The third of three pieces I produced for the final project of my Newspaper Journalism (MA) course, exploring the political implications of Covid-19 across Europe
Poland’s government tried to force a presidential election in May. Though it was delayed to 28 June, Covid-19 is still spreading throughout the country. What happens now?
Coronavirus isn’t the only contagion circulating in Poland – the country is also in the throes of an increasingly rare disease in Europe: election fever. From Italy to Macedonia, referendums and elections across Europe have been postponed. Sadiq Khan finds himself with another guaranteed year at London’s helm, while even Russia has delayed a vote on giving Vladimir Putin unlimited terms of office.
Yet Poland has been an outlier. Its government, led by the authoritarian Law and Justice party (PiS), are determined to press ahead with a presidential election. They first tried organising the vote for 10 May, but a rebellion in the ruling camp meant it failed to gain parliamentary approval, so it was rescheduled to 28 June.
When planning the aborted 10 May election, which would have been postal-votes only, the government said ballots could be mailed to the country’s 30 million-strong electorate. Voters would then have had to leave their homes to deposit their completed cards into “return boxes”, which would also have needed to be kept safe from tampering.
Mateusz (not his real name), an Oxford medicine student who returned home to Szczecin to join his family in lockdown, was among those worried about fraud.
“Preparations were rushed and very poorly executed,” he says, “which left the election open to malpractice. For example, the template for the voting cards was leaked online, so illegitimate cards could have been included in the count.”
On top of these concerns, opposition candidates argued that they were unable to safely campaign at the height of a pandemic, while the incumbent PiS-backed president, Andrezj Duda, enjoyed positive coverage on the mostly state-controlled television channels.
Shutdown: how Covid-19 ground democracy in Europe to a halt
5 March – Italy, Europe’s earliest hit country, postpones a referendum (originally set for 29 March) on a plan championed by the ruling populist Five Star Movement to reduce the number of deputies (MPs) from 630 to 400 and senators from 315 to 200.
12 March – Gibraltar delays a referendum (scheduled for 19 March) on liberalising the territory’s strict abortion laws.
13 March –The UK government announces that local elections in May are to be postponed by a year, including Sadiq Khan’s attempt at holding the mayoralty of London.
15 March – Various French municipalities and Bavaria cautiously hold local elections, respectively two and seven days before France and Germany activate their full lockdowns. Turnout in France hits a record low of 44% and the second round of those same elections, originally scheduled for 22 March, is delayed to 28 June.
16 March – General election in Serbia, planned for April 26, is postponed. Neighbouring North Macedonia follow suit with their general election (planned for April 12) a week later.
25 March – Russia postpones a constitutional referendum on whether to allow Vladimir Putin to have an unlimited number of possible terms in office. The vote, originally scheduled for 22 April, is delayed to 1 July – while case numbers and deaths across the country soar.
7 May – Poland, the only country in Europe to continue with its election plans undeterred, cancels its presidential election (planned for 10 May) at the last possible moment. A new date of 28 June is arrived at on 3 June.
“The opposition parties have been playing several strategic games in terms of wanting to delay or discredit the election, but obviously PiS are also playing games,” says Aleks Szczerbiak, professor of European politics at the University of Sussex, speaking on the day the election was delayed. “The government calculate that their best opportunity to win decisively is to hold it as soon as possible. Any delay carries risks for the ruling camp, because it’s difficult to see them sustaining this kind of support for too much longer.”
Their best opportunity to win the election is to hold it as soon as possible. Any delay carries risks for the ruling camp
Prof Aleks Szczerbiak
Rather than call a state of emergency and delay the election until the immediacy of Covid-19’s threat has passed (as the constitution allows), the government still say the election must happen as soon as possible. Publicly, their justification for a 10 May election was that President Duda needed an immediate, fresh mandate to continue protecting his citizens.
Just as Boris Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ slogan won him the UK’s 2019 election, the Polish government treaded similar territory, saying that any delay to the election would result in a less efficient government machine - something most Poles crave to fight the coronavirus, even if it means having their civil liberties limited.
“As time goes by,” says Wojciech Przylbylski, editor-in-chief of the pro-European Visegrad Insight, “the fear of coronavirus will pass away, as some polls are already indicating. So as people feel the circumstances are less special, they will assess the situation more pragmatically in terms of the economy and their quality of life - and this will mean looking more critically at the government.”
The re-settled election date of 28 June is sooner than the opposition parties had been hoping for, as the full economic repercussions of the pandemic have not yet reached the country, though Prof Szczerbiak questions how important a factor this will be in shaping the result.
“It’s by no means certain that if the country were in a socio-economic crisis it would necessarily rebound on PiS and completely benefit the opposition, though obviously it has a better chance of happening in those circumstances. The main questions will be: how well have PiS dealt with the crisis up until now? Would any others be dealing with it better? Who do you trust to look after the least well-off and most vulnerable?”
