Poland Floats Snap General Polls If Presidential Vote Plan Fails
Poland Warns Snap General Election Possible If Coalition Splits
(Bloomberg) -- Poland’s government warned it may call snap general elections if its plan fails to hold a virus-lockdown presidential vote via a disputed and untested mail-in ballot process this month.
The ruling Law & Justice party, which is backing President Andrzej Duda for re-election, is struggling to push through legislation to allow the vote, currently scheduled for Sunday, to happen only by mail and by May 23. It’s facing resistance from lawmakers inside the governing coalition, who have threatened to join opposition forces in torpedoing the bill.
The dispute comes as international election monitors, the outgoing head of the Supreme Court and Poland’s human-rights ombudsman warn that limiting the contest to mail-in ballots and sidelining thousands of local election committees in favor of govermnent-picked commissioners may invite fraud and leave hundreds of thousands of Poles unable vote.
“An early election can’t be excluded,” Michal Dworczyk, Premier Mateusz Morawiecki’s chief of staff, told public radio Wednesday, referring to a snap parliamentary vote that may be a consequence of lawmakers rejecting the legislation. “Maybe some lawmakers are counting on joining the ranks of the opposition to create a new majority.”
Tug-of-War
The parliamentary vote on how and when to hold the presidential election, scheduled for Thursday, is shaping up to be the most difficult test for the nationalists since they took power in 2015.
While they have overseen robust economic growth, they also led Poland into unprecedented conflict with the European Union over the rule of law after judicial overhauls that critics say amount to an undemocratic power grab.
While the opposition has called on the government to delay the presidential election because the lockdown has curtailed their campaigns and they want to prevent further contagion, there’s also dissent within the coalition’s ranks. A group of lawmakers allied with former deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Gowin now endorse delaying the presidential ballot until the pandemic passes.
“We won’t know who’ll win this tug-of-war until the last minute,” said Antoni Dudek, a political scientist at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw. “But Law & Justice knows that a loss would weaken its grip on power and sow political chaos.”
Opinion polls show Law & Justice is popular and that its handling of the outbreak -- including a stimulus program worth at least 14% of gross domestic product -- has generally been praised. Still, holding a snap parliamentary poll would require dissolving parliament, a move that would need opposition support.
State of Emergency?
Duda is projected by surveys to win re-election if the presidential vote is held this month, helped by his high-profile image in media of leading the virus response. But his support will probably suffer once economic pain from the virus lockdown hits millions of Polish workers.
If Law & Justice fails to push through the legislation for the presidential vote, it can raise the level of the country’s state of emergency, which would automatically delay the ballot. While the government has repeatedly rejected that option, party member and Senator Jan Maria Jackowski said Wednesday that it was becoming an increasingly “rational” solution.
In another twist, lower house Speaker Elzbieta Witek on Wednesday asked the country’s Constitutional Tribunal if she can change the date of the election based solely on what’s in the country’s constitution, without the latest legislation which appears stuck in parliament. The appeal, which is without precedent, could delay the vote to May 23 and give Law & Justice more time to gain a majority for its only-by-post ballot.
The whole ordeal is risking reputational damage if Poland holds an election that doesn’t meet “the highest international standards,” according to Piotr Matys, an analyst at Rabobank in London.
“Poland’s reputation as a properly functioning democratic country could be severely undermined, which would have negative long-term consequences,” he said.
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