Poland’s Law and Justice party will hold on to power, early vote shows
WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s populist ruling party appeared to have been swept back into power Sunday, as voters dismissed concerns about the autocratic drift of the government and rewarded the party for its generous social welfare programs.
The Law and Justice party secured its mandate, according to exit polls, by promoting a brand of aggrieved nationalism that resonated in the country’s rural heartland and towns in the east of the country that have not kept pace with wealthier cities in the west.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party’s leader and chief architect of its policies, noted the deep divisions in the country even as he promised to continue reshaping the nation in fundamental ways.
“We have reasons to be happy,” he told supporters Sunday night after the polls closed. “The good change will continue. But we will need to reflect upon the things that we have done right as well as the things at which we have failed, because a significant portion of the society does not support us.”
Kaczynski said some people had been manipulated into thinking that “we are doing something that will hurt them in the long run.”
“We are doing no such things,” he said. “Poland needs to keep changing, and needs to change for the better.”
For three decades, Poland was held up as a paragon of how a country could peacefully transition from authoritarian rule to liberal democracy.
But in its most important vote since the first, partly free election of 1989, many Poles worried that the fate of democracy itself was under threat. They turned out in record numbers, with more than 61 percent taking part in the election, the highest number since those first elections.
Leaders of the biggest opposition coalition made an appeal to wait for final results.
“This is and was a celebration of democracy,” said Grzegorz Schetyna from the Civic Coalition bloc, “though this wasn’t a fair fight; there were no rules. We didn’t feel that this was a fair fight.”
In the four years since it came power, the Law and Justice party has engaged in a bold effort to reshape the country.
It has overhauled the courts in ways that critics said undermines the rule of law, leading Poland to become the first member of the European Union to face the prospect of losing its voting rights under the bloc’s founding treaty.
State television and radio stations have been turned into government propaganda outlets as pressure on independent news media has mounted.
And leaders of cultural institutions deemed insufficiently patriotic have been condemned or forced from their jobs.
Still, Poland is not yet Hungary, much less Turkey or any other autocratic nation. Civil society remains vibrant, and there are still many critical voices in the news media.