Polish Politics and Elections

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

I don't know if there are any posters which had some hopes with Nowoczesna but today two MPs of that party decided to left the parliamentary club and party. Two rather well-known as for the party members, one is Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus which was influential inside the party, representing more liberals in terms of social issues wing more concerned with abortion, LGBT issues etc. Other one is Joanna Schmidt which is mainly known for being on that famous trip with Ryszard Petru on Madera which caused like 100% loss of his credibility as a leader and politician (although he is not the most clever person I've ever seen so most of the people were not treating him seriously even before that event)

There are gossips that they are planning to start new political initiative with Robert Biedroń, former MP and currently mayor of Słupsk which is now-favourite candidate for candidate for president and Barbara Nowacka, former Twój Ruch politician and main actor of United Left in 2015 tragedy. Formation would be rather social-liberal, sort of Twój Ruch but without Janusz Palikot, but with Ryszard Petru - former leader of Nowoczesna (but his part in that scheme is only part of even less serious gossips).

I have always liked Scheuring-Wielgus, she's obviously to my right but she's always seemed decent and agreeable and her presence wouldn't be a dealbreaker for me in terms of voting for a Biedroń party. Petru, on the other hand, I will never vote for, so I hope those rumours stay just that.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

I call BS on that poll. PiS unchanged from 2014 in Podkarpacie? Kukiz /below/ average in Opolskie and not even on the board in Slaskie? SLD going up everywhere but completely imploding in Podlaskie and Podkarpackie where they were already down to their core in 2014? PSL down from 46% to 16% in Swietokrzyskie, where Adam Jarubas rules with an iron fist, while holding up at 23% at Podlaskie? Razem apparently doing better in ing Malopolska than in Mazowieckie? No, this doesn't make sense.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

RAZEM will sweep the local election because some Facebook meme.

Literally nobody in Razem believes this, get over yourself.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Battle for Warsaw is getting more and more fierce. Both PO and PiS candidates are increasing their poll support as the campaign should start officially soon and they are becoming more and more visible. Today PO got hurt a little bit by one city councilor from that party who decided to leave PO and join PiS. But even despite that PO campaign in Warsaw is not getting well, Trzaskowski is clearly showing that PO didn't learn anything since 2015. On the other hand polls shows that "alles is gut" so I guess elections this year will be mainly about plebiscite on PiS and Trzaskowski still is able to attract centre and undecided voters.

I honestly think Spiewak could win this whole thing if he plays his cards right. Trzaskowski is going full Komorowski, showing himself as aloof and arrogant, and Jaki is artificial and blatantly corrupt. A third candidate could exploit this and Spiewak is the only one with any sort of drive (Celinski, jesus christ...). But he has to do everything right.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Leaked internal PO poll for the Warsaw city council elections:

PO+.N 42%
PiS 20%
Razem+Polish Initiative+Greens+Spiewak 9%
SLD 5%
Kukiz 5%
Others 5%
Undecided 13%

Mayoral election 2nd round:

Trzaskowski 62%
Jaki 27.8%

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

The changes from 2014 in this poll are interesting:

Dolnoslaskie: PO +2, PiS +8, PSL -11, SLD -2
Kujawsko-pomorskie: PiS +9, PO -9, SLD +3, PSL -13, Kukiz +9
Lubelskie: PiS +7, PO +6, PSL -20, SLD +3, Kukiz +8
Lubuskie: PO +6, PiS +7, SLD +3, PSL -9
Lodzkie: PiS +8, PO +1, SLD +3, PSL -17, Kukiz +6
Mazowieckie: PiS +9, PO -2, PSL -10, SLD +2
Malopolskie: PiS +1, PO -7, PSL -6, SLD +4, Kukiz +7
Opolskie: PO +4, PiS +7, German Minority -2, PSL -10, SLD -3, Kukiz +8
Podkarpackie: PiS NC, PO NC, PSL -9, SLD -2, Kukiz +6
Podlaskie: PiS +4, PSL -5, PO -2, SLD -3, Kukiz +5,
Pomorskie: PO -5, PiS +5, SLD +2, PSL -8
Slaskie: PiS +8, PO -2, SLD +4, Silesian Regionalists +1, PSL -6
Swietokrzyskie: PiS +17, PSL -29, SLD +6, PO -1
Warminsko-mazurskie: PiS +12, PO +3, PSL -24, SLD -2
Wielkopolskie: PiS +14, PO +2, PSL -15, SLD +2
Zachodniopomorskie: PiS +9, PO -5, SLD +4, PSL -11

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

The campaign has officially begun, and PO and .N have decided to mark this occasion by putting up a load of billboards saying things like ‘PiS have stolen millions while you can’t afford medicine’ and ‘PiS have stolen millions while there’s still no affordable housing’. This isn’t a bad move, in all honesty - arrogance and nepotism is probably the one line of attack still available to them and at least they’re trying to set the agenda.

