Can Poland’s right-wing ruling party win this year’s parliamentary election?

By Aleks Szczerbiak

If Poland’s upcoming election were held today, the right-wing ruling party would almost certainly lose its parliamentary majority. But with several factors working in its favour, the governing party only needs a relatively small uptick in support to be within striking distance of a record third consecutive term of office.

On the back foot

This year, Polish politics will be dominated by the forthcoming parliamentary election, scheduled for the autumn. The right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) grouping, Poland’s governing party since 2015, has been on the back foot for most of the last three-and-a-half years.

Its initial slump in support was due in large part to a backlash against the hugely controversial October 2020 ruling by Poland’s constitutional tribunal that further tightened Poland’s already restrictive abortion law by invalidating a provision that allowed termination of pregnancy in cases where the foetus was seriously malformed or suffered from an incurable disorder. Given that the vast majority of legal abortions carried out in Poland were in such cases, the ruling effectively meant a near-total ban.

Although PiS said that the ruling was a sovereign decision by an independent body and clearly in line with the tribunal’s earlier judgements on the issue in the mid-1990s (when it was dominated by justices who later became harsh critics of the current administration), the government’s opponents argued that it was under the ruling party’s control.

The judgement set off a nationwide wave of street protests, particularly involving younger Poles, and played into the opposition’s narrative that PiS was increasingly dominated by “religious right” ideological extremists.

Although it is a socially conservative party that draws inspiration from Catholic moral teaching, PiS’s electorate includes many Poles with more liberal views on moral-cultural issues who support the party largely as a result of its socioeconomic policies.

The ruling came at the same time as PiS proposed an animal protection law that many Polish farmers, who constituted a key element of its rural-agricultural core electorate, felt threatened their livelihoods.

It also coincided with a sense that the government was not coping effectively with the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic; earlier in the year, ministers had reassured Poles that the crisis was fully under control.

Consequently, opinion poll support for PiS fell sharply from around 40% in September to the low-to-mid 30s by November.

PiS attempted to regain the political initiative last winter through its “Polish Deal” (Polski Ład) programme designed to boost economic growth and living standards through a wide range of policies including tax reforms favouring the less well-off. However, the programme’s complexity and disastrous rollout in January 2022 left even financial experts struggling to understand it.

In February 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine gave PiS an opportunity to draw a line under the “Polish Deal” fiasco. But the “rally effect” of the war – the inevitable psychological tendency for worried citizens to unite around their political leaders and institutions as the embodiment of national unity when they feel that their country faces an external threat – did not transform the party’s poll ratings.

Although the war moved national security to the top of the political agenda, it did not really emerge as an issue of contestation between the parties, who competed largely on which of them was the most effective at countering Russia and providing support for Ukraine.

An accumulation of crises

However, together with the economic fallout from the pandemic crisis, the war exerted considerable extra pressure on the government through its impact on much more politically salient socioeconomic issues.

Inflation increased steadily from the beginning of 2022, particularly the price of food and household goods, peaking at 17.9% last October, its highest level for more than 25 years.

Cost-of-living increases also eroded the value of the huge welfare payments that were the key to PiS’s appeal to those voters who were not part of its core electorate but supported it as the political grouping offering the most generous support to the less well-off.

Sanctions against Russia and disruption of supply chains also led to substantial fuel price increases and concerns about energy security. At the same time, interest rate rises exacerbated the economic slowdown, while fiscal tightening and the increased cost of government borrowing limited PiS’s scope for further social spending.

Moreover, PiS remained in a bitter “rule-of-law” dispute with the EU political establishment over its judicial reform programme and the European Commission blocked the disbursement of Poland’s €35 billion share of the union’s coronavirus recovery funds.

At the same time, ongoing internal divisions and infighting, notably between the more technocratic and pragmatic Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, weakened the governing camp. Ziobro is leader of the right-wing conservative United Poland (Solidarna Polska) party, PiS’s junior governing partner, which has enough deputies to deprive the government of its parliamentary majority.

Ziobro, who has introduced many of the government’s most controversial policies, including the judicial reforms, staked out a series of hardline right-wing conservative policy positions and criticised Morawiecki for being excessively compromising and ideologically timid, specifically for making too many concessions to the EU political establishment.

While no single crisis was a political game changer, their cumulative effect was to erode support for the ruling party, which struggled to win back the 5-10% of the electorate that it lost at the end of 2020.

Indeed, no opinion poll for months has given PiS hope of winning enough seats to retain its outright parliamentary majority. For example, according to the Pooling the Poles micro-blog that aggregates voting intention surveys, while PiS still has the highest vote share, averaging 36% support, this only translates into 203 (out of 460) seats in the Sejm, the more powerful lower chamber of parliament.

