Polish electorate gets Tusk with jack-booted Kaczyńskis
A couple of months ago, this blog made a plaintive call for the people of Poland to throw out their authoritarian government in favour of the Civic Platform, and for David Cameron to distance his Conservatives from the reactionary politics of President Lech Kaczyński. Last night, the Poles came up trumps.
In elections to the national parliament, the Law and Justice Party (PiS), dominated by the Kaczyński twin brothers, were absolutely thrashed by the resurgent Civic Platform (PO), under pro-business Donald Tusk. Both parties greatly increased their share of the vote, but whereas the PiS saw theirs increase by 5%, the PO’s jumped by an astonishing 17%, catapulting them into a large plurality of seats.
Moreover, the parties that have lost out are the very ones with whom the PiS’s association had caused classical liberals the most consternation. Having dropped out of the governing coalition with the PiS, the right-wing Catholic nationalist League of Polish Families (LPR) and the left-wing ’sons of the soil’ Self Defence of the Republic of Poland (SRP) merged their lists.
And were annihilated. Whereas the two major parties increased their shares of the vote by a total of 22%, the combined fascist-socialist LPR list won a miserable 1%: down from a notional 19% only two years ago. I might well laugh. I do.
The new government, under Tusk, will look vastly different to its predecessor. First, the PO can form a coalition with the centrists, avoiding the disparate coalition that collapsed so spectacularly this summer. There’ll be no vested interests forcing the government to adopt crazy pet projects on hammering homosexuals, banning Sunday trading, increasing farmers’ payments, and so on. Instead, the PO can be held to its manifesto programme.
And what a refreshing programme it is. A flat income/corporation/sales tax of 15%, independence for the central bank, decentralisation of budgets to local authorities, curbing labour cartel power, privatisation of large parts of healthcare and higher education, stripping MPs of their parliamentary immunity to reduce corruption, and liberalising abortion and divorce laws.
And, yet, the main issue that the international media focus on is the Europhilia of the party. Do we not realise how backwards Poland is? How threatened it was by the threat of a Piłsudski-worshipping fascist government sending the country back into the dark ages?
Given that, a more favourable approach to the Euro is a small price to pay, particularly when most of the regulation and oppression suffered by Polish people comes from domestic government. Maybe, when the Poles give themselves freedom - as Tusk promises - they’ll realise that the EU is a hindrance, and adopt a more strident line towards supranational interventionism.
For that to happen required a change of government. Fortunately, Poland has just that: out go the old guard of nationalists, socialists, and agrarians united, and in come the suited business-friendly liberty-lovers of the Civic Platform. Given the programme on which the party ran, Tusk has a lot to live up to, but one thing’s certain about his performance: it can’t be worse than his predecessor’s.
Categories: elections, European Union, Poland
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IanP said,
October 22, 2007 @ 11:02 am
The big question that remains now for Poland is:
Will the new government give the people of Poland a referendum on the Reform Treaty that the Kaczyński’s have signed up to.
This could be the one country to stop the Treaty being adopted.
Devil's Kitchen said,
October 23, 2007 @ 12:11 am
Very good piece. Just one thing…
… independence for the central bank… a more favourable approach to the Euro is a small price to pay…
Giving independence to the National Bank of Poland is a bit of a waste of time if they are going to adopt the Euro, no?
DK
Oli Cooper said,
October 23, 2007 @ 11:36 am
Thanks for raising that, DK, which requires twofold clarification of the importance. Clearly, independence for the bank is not as important as it would be for the Bank of England - for other reasons as well - but it is still of critical value.
The first is the timeframe for the adoption of the Euro. Poland is slated for entry into the Eurozone no earlier than 2012, with a possible extension to goodness knows when due either to inability to converge as required by treaty (per Greece) or a change of policy (per Sweden). That gives the National Bank of Poland, at the very least, over four years of independence. The upper end of that scale is unknown, but could stretch to a decade. Given that there has been such volatility in the past decade (with seven different PMs from four different parties), the stability offered by independence over the next decade will be more important than would otherwise be the case.
The second is that the NCBs of the ECB system are not merely relics of the pre-Euro age, but play essential roles in the working of the Eurozone. Each bank has a vote on the Governing Council (the main organ of monetary policy in the ECB), and the near-complete independence that the Civic Platform propose would fundamentally alter the character of that player. Instead of being a puppet of the Polish President, the delegate can be someone that actually knows something about economics: a rare commodity within any government, particularly that of the European Union.
The very simple answer to Ian is that, no, there will not be a referendum. There was tacit agreement (read: ’stitch-up’) amongst all the heads of government negotiating in Lisbon that there will be no referenda in any country (Republic of Ireland being an exception, because they have to have a referendum). This allowed some of the countries otherwise veering towards a referendum, including Poland under Kaczyński, to extort major concessions (the extension of the Ioannina Compromise and the appointment of a permanent Polish Advocate-General at the ECJ). However, whereas the Law and Justice Party was ideologically Eurosceptic, the Civic Platform is not. Tusk will sign up to all the agreements reached by the Kaczyńskis, and there will be no referendum. However, the likelihood of there having been one was small in the first place.