WITH A RECORD PARTICIPATION, POLAND DECIDES TO CHANGE COURSE
After 100% of the votes were counted, the results of the parliamentary elections in Poland leave the current regime as the winner in number of seats, but it will be the three-party coalition led by Donald Tusk that will be able to appoint the prime minister.
According to the official results published by the National Electoral Commission, the ruling PiS party (Polish for Law and Justice) obtained 35.38 percent of the votes. It is followed by the opposition parties PO (Ccivic Platform), with 30.70 percent, Trzecia Droga (Third Way), with 14.40 percent, and Izquierda, with 8.61 percent. Then the ultra-nationalist Confederation appears, with 7.16 percent. This is what the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza says.
Law and Justice won the largest number of seats, but the opposition as a whole will have more parliamentarians and the safest option of appointing the prime minister. Poland is a country of parliamentary regime. The prime minister has the function of presiding over the cabinet of ministers, in charge of the management of the government. He is the hierarchical superior of all public officials.
Poland also has a President of the Republic, a position now held by Andrzej Duda. He is the head of state and represents the country internationally. He is elected by direct vote.
WHEN WILL THE PRIME MINISTER BE APPOINTED?
The President of the Republic must convene the first session of the new Parliament within 30 days of the proclamation of results. Then, within two weeks, you must appoint a politician of your choice to form a government. He must receive parliamentary approval for his cabinet within another 14 days. If it fails, the initiative passes to Parliament, which can use its majority to elect a candidate as prime minister. The process could last until the end of the year.
Normally, the candidate that the President proposes for Premier is the rethinker of the most voted party in the parliamentary elections. But, as in this case, the most voted party – neither by itself nor with the sum of the vote of its allies – is enough to gain the parliamentary majority, it is to be expected that the President will propose as Prime Minister the leader of the majority opposition coalition, Donald Tusk.
Despite the electoral results, according to DW, the matter is not necessarily simple, given that the current president is closer to Law and Justice, which has Jarolslaw Kaczynski as a candidate for Prime Minister, to replace his coideary who now exercises power, Mateusz Morawiecki.
On that aspect, Gazeta Wyborcza reported that Tusk already addressed President Duda in these terms: “People are waiting for the first decisions. I would like to ask the President to make energetic and quick decisions. The victorious democratic parties are in constant contact and are willing to take over the government at any time.”
Szymon Hołownia, leader of Poland 2050, who is part of the Third Way, said that he did not see great problems for the opposition parties to the current regime to reach the necessary agreements for the formation of the government and its program, he emphasized.
Hołownia emphasized that it is up to President Duda when this government can be formed. “Just listen to what 74 percent of Poles said. We would like to ask the president to take this into account. We will be ready with a basic plan (of cabinet formation among the parties of the Civic Coalition) in about a dozen days,” he added.
The great participation has been highlighted by the participants. 74.38 percent of the voters went to the polls. Such a significant participation, comparable in importance to that of 1989, when the democratic transition began, at the discretion of Maciej Strasiński, International editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, in his analysis published in EditoRed.
“The whole world was speechless to see this record of turnout,” Donald Tusk said when he thanked the voters after the results of the elections were known.
NEW DIRECTION
A regime led by Tusk would imply a change of course in Poland’s relations with the European Union. While Morawiecki and Kaczynski are of the idea of taking their country out of the Union, Tusk, on the contrary, proposes to return to the pro-European path.
During the campaign, Tusk promised to restore good relations with the EU and release the European funds frozen by Brussels due to disputes during the two legislatures of the Government of Law and Justice. It also promised to liberalize the right to abortion, in clear contradiction with the guidelines of the current regime.
Tusk was already prime minister, from 2007 to 2014, from where he made the leap to the presidency of the European Council, between 2014 and 2019.
