When the organization Together announced that her candidate in the presidential election would be Adrian Zandberg, many doubted whether, at all corners and divisions, the traditionally discorded interior formation would be capable of mobilizing, which would let the collection of 100,000 signatures, essential to registry the candidacy. Zandberg signed 180,000 signatures at PKW last week. Now the organization is faced with the question of how to make good usage of Zandberg's attention, which Zandberg will most likely be the only 1 – unless the signatures are collected by Piotr Szumlewicz – a non-right-wing opposition candidate to the Tusk government.
Against Correction
It should be said that Zandberg is doing a truly good run for his background. He recalls that if he has the energy and will to do so, he can be the top asset together. He rides all over Poland, meets with people, counts more media industriously, where he does truly well. He did a large occupation even in hostile territory on tv Republic – although leading interview Danuta Holecka on average pressed him, assuming that the camp to which the station is connected, a candidate beating the Tusk government on the left can only aid and it is worth giving him a free speech.
You can besides see the increased activity of Zandberg and his people online. From YouTube recordings of the candidate, through the flood of favorable comments on X, to rather hit memes – headed by Zandberg holding 2 swords, signed “one for monsters, the another for Confederation”.
Most importantly, Zandberg has an thought of himself in this run and a coherent communicative that shows why he competes and what values are close to him. 1 of the most common words in his statements is “coryto”. This is simply a clear message: both the Law and the current coalition, treat you like your own private trough, it is time to end this, policy is to be an area where we are jointly arguing about how to solve the problems facing our community, alternatively than the place where the loot is divided. We, Zandberg continues, were invited after October 15, 2023 to participate in power, we could settle down at the trough and eat at will, but we refused due to the fact that there were circumstantial solutions for us that Tusk did not want to warrant in the coalition agreement.
Zandberg's message does not deficiency strong left-wing social demands – especially those related to the financing of wellness protection and access of young people to housing – but the anti-establishment, populist, is not little important. I don't usage that word in a negative way. I am referring to a policy based on the opposition to the widest-defined “elicie” or “political caste”, which, alternatively of serving voters, settles the interests of its own and supporting groups. specified as – this example appears most frequently in the candidate's message Together – a lobby of developers and bankers, insisting on pumping bubble into the property marketplace through programs specified as Credit 0 percent.
Can a left be an effective candidate for protest?
In Poland, presidential elections are frequently utilized by voters to show yellow cards to the full political class. This favours candidates ‘outside the deal’, or at least outside the mainstream party. Since Andrzej Lepper in 2005, through Paweł Kukiz in 2015, to Simon Holovnia in 2020, candidates for protest against the dominant form of organization politics were able to take a strong 3rd place and gain decent, two-digit support.
This voice of protest was mobilized under various political banners – populist, plebeian-small-people revolt in the case of Lepper, an anti-political, right-wing populism in Kukiza, finally: average centrism in the case of Holownia. However, in the presidential elections in Poland so far it has not been possible to mobilise this anger under the left banner.
Kwasniewski won in 1995 and 2000 as a candidate for 1 of the key political systems of the 3rd party. Although in 2010, the SLD was already a shadow of its own years of glory, it is hard to recognise Napieralski – at that time it won 3rd place, with 13.68 percent support – as a candidate of "anti-system". In 2000, Piotr Ikonovich, attempting to bypass Kwasniewski on the left, he won 38,000 votes, which is over 2.5 times little than the number of signatures needed to registry the candidacy. Unfortunately, everything indicates that in this election the vote of protest will not be collected by Zandberg, and Sławomir Mentzen. Anti-systemic emotion will most likely find its mass articulation in the extremist right-wing Confederate project, combining marketplace fundamentalism with selective traditionalism and a considerable amount of authoritarianism.
As Zandberg would not have efficiently articulated his left-wing populist message, he is in a lost position in the fight against Mentzen for mostly angry, "antisystemic" electorate. It starts from a multiple lower level of support and it is the views preached by Mentzen that are present closer to Polish common sense or "boyly reason". The Confederate candidate is favored by the visible worldwide, mainly among young men, the right-wing trend and powerful backlash towards progressive, regarded as “left” values, with which, due to his organization affiliation, Zandberg will be associated by any voters.
Even if Mentzen's support breaks down and Zandberg dispels him in pre-election debates – which is very likely – the second will inactive fight for a fewer percent alternatively than, like the Confederate, a strong dozen.
Year 2015 again
Here comes the most embarrassing question for the candidate Together a question – about the strategical sense of its launch in the presidential election. Zandberg clearly tries to strengthen polarization between himself and the right-wing candidates' cape. He repeats: I want to show you that in this election you do not gotta choose between Mentzen and his clones from PiS and KO. However, everything indicates that the votes will be taken not by Mentzen and his “clones” but by the fresh Left candidate, Magdalena Biejat. She's Zandberg's real opponent in this election.
The stakes for Together are to show that the organization can function outside the left-wing coalition supporting the Tusk government and that it will stay in it is not the only option the left-wing organization has today. That alternatively of agreeing to the function of a much younger coalition partner who cannot push through his most basic demands, it is better to set himself in a contra to the government and gather opposition to his policies around him, or he will be governed by the extremist right—the 1 from the Law and the Confederacy.
Biejat's disastrous consequence will weaken fresh Left in government and polls – where the electoral threshold is starting to be a problem for her today. In the face of the collapse of the 3rd Way, which will fly even more downwards after the mediocre consequence of Holownia, this will revive the thought of 1 list of "democratic camp" in future elections, from Nowa Left to the right wing of KO, with the participation of the remnants of Poland 2050. It is hard to imagine a script in which in the future Sejm there is simply a place for a force centered at Together to the left of specified a formation – how good Zandberg's run would not be.
The consequences of the current division of the left may be the Sejm without an independent left-wing club and the impossibility of forming a government without a Confederation. The question is whether left-wing voters will take this origin into account by voting in May.