Also Schetyna and Lubnauer now suddenly get along really well and keep having long dinner parties together, which means that in five years .N is just going to be a shell party run out of a shed by that really dodgy bloke who tried to run for leader and got shredded for his investment portfolio.

PiS, meanwhile, aren’t doing all that much and seem to be content to let the launch of the new Good Start programme - under which parents of most schoolchildren will receive a sum of money to help pay for school supplies and text books - do the talking for them.

In minor party news, Janusz Korwin-Mikke is threatening to sue literally all the other candidates in the Warsaw mayoral election because they’ve been really blatantly campaigning before the legally permitted date while he claims he stuck to the law and has therefore lost out on potential momentum. Oh and he wants to ban trams from the centre of Warsaw. Because of course he does.

Finally, Razem have announced that one of their flagship policies for the local elections will be free school meals for all children, and that their Opole branch will be running for the city council in coalition with the German Minority, which seems a bit strange given that the Germans down there tend to be more CDU than SPD, but then there’s also been a lot of cooperation between them in opposition to the mayor’s policies.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Finally, Razem have announced that one of their flagship policies for the local elections will be free school meals for all children, and that their Opole branch will be running for the city council in coalition with the German Minority, which seems a bit strange given that the Germans down there tend to be more CDU than SPD, but then there’s also been a lot of cooperation between them in opposition to the mayor’s policies.

Joint protests probably bring people together. But from publicity reasons very bad move.

Wisniewski will happily exploit it - it's not like he and his friend Patryk Jaki don't already have form for anti-German campaigning...

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Heat, do you also have that feeling that recently campaign got a little bit more boring/tonned down?

Depends how you look at it, there doesn't seem to be much happening in the cities at present but I think that's partly because the parties are now focusing more effort on promoting candidates for the sejmiki, which are not and never have been interesting.

btw, you're from Łódź, aren't you? Do you know anything about that whole thing with the PO and SLD councillors supposedly voting against a proposal for free meals for schoolchildren and then immediately putting the same thing in their election programme?

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Heat, do you also have that feeling that recently campaign got a little bit more boring/tonned down?

Trzaskowski basically stopped campaigning upon discovering his true calling: going around Warsaw and fixing everything with some tape.

I can't believe this man was supposed to be PO's last, best hope. He's absolutely hopeless, and Jaki is a soulless ghoul. The fact that either of them are as high in the polls as they are suggests we are doomed as a nation.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

In the interests of levity, it turns out that PiS won't be running candidates for Slupsk County Council (not to be confused with Slupsk city council), and Jaslo city council (in the south). They will also have candidates in only two out of the four wards of Przemysl city council (also down south). Jaslo is particularly embarrassing as they currently have a majority there. Apparently in all three instances the Electoral Commission invalidated some of the signatures on their nomination papers. I am, of course, certain that the collection process was conducted in an entirely above-board manner.

hahahahahahahahahahaha

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Where did you hear about the Korwin thing? It wouldn't surprise me because his party is an absolute dumpster fire at the moment (and people are leaking like crazy onto Facebook, lmao) but I can't find anything about it.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

If anyone is wondering how PiS is handling electoral success, you need only look to Nowy Sacz in the south, which has been a right-wing stronghold since time immemorial and which is currently one of the few large towns in Poland to have a PiS mayor. As far as I can tell, incumbent mayor Ryszard Nowak, a PiS member, is retiring and was hoping to get the national party to choose his handpicked successor Krzysztof Gluc, former deputy CEO of Nowy Sacz Water, as their candidate for mayor. However, Dear Leader Kaczynski personally intervened to have Iwona Mularczyk, the wife of local MP Arkadiusz Mularczyk, endorsed instead. Iwona Mularczyk is a teacher at a local school and has never taken part in politics before.

Nowak then quit the party and Gluc is running for mayor as an independent with his endorsement. He is, for some reason, working with the former chairman of the local SLD branch.

Two other PiS members, councillor Jerzy Gwizdz and secretary of Nowy Sacz PiS Malgorzata Belska, were also seemingly annoyed by having been passed over for the nomination and have both decided to run as independents.

The result of all this maniacal splintering is that, in a city where PiS won by 30 points in 2015, the candidate of the PO-.N Civic Coalition, Malopolska Assembly member Leszek Zegzda is currently set to top the poll in the first round with just 30% of the vote. In fact, it's not impossible that none of the PiS genepool candidates reach the runoff, because random independent Ludomir Handzel (who lost to Nowak by just 188 votes in 2014) is polling on par with the official PiS candidate. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.



(oh, and yes, that is indeed the SLD candidate polling at 0.7%. God bless Malopolska!)

