Poland’s great democratic moment is good news for all of Europe

To be in Warsaw on Sunday night was to experience a rare moment of political joy. Young voters queued until the early hours to see off the xenophobic nationalist populists who have been dragging their country backwards, prove that even an unfair election can be won against the odds, and turn Poland towards a modern European future. Neighbours brought hot drinks to sustain them in the cold. Interviewed at around 1am on Monday morning, one young man in Wrocław said they had to hang in there because this was the most important election since 1989. 

I walked to a Warsaw polling station on election day with the same old friends whom I had accompanied to that historic vote on 4 June 1989. With delight, they each chose one name from the long list of parliamentary candidates. With equal delight, they refused even to take the ballot paper for the simultaneous referendum which – with its ludicrously biassed questions about things like an alleged “forced relocation mechanism” for illegal immigrants supposedly “imposed by the European bureaucracy” – was effectively election propaganda for the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS). But my friends and I were full of nervous anticipation. 

Anna told me that whereas in 1989 her dominant emotion had been hope, now it was fear. Her daughter, who was just seven in 1989, worried what more the ruling party could do to poison young minds and ruin her own seven-year-old daughter’s education. But then, starting with the first exit polls at 9 pm, our foreboding turned to relief and then joy. 

Despite being only semi-free, that 1989 election opened the door to democracy in Poland. Despite being unfair in multiple ways, not least in the crude, mendacious propaganda pumped out by all state-controlled media, this one should reverse Poland’s slide towards the kind of electoral authoritarianism practised by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. 

Turnout, at a record nearly 74 percent on the current count, was fully 10 percent higher than in 1989. Reversing a continent-wide trend, first estimates suggest that voters under 29 turned out in larger numbers than those over 60. It seems young Poles finally understood that their future was at stake. Whatever happens next, this was a great democratic moment. The people spoke and said they wanted a different government. 

Unless current projections are badly wrong, the democratic opposition parties will have a clear parliamentary majority over PiS and its potential partner, the wild Konfederacja party, which had threatened to pick up a significant youth vote.

Why did the opposition win? We’ll need more time to understand this fully, and there always remains a fog of glorious mystery around how and why millions of individual people ultimately decide to vote one way rather than another. Nonetheless, we can see that many voters simply got fed up with the crude, mendacious, corrupt, petty, backward-looking, obscurantist rule of the party led by the 74-year old Jarosław Kaczyński, who is a kind of one-man walking anthology of resentment. 

Some were alarmed by opposition warnings that the anti-Brussels course of PiS might eventually lead to Polexit. (The more immediate danger was that it would join forces with Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and the Slovak populist Robert Fico to drag the entire EU further to the right.)

Next to the young, it will be interesting to see how women voted, faced with a reactionary, patriarchal party imposing one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in Europe. Around 600,000 Poles abroad registered to vote, although their impact on the actual result will be (unfairly) marginal.

Huge credit must go to Donald Tusk, the leader of the largest opposition list, the Civic Coalition, which has at its core the Civic Platform party he co-founded in the early 2000s. I must confess I was sceptical about the return to the front line of Polish politics of the 66-year-old former president of the European Council. It felt a bit like Tony Blair resuming the leadership of the British Labour Party – and Tusk, like Blair, does have a lot of people who can’t stand him. But he fought his way through a barrage of poisonous abuse, ludicrously accusing him of being the German candidate, and this victory is in significant measure his.

I came to Warsaw directly from Istanbul, where my liberal democratic friends are in deep depression after a united opposition failed to defeat president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in an election earlier this year. Last spring, I watched a united opposition in Hungary go down badly against Orbán. In Poland, my friends and I were also urging the opposition to unite – which it failed to do. Yet it may turn out that the fact there were three different opposition lists to choose from – Tusk’s Civic Coalition, the Third Way (combining two parties broadly acceptable to liberal Catholic voters) and the New Left –actually ended up maximising the opposition vote.

I just learned a new Polish word: depisyzacja, that is, “dePiSisation”, by analogy with decommunisation. But taking the PiS out of the Polish state will be a tough task

It’s still early days. Resentment-tsar Kaczyński may yet have a few dirty tricks up his sleeve. President Andrzej Duda will give him the first chance of forming a government, so it could take months before power finally changes hands. Such a diverse opposition coalition may be fractious in government (think Germany). 

Then there’ll be the huge challenge of reversing PiS’s creeping state capture. I just learned a new Polish word: depisyzacja, that is, “dePiSisation”, by analogy with decommunisation. But taking the PiS out of the Polish state will be a tough task. It means restoring the independence of the courts, turning state media into proper public service media, undoing deep political penetration of the civil service and state-owned enterprises, re-drawing constituency boundaries so they reflect population changes – and more. Restored EU funding will help, but no one knows the true condition of Poland’s public finances and there’s a war grinding on next door in Ukraine.

PiS remains the party which won the single largest share of the vote. In big cities, nearly half the votes went to opposition parties and less than a quarter to PiS, but in the countryside it was the other way round. Civic Platform must show it has learned from its mistakes in the 2000s and respect the concerns of a poorer, more conservative, Catholic, rural and small town Poland. And the opposition needs to avoid the temptation simply to take revenge – a certain Polish speciality wonderfully depicted in Andrzej Wajda’s film of the classic Polish comedy Revenge.

But sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof. I notice this morning that the presenters on the independent, opposition-supporting TV channel TVN can hardly stop smiling – and, frankly, nor can I. Poland’s populist nightmare is almost over and all Europe will benefit as a result. 

Timothy Garton Ash’s most recent book is Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

👉 Read the original article on the Guardian