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Update 7 (January 2006):

Poland: settling down or still wide open?

Ever since the collapse of Communism, Poland has had one of the least consolidated (indeed, least systematic) party systems in Europe. Especially among that part of the political spectrum that emerged out of the Solidarity movement (see Chapter 8) that overthrew the Communist regime (see Chapter 1), parties have come and gone, or more often mutated into other parties, while the basis of competition in Poland has been religious values and attitudes to the old regime rather than the approximation of west European-style left-right conflict that has begun to structure systems in, say, Hungary and the Czech Republic (see Chapter 5 and Chapter 6). In Chapter 5, we attempted to use what at the time was the most recent general election to illustrate (via a bar chart) the relative strengths of the 'party families' (social democratic, conservative, liberal, far right, green etc.) in each of our featured countries: the chart on Poland was by far the most debatable because deciding which of its parties can reasonably said to belong to a particular party family is very difficult.

The relative lack of consolidation in the Polish system is illustrated in the following table, taken from work by the Open University's Professor Paul Lewis, an expert on Poland and the region as a whole: it gives the share of the national vote taken by parties winning over 15% in elections to the national parliament, the Sejm:

(Paul Lewis: 'Party Systems in Central Europe', paper delivered to conference on Globalising Party-Based Democracy, CSGR, University of Warwick, 7-8 July 2005).

So what about the elections of 2005, a full report on which can be found here? Is a clearer picture emerging? Perhaps. If we take the same measure as the table, we find that parties winning over 15% took 51.1% of the vote, suggesting some consolidation. On the other hand, turnout - which has always been relatively low in Poland was even lower than ever, at just 41% in the parliamentary elections (and 51% - also a record low - in the second round of the presidential contest that followed hard on their heels). We should also note that the clear winner in the previous election in 2001, the ex-Communist Democratic Left Alliance, badly tainted by corruption scandals and policy failures (especially on health) collapsed from 41% (a figure slightly boosted by a coalition with the much smaller Labour Union party) to just 11% - testimony to the high levels of volatility still affecting Poland and a worrying sign that the fragmentation that had hitherto characterised the right (sic) of the political spectrum was spreading (see Chapter 5).

Perhaps more importantly, however, this was the first post-Communist election in the country that saw all the parties - and only those parties - that won seats in one election winning them in the next election. It was also slightly easier to see where many of the contenders were coming from, as it were. The eventual winner, Law and Justice, with 27%) is a nationalist and (especially on 'law and order') conservative party, which seems to attract more support in the economically disadvantaged and less cosmopolitan west of the country. Run by identical twins, the Kaczynski brothers, one of whom is now president, Law and Justice was able, after making commitments to defend agriculture and 'the family', to form a minority government with the help of Self-Defence - a populist agrarian party which took 11% - and the League of Polish Families - a religious party on the far right which took 8%. Apart from the Democratic Left and the Peasant Party (which had for a time been its coalition partner and managed to stay in parliament with 7%), the loser (at least in the short-run) was the more liberal (in both the economic and social senses of the word) Civic Platform. It had been widely tipped as the biggest party and had hoped to govern in coalition (but as senior partner) with Law and Justice.

These hopes - shared it should be said by many in the West and by the financial markets - collapsed when, after Platform's disappointing election performance, Law and Justice chose to block its candidate for parliamentary speaker. A shaky start ensued, especially when, with the national currency under pressure and worries in the West about a more Eurosceptic stance, the new finance minister seemed to hint at hostility to foreign investment - something that precipitated her replacement.

Things seemed to have calmed down a little since then: the government has been careful to appoint technocrats to many key economic posts and made a non-party career diplomat foreign minister; and things are always easier when your economy, like Poland's, is growing at an impressive 4% pa. Unemployment, however, is still a terrible problem, and rising inequality worries not just progressives but conservatives unpersuaded of the joys of neo-liberalism: both phenomena may well have contributed to the disappointment experienced by Civic Platform, associated by many ordinary Poles with wanting even more of the reforms that they believe have let them down. Many observers, though, see trouble in store as the populist parties supporting the government (which is 77 seats short of a majority on its own) find it difficult (as they inevitably do, some would argue) to keep their more radical promises. Whether such a fragile administration can pass its key first test - getting its budget through parliament - will be interesting to see.

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