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

List no 5 - KKW SLD Lewica Razem (SLD and various political plankton organisations)
List no 6 - KW Partii Razem

I predict that this will cause absolutely no problems whatsoever.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-politics-warsaw-insight/in-warsaws-local-election-europes-identity-crisis-plays-out-idUSKCN1M80O2

In spite of the obnoxious 'POPULISM ON THE MARCH' framing, that article is still the best English-language introduction to the Warsaw campaign I've seen so far.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

lol, Kukiz just threw his candidate for mayor of Warsaw, nationalist beer magnate MP Marek Jakubiak, under the bus. He said at a rally in Kielce that he was aware that Jakubiak had no chance of winning and that privately, his sympathies lay with another candidate. He refused to say which candidate that was other than they were 'on an opposite pole' (ideologically) from Jakubiak, which would probably indicate Spiewak seeing as Kukiz has praised him in the past.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

List no 3 - KW Partia Zieloni (Greens surprisingly managed to to well though)

They didn't even need me to fill in the gap.

I'm hearing that in a lot of places their lists are literally made up of random people from Facebook. There are entire voivodeships where they have <10 members in total, so I imagine their signatures could be interesting as well.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Two quick updates.

- Krakow is getting interesting. Since 2002, the mayor of Krakow has been Jacek Majchrowski, who was elected as an SLD candidate but immediately became an independent and no longer maintains ties with them. He is also, er, fairly obviously corrupt. This year Majchrowski has been endorsed by PO, SLD and PSL as their 'stop PiS' candidate and is facing possibly his most credible challengers since he took office - Malgorzata Wassermann, a PiS MP who chairs the inquiry into infamous pyramid scheme Amber Gold (which is alleged to have had ties to PO politicians including Donald Tusk himself), and Lukasz Gibala, a liberal former MP for PO and Palikot's Movement. The polling tends to show Majchrowski and Wassermann basically tied in the first round and Gibala in third, some way behind but closing in quite quickly. In the second round Majchrowski would on current numbers beat Wassermann fairly convincingly, but I wonder if that lead would survive an actual campaign given that this race obviously matters to PiS a fair bit so they're trying hard and Krakow has always had a bit more PiS potential than other major Polish cities. Interestingly Gibala could beat either of them, so if he sneaks into the second round things could get interesting.

- Gliwice PO is currently in meltdown. The national party, pushed by local MP, former Justice Minister, and PO 'rising star' Borys Budka, chose to endorse the incumbent independent (but PO genepool) mayor Zygmunt Frankiewicz and run in coalition with him for the city council. A number of local members, including some popular currently sitting councillors and local activists, were opposed to that and wanted to run their own candidate for mayor, but claimed to go along with the decision after it was officially made. They then found themselves removed from the Civic Coalition's lists at the last minute on the grounds that it was thought they might defect after being elected. Cue entirely predictable outrage, which was made worse by the fact that Budka's wife had suddenly appeared as a candidate without anyone in the local party being consulted first. Budka is now facing much criticism, including from his 'mentor', former MP Andrzej Gałażewski, who described him as an apparatchik, a careerist, and 'his own personal political failure' in an interview with a local paper.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-gayrights/gay-couple-can-register-child-in-conservative-poland-court-idUSKCN1ML1OQ

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I like how Reuters had info about that and only few Polish media outlet informed about that so far, one being website of Radio Maryja.  

The Polish media just don't want to support fascism. After all, if the PO mayor of Lublin is to be believed, a peaceful Pride parade and a nationalist counter-demonstration being organised by people who have expressed their desire to use violence against the Pride marchers are equally dangerous and both must be banned in the interests of public order. Why are you such a symetrysta?

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Warsaw debate was a total circus, I do not even want to make some summary for you there.

I miss the days when Joanna Erbel was the biggest joke around.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

TOMORROW

Ten rok na pewno będzie rokiem UPR-u.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Anyway, the only prediction I'll venture is that if PO+.N lose badly they're going to blame it on the psalm that's being read out in all churches on that day that coincidentally contains the words 'law and justice'.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

The time-honoured Polish tradition of people 'leaking' supposed exit poll results thinly disguised as prices of fruit and vegetables onto the twatters under #bazarek (market) has started in earnest.

Quite a few of them seem to be ramping good results for PO+.N, but it's never clear who there is actually leaking and who is just making stuff up.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

So these are both local and voivodship elections. Which ones are the most important?

The locals are probably seen as more relevant but the voivodeship assemblies are, among others, in charge of allocating money from the EU structural funds, which has obvious implications for electoral politics (which is why winning majorities in as many of the assemblies/sejmiks as possible is so important to PiS). So I'd say the voivodeships.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

One very important thing that needs to be kept in mind is that due to different turnout patterns, vote shares in the voivodeship assembly elections do not match up to parliamentary elections - PSL and 'non-partisan lists' (read: stooges of over-ambitious local politicians) tend to do much better. PO managed 31% in 2010 while polling about as well as PiS are now. PiS hitting, say, 32-35% should most certainly not be seen as a sign that they're losing support from 2015.