coalition partner of the PPP who won the election, this is also the case here, with the Law and Justice, however, the party has never yet entered into a coalition. In the Holownia environment, a drop in support only means a move to Civic Platform, is that a problem? For the vast majority, except maybe a few people, including the party leader himself, no. It is an environment twinned with Tusk’s party.

However, it is different on the left. Here there seem to be more potential scenarios and positions than the representatives themselves.

Firstly, we have MPs who are members of the government itself, ministers and deputy ministers, or activists who have made their way into state-owned companies or various other institutions and at local government or administrative level, thereby tying themselves to the current administration. These people are associated with the NL and its two smaller annexes, but they are not all from these backgrounds. ‘Overboard’ remains a significant proportion of them. In addition to them, there is the Left Together, having recently experienced a split and a loss of 6 parliamentary members – all over the issue whether the party should enter the government or become a vocal left-wing opposition to it.

Where does it lead? Nobody knows. But the ongoing crisis on the left seems that the well-known auto-suicide path might be followed, with possible three separated parties, or political caucuses emerging in the near future.

Raison d’etre

With such chaotic and indigestible cooperation within the coalition, one fundamental question remains, what is it all for?

All the coalition’s activities to date, from the reforms introduced, to the cleansing of institutions of Kaczynski’s influence, to the media crises, communication failures or the floods and related activities, have ultimately boiled down to one thing and one thing only: strengthening of Donald Tusk’s position. His methods of managing his cabinet resemble those of Putin. He drills his ministers, orders them around, criticises them, also in the media, making them all be pitched from wall to wall by him. At the same time, each of them knows that they are unable to enter into a confrontation with the Prime Minister because they will lose it.

Whether because they do not have enough support in their own ranks or because they fear being blackmailed by the liberal media, for whom Donald Tusk is a figure of greatness reminiscent of the Polish Pope.

At the same time, a presidential election is due to take place in a year’s time, in which a victory belonging to either the right wing under Jaroslaw Kaczynski or Donald Tusk will give us an indication of the party in whose potential interest the elections will be brought forward.

All the indications are, therefore, that the current inaction of the coalition may be deliberate, designed to show everyone that a government of three coalitions, with a total of far more parties than the nominal four, is simply impossible. Thus, the aim of the current coalition is to end it, through the earlier cannibalisation of the coalition partners by the main hegemon.

The question is whether Tusk’s gambit will not become the cause of his defeat.

* The seat divide after the elections in the key lower chamber of the parliament, Sejm is following: Law and Justice — 194 mandates; Civic Coalition/Platform — 157 mandates; Third Way — 65 mandates, nearly equally shared mandates among the Poland 2050/Szymon Hołownia’ party and the Polish People’s Party; The New Left — 26 mandates, including 8 going to the Left Together; Confederation — 18 mandates. The vote results were: Law and Justice — 35.38 percent, Civic Coalition — 30.70 percent, Third Road — 14.40 percent, New Left — 8.61 percent, Confederation — 7.16 percent.

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