Polish Politics and Elections

[Estrella]

Officially called for 28 June.

Clownfiesta.

I am but one person, but one thing this has absolutely ensured is that I will take great pleasure in voting for Trzaskowski in the second round.

I honestly wonder whether to vote Trzaskowski in the first round already (Biedroń being a huge dud) to give him stronger position. There's just no one in the Polish political scene I held in bigger contempt than The Pen (Duda's been called that because he's signing everything his party tells him to sign).

Back in 2015 I casted a spoiled ballot in the first round (actually wrote in Grodzka on the paper, but we don't allow write-ins to be counted), since there was no candidate I could even remotely identify with. With hindsight I would've voted Komorowski at the start.

Running Biedroń was a huge mistake. I'm just hoping his poor result doesn't drag the rest of the Left down Ogórek/Krzaklewski style. I know Zandberg and ADB didn't want to run, but either of them would have done much better. Hell, Cimoszewicz or Belka would have done much better if they'd dredged them up. There's a strong chance I'll vote for Trzaskowski or WKK, or maybe write 'The Ghost of Karol Modzelewski' on the ballot paper.

What happened to Biedroń? I thought that he was quite popular.

[Estrella]

https://mobile.twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1268084311259000832

Found this interesting poll. Probably nothing unexpected, but I still think it's weird that Trzaskowski is doing so well.

[Estrella]

From EUElects liveblog:

Andrzej Duda won in Canada. He recieved 4720, while Trzaskowski recieved 3119. Despite this fact, Duda won only in Toronto, while Trzaskowski in Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa.

I thought the overseas vote was supposed to be pro-Trazskowski?

It is...outside of NA.

Toronto's probably got more of an "Ethnoburban Conservative" streak--the same thing that buoys Ford Nation...

Interesting that overseas voters in North America being more right wing is a thing for pretty much every country that has overseas voting that I know of. In the US I guess it's explained by osmosis from the Republicans and much more conservative public discourse, but I wonder why this is happening in Toronto - it's not like Fordismo has a huge media presence or an influential political party (seeing that everyone hates Dough now). Perhaps more culturally conservative people moving to places with larger Polish communities, i.e. only Toronto?

[Estrella]

https://twitter.com/ChrisLashHist/status/1362359880686964736

Was the fighting mostly about muh electability or are there significant socially conservative groups within the party?

[Estrella]

Looking over Lewica's program on Wiki, there was a bunch of expected (and pretty good) progressive proposals, and then this:

abolishing the Institute of National Remembrance and the National Day of Remembrance of the "cursed soldiers"

Weird question, but how does the Polish left feel about the People's Republic? I'm asking because the above led me down a rabbit hole about how Lewica protested against removing a memorial to the Soviet army, protested against removing a Confederate statue a memorial built to commemorate the 20th anniversary of PZPR,  protested against naming a street after post-WW2 antifascist-turned-anticommunist guerillas (the "cursed soldiers") and renamed it "Victims of Cursed Soldiers Street" and, as the Wiki excerpt says, they want to abolish the IPN - which, yes, parrots PiS talking points all the time, but also it just comes off as "of course the successors to PZPR want to stop investigations into Communist crimes and their perpetrators".

[Estrella]

lol Konfa

[Estrella]

So last minute Kon -> PiS and PiS -> TD voter movement? Or perhaps Kon -> TD directly? Or perhaps just related to turnout vs. abstention numbers across various bases. In any case, I think Tusk is right in that this election can be called for the left.

Of course those are their 2019 voters, but it would make sense if there are more Konfa → TD and Konfa → KO voters than Konfa → PiS compared to the campaign as well. Their voters see PiS as basically socialist because of their economic policies and iirc it was them who caused Duda to almost lose in 2020.

(also, just as I'm writing this, TVP is talking about how many percent off the exit polls were in Słowacja lmao)

[Estrella]

You can actually see them, to some extent, on satellite maps taken at night and also showing woodland cover and so on as the population density in rural areas added to Poland after 1945 is a lot lower than in the rest of the country: attempts to repopulate the new territories were only properly successful in the cities and conurbations, and largely for the same reasons as those areas continually leaked people from the early 19th century onwards when they were still German; i.e. remote, poor quality soil and so on.

This makes me wonder if areas with particularly high % of those descended pre-1945 Poles (presumably mostly rural) vote divergently from other parts of western Poland.

I'm not sure if Lower Silesia is such an area, but PiS won there even though it's as far west as it gets.