Although the polls showing the mime between Karol Nawrocki and Sławomir Mentzen are inactive rare, and inactive the most likely script assumes the first 1 against Rafał Trzaskowski in the second circular of the presidential election, the question is, "Can Mentzen overtake Nawrocki?" will be rolled in the media for respective weeks to come. It may be worth asking others. Not whether it is possible, but whether it would be desirable from a left-wing point of view. In another words, should the party's voter left of the center keep his fingers crossed for Mentzen drowning Nawrocki?
It is not about which candidate is better, due to the fact that from the point of view of progressive values both are equally unacceptable. Sometimes, however, past follows the incorrect way to good goals, and affirmative change is frequently done with the hands of people who cannot be attributed any noble intentions. 1 can imagine, then, a script in which Mentzen's possible success will bring benefits to the Polish political scene, completely unrelated to the interests and values of the Confederation.
End of duopol?
Mentzen's entry into the second circular in place of Nawrock would be a large defeat of Kaczyński, possibly even threatening his position in the Law and Polish right. He personally chose Nawrocki, giving up more politically efficient, more charismatic candidates – specified as Mateusz Morawiecki or Przemysław Czarnek – due to the fact that a good consequence in the presidential election could be the beginning of a run for power in the party.
Kaczyński chose a more risky option for the party, but theoretically safer for his own position in its ranks. However, if this maneuver ends with a full defeat – and that would be the failure of the PiS candidate to enter the second circular – then there will be voices in the PiS that the president has completely lost contact with political reality and leads his full camp to the catastrophe. any activists will start looking for a fresh place on the political phase in specified a situation, individual may effort to overthrow the Law and Justice. Even if Kaczyński fails to take power over the party, it may be the end of the Law and Justice we know. At the same time, the duo of PO-PiS, organizing Polish politics for 20 years – since the double elections in 2005.
It is hard to defend the thesis that it is functional today, that it well reflects real divisions in Poland, that it allows to respond effectively to social demands and challenges facing our political community. In a situation where the alternate is the authoritarian, breathing regulation of the revenge of the PiS, the coalition electorate on October 15 has no choice but to proceed to support the current government, nevertheless disappointing its policy would be. The right-wing elector, convinced that the alternate is Tusk, a German agent in the literary folklore, who is carrying out the mission of destroying Poland, will vote for the Law and Justice Party, regardless of how corrupt and inept the governments of this formation would be. This is not the way democracy should look.
In a situation where the geopolitical environment of Poland has become the most unstable since the early 1990s, we besides request a political strategy capable of long-term cooperation on key safety issues. Today, the opposition is trying to undermine our government's position in relations with the States due to the fact that it hopes that it will return to power.
Attempts to strengthen the European pillar of Polish safety – which, in a situation which is independent of Trump's excesses, changes in the strategical priorities of the States are simply essential – can be blocked by actions of the Law and Justice Office, presenting them as a ‘sad’, a ‘test of displacing the US from Europe’, which Tusk undertakes on behalf of Germany, possibly as a ‘wanting to make profits of the German arms sector’. On Wednesday 12 March, the Euro MPs referred to all these arguments, justifying their vote against Eastern Shields – a task to strengthen the east border of the European Union – in the European Parliament.
The PO-PiS agreement was incapable to communicate – and there is no indication that it will be – on a bill guaranteeing that the validity of the presidential election will be ruled by a court whose legitimacy will not be undermined. Which threatens us with a possibly powerful political crisis in the spring - if, for example, Nawrocki loses slightly, and the neo Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs tries to nullify the elections. By the way, falling out of Nawrock already in the first circular would besides free us from this nightmare scenario.
Is the Law and Justice no longer a lesser evil?
Trzaskovsky's triumph in the second round, combined with a deep crisis, leading to the disintegration of the Law and Justice as the main organization of the Polish right, would give the ruling coalition quite a few political space to complete the cleaning after erstwhile power in areas specified as the judiciary.
Of course, the electorate of PiS – with its traditionalism, authoritative impulses, susceptibility to populism, distrust towards Europe – will not disappear. He will request political representation – democracy cannot ignore his voice and interests. The fact that the Kaczyński organization represented him for the last 20 years besides had its advantages. PiS was not only right about the request for social adjustment of the Polish socio-economic model, but managed to make it in the first years after 2015. How lame this correction would not be, as it would not neglect investment in the public sector, has changed to a better mainstream reasoning of the state's obligations towards citizens.
