112 - Democracy Occasionally Triumphs: Poland is a Possible Harbinger
Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala
Now and then amid the brutal war in Ukraine and the savage assaults on Israel and Gaza, there are inklings of what we might call promising news. The most exciting is the victory of the center-left free-thinking coalition in Poland, with 248 in the 460-seat Sejm, the lower house of parliament, compared to 194 for the outgoing PiS crypto-fascist party that has ruled Poland for disappointing eight years.
Donald Tusk is likely to lead an array of four democratically inclined parties, who together obtained 53 percent of the total vote, with his KO or Civic Platform, the largest and most experienced of those who were stridently opposed to the decidedly right-wing party – PiS or Law and Justice -- led by tight-lipped, churlish, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. “Poland won, democracy won,” declared Tusk.
Tusk was prime minister before, from 2007 to 2014, before Kaczynski and his associates plunged Poland backwards to become a thorn in the side of European integration and democracy. Fortunately, he put Poland decisively on Ukraine’s side, funneling war materiel, financing, and agricultural supplies to Kyiv in the darkest early days of Putin’s invasion. His government also admitted more than 1 million Ukrainians, sheltering them from Russian bombings. But very recently, for electoral purposes, Kaczynski (who ran the Polish government as party leader, with a puppet prime minister and cabinet ostensibly in charge) refused to let Ukrainian grain exports pass through Poland, and said (later rescinded) that he would interfere with military shipments across their common border.
The parliamentary election in Poland was thus about supporting Ukraine to the hilt or pulling back. The Tusk alliance drew support because of its promised solidarity with Ukraine against Russia, but also because youthful voters and urban electors had tired of PiS’ relentless protection of antiquated social mores, and because of its many battles with the rest of Europe over subsidies and the openness of elections. It relentlessly spewed false propaganda through the media that it has long controlled.
Tusk’s coalition drew support from cities and from young people, Kaczynski’s from Poland’s rural heartland. Kaczynski welcomed Ukrainians but closed most doors (especially those on the edge of Belarus) to outsiders. Tusk’s outlook is more advanced, more cosmopolitan, and more outward looking. After losing the premiership and leaving Poland in 2015, he became president of the European Council.
This was Poland’s most important election since Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Movement loosened the Soviet grip and led Poland out of Moscow’s clutches in 1989. A high total of 74 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in this month’s balloting. Likewise, an unprecedented 69 percent of voters under 29 trooped to the polls, with PiS coming in dead last among that age group of voters.
If the democratic coalition had not won so decisively, and if PiS continued to hold power in Poland, any full return to democracy and to the happy embrace of the European Union would have been impossible. PiS has over a decade disassembled the democracy of 1989-2014. It leaned more and more in an autocratic direction, greatly limiting the autocracy of the judiciary, installing partisan right-wingers throughout the bureaucracy, and helping to elect a conservative, Andrzej Duda, as Poland’s mostly ceremonial president. Duda will be able, however, to slow or even attempt to push aside Tusk’s premiership by giving PiS a first opportunity to form a government. When that fails for want of support, he may maneuver in other ways to deter Tusk’s ability to establish an effective government.
But once the Tusk coalition’s overwhelming numerical superiority is accepted, Poland should be able persistently to restore democracy to Poland, find ways of strengthening democratic practices for the longer term, reinstate Poland within the good graces of the EU, and further assist Ukraine. Tusk promises to end efforts in Warsaw to turn Poland into a copy of President Viktor Orban’s Hungary, who recently traveled to Beijing to be with Putin and Xi Jinping at China’s Belt and Road summit. Tusk can also unlock $37 billion in post-Covid aid held by the EU because of PiS’ anti-democratic machinations.
Tusk’s democratic instincts and leadership will also distinguish Poland from Slovakia, which recently elected a right-wing government led by Robert Fico, an Orban ally. (Fortunately, Slovakia’s much more liberal, democratic President Zuzana Caputova, has refused to accept the worst of Fico’s nominated fascist colleagues for a cabinet seat.)
Throughout these mostly positive democratic maneuverings in Poland, Putin publicly and crystal clearly made his antagonism to anything that smacked of the rule of law, respect for sovereignty, and world order. In at meeting in Sochi on Russia’s Black Sea coast he dismissed the rules-based global order as a “boorish” Western mockup. The era of global rules, he said, “is long over and will never return.” He praised his own “new world” and thoroughly rejected the West’s idea of the rule of law as “some kind of nonsense.” His actions in Ukraine and his support for Hamas long painted Putin as a tyrant. His tirade in Sochi only made those in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America who would take Putin’s side more fully enemies of freedom in the world.
We knew Russia’s disdain for honest dealings long ago. Orban and Xi support him. But now at least Poland is back firmly in the democratic corner, backing the massive freedom struggle in Ukraine.
Other Positive Electoral Returns
Argentina
Argentinians did better than opinion polling before Sunday’s election predicted. They backed Economy Minister Sergio Massa (36.7 percent) over madcap libertarian dog-cloner Javier Milei (30 percent), a nasty critic of the Pope who wants to dollarize the country’s economy (not a bad idea) and to slash most state expenditures to the bone. Voters in Argentina presumably believed that Massa was steadier and less of a dangerous bomb-thrower. The run- off between the two contenders takes place on Nov. 19.
Ecuador
Daniel Noboa handily won the presidency outright in Ecuador over Louisa Gonzalez, a protégé of left-wing former President Rafael Correa, who lives in exile in Belgium. Noboa is the wealthy heir to a banana exporting fortune. But he is very young (35) and was educated at New York University, with graduate master’s degrees from Northwestern University, Harvard University, and George Washington University, the first two in business administration, the second two in public communications and administration.
Although leaning rightwards, Noboa may be able to reduce the rampant grand corruption that has long pervaded officialdom in his South American land. His biggest problem will be ridding Ecuador of the Colombian cocaine smuggling gangs that have in recent years penetrated his country and are responsible for the episodes of extreme violence and prison massacres that have engulfed Ecuador. Crime has risen to lofty levels never before experienced in Ecuador.
Guatemala
In Guatemala, still abysmally corrupt to its core, a professorial reformer -- Bernardo Arévalo – surprisingly triumphed in August’s election. He doesn’t take office until Jan. 7, however, and ever since his electoral victory, the corrupt cabal that previously ruled the Central American polity has been working non-stop (despite stern words from Secretary of State Antony Blinken) to block Arévalo’s path to high office. The attorney general keeps inventing one spurious reason after another to subvert his presidency.
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