Currently PiS’s only plausible possible coalition partner is the radical right Confederation (Konfederacja) grouping: Pooling the Poles has it averaging 7% and winning 25 Sejm seats, which would still leave the ruling party short of a parliamentary majority. Moreover, Confederation’s strategic objective is to replace PiS as the main political force on the Polish right, not to keep it in office.

Monthly polling average from aggregator eWybory.eu.

Everything still to play for

However, PiS’s support has not collapsed and it would only need a small uptick to get it back to the 40% average that the party needs to have a chance of securing another outright majority and record third term of office for the post-communist era. Indeed, even if PiS falls slightly short, there is a reasonable chance that it could win over some individual defectors from other political groupings.

In one sense, it is striking that, in spite of such huge problems, PiS has been able to maintain relatively high levels of support and get through the winter with none of these crises reaching a critical stage.

Inflation appears to have more-or-less peaked (for the moment at least) and, although energy costs remain high, there were no winter fuel shortages as initially feared. Unemployment remains low, so many Poles feel they can at least partially offset inflation with pay increases and, although growth will slow down considerably this year, the Polish economy is very unlikely go into actual recession.

PiS knows that whether or not the government can unblock Poland’s share of the coronavirus recovery funds will be a critical litmus test of its broader effectiveness.

But if the legislation implementing a deal which the government agreed with the European Commission last December is approved by parliament and signed into law, and the recovery funds released, this would be a major political success for PiS.

For sure, even in a best-case scenario the first tranche of recovery fund monies are unlikely to come on tap until the third or even fourth quarter of the year.

Nonetheless, not only would their unblocking undercut one of the opposition’s most important talking points, it could also reassure potential investors and the financial markets, thereby stabilising the Polish currency, and further reducing inflation and the cost of government borrowing. This would, in turn, provide PiS with some fiscal headroom to boost social spending, and thereby shore up its support, in the election run-up.

Moreover, the Polish government’s active engagement as one of the main hubs for channeling military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and prime destination for refugees fleeing the conflict, have boosted the country’s international standing.

PiS is ramping up Polish defence spending, already one of the highest levels in NATO, to 4% of GDP and doubling the number of troops to 300,000, making Poland pivotal to the alliance’s security relationship with Russia.

So if, depending upon the course of the war, military security becomes more of an election issue, PiS could benefit from a further “rally effect”, which could then spill over into other policy areas.

PiS is also helped by the relative weakness of the opposition. Bitter divisions over how to respond to the legislation modifying PiS’s judicial reforms that emerged from the government’s negotiations with the commission further divided an opposition already fragmented between four liberal, centrist, left-wing and agrarian parties.

Former European Council President and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk – who leads the liberal-centrist Civic Platform (PO), Poland’s governing party between 2007-15 and currently the main opposition grouping – is certainly a very articulate and effective critic of PiS and his blistering critiques have rallied the core anti-government electorate.

According to Pooling the Poles, PO is currently averaging around 30% support. But Tusk is also one of Poland’s most distrusted politicians and a very polarising figure with loyal devotees but also fierce opponents, so may actually end up mobilising PiS supporters.

Crucially, the opposition has not yet convinced voters that it has a credible and attractive programmatic alternative, particularly on the socioeconomic issues that are likely to be the main battleground on which the election will be fought. The very negative anti-PiS messaging on which the opposition appears to have based its electoral strategy is unlikely, on its own, to have sufficient mobilising appeal.

Indeed, Polish public opinion is highly polarised and there is little evidence of any significant transfers between the government and opposition camps.

Rather, it seems that the fall in support for PiS was largely accounted for by the demobilisation of some of its erstwhile supporters, particularly those attracted to the party by its social and economic policies rather than for ideological reasons. Many of these voters are now planning to abstain rather than switch to the opposition, which obviously makes it easier for PiS to win them back.

The election outcome remains uncertain

PiS’s base of support has been eroded as it faced continued economic turbulence, a protracted war on its border, a resulting energy crisis, an ongoing dispute over EU funds, and infighting within the governing camp.

Opinion polls suggest, that if an election were held today, it would almost certainly lose its parliamentary majority and the opposition parties could cobble together a government, albeit a rather shaky one.

But the election will be held in ten months’ time, not today. The winter crises have not spiraled out of control, inflation is slowing down, unemployment remains low, and while the economy is weakening it is unlikely to go into recession.

The possible unblocking of EU coronavirus funds would provide fiscal headroom for further social spending, the ongoing war in Ukraine could create a further “rally effect” around the incumbent, and the opposition remains unable to win over disillusioned ex-PiS voters.

With all these factors potentially working in PiS’s favour, the election outcome is likely to remain uncertain right up until polling day.

Main image credit: Krystian Maj/KPRM (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

Aleks Szczerbiak is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex. The original version of this article appeared here.