On the last question, Prof Szczerbiak suggests that PiS could possibly hold the upper hand. “If I were PiS, I would say ‘we’re the first government to make sure that the benefits of economic transition [from communism to capitalism] were widely felt and we’ll make sure the costs of this difficult period won’t simply hit the people at the bottom.’”
Though the underfunded and understaffed Polish health service has avoided collapse, PiS have another major headache: the need to adapt their platform with a post-corona recession hurtling down the tracks. So far, they have managed that well too.
“PiS’s approach before Covid-19, if ever it was in trouble,” says Prof Szczerbiak, “was to pull out a new social spending pledge, and it was very effective. Interestingly, they’ve recalibrated that approach. The new pitch is: ‘in these difficult times that are coming, we are the people that will protect the least well off’. For the opposition, it’s not enough just for the country to get in a mess: they also have to persuade people that they will manage the situation in a way that doesn’t harm the vulnerable.”
Turning tides: timeline of recent Polish politics
2004 – Poland joins the European Union (having voted by 78% in a 2003 referendum).
2007 – Parliamentary election brings (centre-right, pro-European) Civic Platform to power, with its leader Donald Tusk becoming prime minister. He enjoys high approval ratings and enables Poland to weather the worst of 2008’s global financial crash. His party is returned to government in 2011’s election.
2014 – Tusk resigns as PM in order to become president of the European Council, leaving the less popular Ewa Kopacz to take over.
May 2015 – Andrzej Duda, candidate of the (hard-right, Eurosceptic) Law & Justice party (PiS), is elected as Poland’s president. The role is more ceremonial than that of the PM, while possessing some vital constitutional powers. As president, he rejects EU plans to accept a share of asylum seekers during the refugee crisis of that year, and refuses to appoint judges selected by parliament.
October 2015 – PiS’s ‘United Right’ coalition becomes the first pre-organised alliance of parties ever to win an overall majority in the Polish parliament, sweeping the Sejm (lower house) and Senate. With both houses and the presidency in their hands, PiS initiates a hostile takeover of the judiciary and media. The EU tries to strip Poland of its voting rights in Brussels, but is prevented by a veto from Hungary. While neighbouring Germany takes in 600,000 Syrians, zero asylum-seekers are granted sanctuary in Poland.
2019 – Parliamentary election sees PiS lose their majority in the Senate. With the help of their ‘United Right’ allies, they retain control of the Sejm.
2020 – Duda stands for re-election. Fierce debate ensues inside and outside the ruling camp over the election date, against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Poland, like the rest of Eastern Europe, has had remarkably few coronavirus deaths – at least according to official figures. As of 24 June, Poland has registered just 1396 dead, smaller even than Ireland’s 1720, despite having a population eight times larger than the latter.
“The problem with these figures,” says Prof Szczerbiak, “is you could say they haven’t done enough testing and haven’t uncovered enough cases, but also what counts as a Covid-related death varies across countries, so I’m wary of that comparison. But I think there’s a perception that they’ve handled the crisis well and lots of people have taken it at face value.”
Mateusz, who plans to vote for leading opposition candidate Rafał Trzaskowski, concedes that the government was appropriately strict at the start of the outbreak. When he returned to Poland in March, he was forced to isolate for two weeks in a single room of his house. On every day of this fortnight, the police would drive outside and beep at him to come to the window and wave, demonstrating that he was still isolating. He also had to install an app on his phone, which at random moments throughout the day would instruct him to take a selfie in the room. If no photo was sent within the space of ten minutes, the authorities would be alerted.
In the months since though, Mateusz has begun to worry about the government’s priorities. “Poland has never really reached a peak of infections,” he says, “and yet restrictions have been lifted quite quickly. The process of lifting them also seems politically driven – virtually all restrictions have been lifted just in time for the election. A focal point has been allowing more people into churches, with only Catholic churches ever mentioned, which only goes to show how much it’s tailored towards PiS voters.”
Most Poles are on 40% furlough. This is not some nice sunny holiday in their gardens.
Prof Aleks Szczerbiak
Prof Szczerbiak points out that the public appetite to leave lockdown is much stronger in Poland than, for example, in the UK. “Most people now want to get the economy moving. You’ve got to remember in Poland, people are not sitting with 80% furlough; it’s only about 40%, so this is not some nice sunny holiday in their gardens. The debate is starting to move, and as a consequence, people are less scared of the pandemic.”
With polls indicating a 50-50 dead heat between Duda and Trzaskowski in the election’s probable second round, and a record number of Poles abroad casting their ballots, the vote is set to be one of the most knife-edge in years.
“All of this is happening in a deeply polarised country,” says Prof Szczerbiak. “The splits between Poland’s political elites, which have been visible in the arguments over holding a major election in a pandemic, map onto divisions in Polish society. When the two camps are so evenly divided, there is so much more at stake.”
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