The dim future of the Kaczynski brothers

The Poles saved their honor in the elections

The parliamentary elections in Poland on Sunday resulted in the defeat of the ruling Kaczynski brothers' Law and Justice (PiS) party. The CEC will announce the official election results today, but preliminary results became known by yesterday evening. They confirmed the victory of the liberal Civic Platform (CP) - 41.39%. The conservative PiS has 32.16%. The Sejm, the lower house of parliament, also included the center-left bloc of ex-President Aleksander Kwasniewski “Lefts and Democrats” (13.2%) and the Polish Peasant Party (8.93%).

The past early parliamentary elections were the longest and most widespread since 1989, when the communist regime fell in Poland. The Central Election Commission extended the voting time six times, initially due to minor technical violations and unforeseen cases. For example, in Koszalin, one gentleman was mistakenly given a list of voters along with the ballots, which was sent to the ballot box. As the election drew to a close, several polling stations in Warsaw ran out of ballot papers. The expression of will was stopped, and they had to go to the reserve fund to get additional ballots. Members of the Central Election Commission did not immediately realize that the turnout had broken all records. In the country it was 54%, in the capital - as much as 74%. But the Poles of Irkutsk set an example for everyone - 98%. True, only 35 voters were registered on the banks of the Angara.

The very first results shook the whole of Poland : the crushing victory of the opposition GP of Donald Tusk (pictured) immediately became clear, as well as the indisputable defeat of the party of the Kaczynski brothers. “Honor saved!” - ex-President Lech Walesa noted with satisfaction, calling on his compatriots the day before to “interrupt the nasty performance of the last two years and make the current government the outgoing government.” And another ex-president, Alexander Kwasniewski, summed it up in his own way: “On October 21, the IV Rzeczpospolita ended.”

The liberals will also have an overwhelming advantage in the Senate - the upper house of parliament: 60 mandates out of 100. The GP and its leader achieved a symbolic triumph in the Polish capital. More than half a million Warsaw residents voted for Donald Tusk, and about 215 thousand voted for Prime Minister and PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Residents of Polish cities preferred the SOE. In rural areas, where a third of eligible Poles live, PiS was ahead. PiS's recent allies in the ruling coalition - the populist "Self-Defense" of Andrzej Lepper and the national-Catholic "League of Polish Families" of Roman Giertych - did not receive even 2% of the votes, remaining behind the Sejm's five percent threshold.

The winning SOE, which is predicted to have 209 mandates in the 460-seat Sejm, will still not be able to rule on its own. Already yesterday morning, the leadership of the State Enterprise began constructing a new configuration of power. Since the bitter rhetoric from PiS now rules out a coalition of right-wing parties, and the Left and Democrats (LeD) immediately declared that they would become a constructive opposition, the Peasant Party becomes the most natural ally for the winners. She not only improved her percentage compared to the previous elections, but also added more than half a million voters to her tally.

Based on the election results, the post of prime minister should be taken by Donald Tusk, who has already announced his readiness to lead the government. However, another scenario cannot be ruled out. After all, President Lech Kaczynski, who is worried about his brother’s defeat, is not bound by a constitutional obligation to entrust the mission of forming a new government to the leader of the winning party. Voices have already been heard that the president would like to have his own people in the new cabinet of ministers, and in key positions - in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense. The GP doesn’t even want to think about this, because in this case, according to the party leaders, even greater chaos will arise in the country.

The State Enterprise has no shortage of highly professional personnel who were ready to take power two years ago. There are already candidates for key positions. Most likely, one of the leaders of the State Enterprise, Bronislaw Komorowski, who once headed the military department, will become the marshal of the Sejm, that is, the speaker of the lower house. The Ministry of Defense can be headed by the current chairman of the Sejm defense commission Bogdan Zdrojewski, the deputy prime minister and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs will be the secretary general and political strategist of the State Enterprise, the “brain” of the election campaign, Grzegorz Szhetyna. Radoslaw Sikorski, the Minister of Defense in the PiS government, who was dismissed by Prime Minister Kaczynski and moved to the liberal camp, is ready to become the head of Polish diplomacy.

50-year-old Donald Tusk is an experienced and sophisticated politician who loves football and never misses an opportunity to kick the ball. While still a student at the University of Gdańsk, he became involved in opposition activities and became a co-organizer of the Solidarity student committee. Then he was engaged in journalistic work, editing illegal publications. During martial law, Tusk participated in a protest strike at the famous Gdansk shipyard.

In 1989, Tusk, together with his associates, founded the Liberal Democratic Congress party, which he headed two years later. Then there were several moves among liberal parties, until the Civic Platform was founded in 2000. In the 2001 elections, the GP received 65 parliamentary seats, and Tusk became vice-marshal of the Sejm. At the next elections in 2005, he was again elected as a deputy. At the same time, in the presidential elections, having won in the first round, Tusk lost in the second to Lech Kaczynski.

Tusk is the author of over 200 publications, including the super popular book “Once Upon a Time Gdansk.” It is dedicated to the city where the still youthful-looking politician was born in 1957 into a Kashubian family, a representative of the ancient Slavic Pomor ethnic group. In the plebiscite for “Gdansk citizen of the millennium”, Mr. Tusk was in the top ten together with Lech Walesa. Tusk's wife, Małgorzata, is a historian. They have two children - 25-year-old son Michal and 20-year-old daughter Katarzyna.

Valery MASTEROV, staff correspondent for Moscow News in Warsaw, for Vremya Novostei