PiS set to win Poland vote but may lose Senate majority
The nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) appears to have narrowly won Poland’s legislative elections, according to preliminary results, but also to have fallen short of the landslide victory that the party would have needed to overhaul the constitution. Results released on Monday predict that PiS will retain 48 or 49 seats in the 100-member Senate, while the Civic Coalition (KO), led by the market-liberal Civic Platform (PO) party, will win 42 or 43 seats, and the rest will go to other parties and independent senators. PiS could even fall short of the 231 seats necessary to retain its majority in the more powerful 460-member lower house, the Sejm.
Opposition leader Katarzyna Lubnauer tweeted that PiS’s domination of the Senate was dead: “Thanks to the agreement of opposition parties, the opposition will have the majority.”
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Most constituencies have tallied 100% of votes. Official results are expected by late Monday. Initial results indicated that PiS, which pledged to defend nationalist and Catholic ideals and further increase welfare spending, would win a comfortable majority in the Senate.
Should the results hold, the opposition could now block or delay PiS legislation and torpedo nominations to some of Poland’s highest institutions, such as the civil rights ombudsman. Despite the uncertainty over the final results, PiS officials said the party would press on with changes to the judiciary, which critics say amount to a politicization of the courts. The European Union has yet to release an official reaction to the election results; the EU has previously taken Poland to court for gutting the judiciary and officials from across the bloc have criticized the PiS’s exclusionary policies.
‘Lack of impartiality’
According to a report from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a democracy monitor in which 57 countries participate, coverage by state media favored the PiS in the run-up to Sunday’s elections. Jan Petersen, the head of the election observation mission, said observers had noted a high level of polarization in the public and private media.
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Petersen said voters’ ability to “make an informed choice was undermined by a lack of impartiality in the media, especially the public broadcaster.” He said rhetoric used by “a number of leading political figures is of serious concern in a democratic society.”
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Recently the PiS has targeted LGBTQ+ communities to fire up its Catholic base, calling equality efforts an “invasive foreign influence” and attempting to tie them to the Soviet domination of Poland through 1989. The OSCE reports that the PiS also used state media as a mouthpiece to praise its own candidates and cast opponents in a negative light.
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In a further sign of deepening divisions the Confederation Liberty and Independence — a catchall for laissez-faire capitalists, euroskeptics and nationalists — won seats in parliament for the first time, narrowly topping the 5% threshold needed to enter the legislature.
mkg/msh (Reuters, dpa, AP)
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