In spite of all its wars with the European Commission, the Law and Justice organization remained a organization recognising, at least at the level of authoritative declarations, the European and Atlantic orientation of Poland. The dominance of PiS stopped the “geopolitical rusification” of the Polish right.
Today, however, the organization abandoned most of the anchors – apart from anti-Russian – which made it dominant on the right hand little evil. While competing for Confederate voters, she cut off the social anchor, adopted radically anti-Ukrainian language, and blindly in Trump, the younger PiS activists have already said that a reset in relations with Russia would not be specified a bad solution for Poland. It is all indications that the PiS will be happy to play Trump for weakness and division of the European Union.
PiS has consistently been burning bridges connecting it to the far right for respective years and approaching its opposition to the alto-right. It has long not been the formation of Lech Kaczyński, and it seems that in the future it will become a organization not even Mateusz Morawiecki or Beata Szydło, but Przemysław Czarnek, Patrick Jako and Dominika Tarczyński. If he returns to power, we are facing a sharp course for the Orbán authoritarianism, where the governments of Szydło and Morawiecki will appear to be a model of centred, moderate, enlightened right-wingness.
Breaking down the Law and Justice would open up space for the left, giving first of all the anticipation to make the social electorate that is present in Kaczyński's presence today, due to the fact that he believes that he is best placed to care for his interests – as the leader of the largest organization among those with any social sensitivity. The weaker the PiS will be, the little likely it will always return to power, the more in pursuit of fleeing voters it will scope for the Confederate narrative, the greater the chance for the left.
This will destruct us as a society
At the same time, the imagination of the political scene, on which the main centre to the right of the PSL is the Confederate, powered by any transfer of escapees from the PiS under the leadership, let us say, Patrick Kojak, is possibly even more worrying than the current duopol.
Confederate dominance of the right would mean mainstream public debate on which the Law and Justice, after all, reached seldom and with caution. Meanwhile, the Confederate built up its political identity over the years by disseminating anti-vaccination content, Climate negationism, politicized homophobia, extremist anti-migration discourse, and even open anti-Semitism – although the expulsion of the faction of Grzegorz Braun and the electoral "detox" image of Mentzen weakens this last component of her image.
The traditionalism of mainstream PiS and most of its electorate was alternatively defensive. Confederate traditionalism, although more selective, is more radical, revolutionary and conservative. Part of the environment around the Confederation is dreamed of utilizing the state to reverse most of the changes that have taken place in Poland since the beginning of this century, since integration with the Union and the death of John Paul II launched secularization processes.
Of course, the Confederate in power would gotta negociate someway between its own counter-revolutionary ambitions and the preferences of its electorate, which itself is the product of these cultural changes. However, the increase in the importance of a organization gathering specified a radical, reactionary environment will be a serious problem, especially for groups whose emancipation peculiarly hurts Confederate leaders, from women to sexual minorities – unlike in Western Europe or even in the MEGA movement, the Polish right inactive does not accept the rights of non-heteronormative people.
Finally, even by abstrahing from the most reactionary, “worldview” elements of the Confederacy program, the dominance by this organization of the right side of the Polish political scene to the remainder will destruct us as a society. It will mean a extremist strengthening of the rule of social selfishness and marginalisation of solidarity language not only on the right, but on the full political stage.
PiS with its project, “national democracy” was – and present is even more – a organization threatening the Polish constitutional order, headed by the principles of balance of authorities and protecting citizens' rights from political excesses of the majority. The Confederacy's political task threatens another rule enshrined in the Constitution: social justice, which, in accordance with Article 2 of our Basic Law, is to "realise" as a "democratic state of law". 1 can argue whether it has always actually been real, but if the Confederacy reorganises the right around it, fewer people in Poland will even admit that it should be real.
It would be best, of course, for both Nawrocks and Mentzen to accomplish a profoundly disappointing consequence in these elections, so that the weakened would come out of them and the Law and Justice and the Confederation. For now, however, all points to Mentzen taking 3rd place, strong adequate to let the Confederacy to decide who will rule. The division of the PO-PiS will end in 2027 in specified a way that whoever wins will co-mantzen. Especially if there is no left in the next Sejm, which, given that it seems to be repeating the 2015 script for now, is not unimaginable.
