MIRACLES ARE possible, even in Warsaw. Arriving at the city’s main train station last week, I was bowled over by how this glum, hulking communist monstrosity, with a lick of paint and a little love, is on its way back to being a striking example of 1970s architecture.
For years after the collapse of communism, Warsaw seemed to be the one eastern bloc capital immune to the spit-and-polish charms of capitalism. But now, in the city as in the train station, a slow transformation is gathering momentum.
Tidy boulevards, bright facades and new shops are all visible proof of how, in the generalised economic crisis, Poland has powered ahead as the only European economy not to enter recession.
Another invisible miracle takes place tomorrow: for the first time since 1989, a Polish government has completed its term, intact, without collapsing. Not just that, the centre-right Civic Platform (PO) and its leader, prime minister Donald Tusk, have a good chance of returning to power, another first.
For two decades, Polish politics has been a rollercoaster of recriminations where parties that took office at one election were often annihilated by voters at the next, inevitably premature, ones.
Now Polish politics is in real danger of becoming dull or, in more political parlance, stable. Walking around Warsaw or watching television, it’s hard to believe an election is going on. But Mr Tusk is taking nothing for granted.
“This election is a very serious, fundamental dispute over Poland’s future, one I am determined to win,” he says.
He is hoping voters will reward his party’s sober years in power, its efforts to bury the hatchet with Russia and Germany, and its solid hand on the economic tiller in choppy European waters.
Critics say Mr Tusk would prefer to do nothing rather than take a chance and that the PO has fallen short of its economic reform and privatisation goals.
The party’s political honeymoon could end during a second term though if its old coalition partner, the Peasant Party, fails to make it back into parliament. Forced to find a new partner, it might turn to the Democratic Left (SLD). Such an alliance would make it more difficult for Mr Tusk’s PO to keep up the double act of appealing to both traditional-conservative voters and modern-liberal constituencies.
If there is one lesson of modern Polish politics, however, it is this: never say never. Despite the glow of power, and the reflected glory of the ongoing European presidency, polls show Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s national conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party just eight points behind Mr Tusk’s PO.
Mr Kaczynski rose to power in 2005 on the vote of millions of disaffected citizens outside Warsaw who felt left behind by the transition to capitalism. But the memory of his erratic two-year coalition has, for many voters, been eclipsed by last year’s “catastrophe”.
After a plane carrying his brother, President Lech Kaczynski, and dozens of dignitaries crashed near Smolensk in Russia in April 2010, PiS officials galvanised support by claiming that the crash – ruled an accident by investigators – was proof that shadowy foreign forces were still at work Poland, undermining the country’s independence.
At first it looked like PiS was gearing up for a Smolensk-dominated election campaign, recruiting relatives of survivors to run all over the country on a sympathy vote. Then the surprise. In glossy magazines, young, leggy PiS candidates in fashionable frocks appeared in full-page political advertisements indistinguishable from “get that look” editorial spreads.
These are “Kaczynski’s Angels”, helping the PiS leader chase the younger vote. In speeches he has attacked high youth unemployment – as high as 25 per cent among graduates – as a “denunciation of the dreams of what Poland could be”.
As well as the youth vote, analysts say Mr Kaczynski’s uncharacteristically mild-mannered campaign is an attempt to disincentivise PO voters, lulling them into staying at home on election day.
“The dirty trick of this campaign is that there aren’t any,” said Dr Jaroslaw Zbieranek, political analyst at Warsaw’s Institute for Public Affairs.
Perhaps the greatest danger Mr Tusk faces is that many of the urban, educated voters who should be natural PO voters are disillusioned. “I don’t know who to vote for: the PO are just business people and technocrats with no convictions,” says Jakub Zawisza, a manager from Warsaw. He is considering backing Janusz Palikot, an ex-PO champion of gay rights, legalising marijuana and an end to compulsory religious education.
If Mr Palikot takes votes from the PO and SLD, Mr Tusk might be forced to cobble together an unstable coalition that would struggle to agree on reforms, while euro membership would be kicked further down the road. On Sunday, Polish voters face the choice of welcoming back the old ghost of political instability or exorcising it for good.
Polls give PO stable lead over conservative rivals
THE RULING centre-right Civic Platform (PO) party has over recent days maintained a stable lead over its main rival, the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS), ahead of tomorrow’s election.
PO will receive 35 per cent and PiS 27 per cent, according to an opinion poll by Estymator conducted for the Polish edition of the Newsweek magazine.
A new libertarian party set up by a former PO lawmaker, Palikot’s Support Movement (RPP), came in third in the survey with 12.5 per cent.
Other parties set to win more than the 5 per cent needed to enter parliament are Tusk’s current junior coalition partner, the Peasants Party (PSL), with 10 per cent, and the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), with 8 per cent.