The top candidate has established herself between a Polish and an EU flag. Malgorzata Kidawa-Blonska raises, speaks of "simple people's affairs". Their party, Koalicja Obywatelska (Citizens' Coalition, KO) dedicated their program to them.
She looks searching for the lectern, then into the crowd: "Yes, where is the program?" she asks, confused. Artificially laughed. She does not even try to improvise. Kidawa-Blonska does not kick until someone finally hands her a copy.
This scene from the election campaign reveals the bourgeois-liberal opposition in Poland: the KO, an alliance of the EU-friendly civic platform, the liberal party "Nowoczesna" and the Greens, acts brashly, insecure, with no clear agenda.
KO boss Schetyna: catastrophically unpopular
That will not be enough to drive the National Conservatives "Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc" (PiS) back from power after four years:
- With up to 42 percent approval opinion pollsters see the PiS.
- The Citizens' Coalition gets 20 percentage points less.
- Afterwards, the left stumbles with 13 percent,
- an alliance for the peasant party with six percent,
- and a far-right troop that may fail at the five-percent hurdle.
Kidawa-Blonska, the KO's top candidate, is already the last contingent of the opposition. The dignified, but not particularly well-known politician was only weeks before the election pushed to the top position - out of necessity. The reason: CO chief Grzegorz Schetyna is catastrophically unpopular.
A mistrust ranking puts him in second place, only the right-wing conspiracy theorist Janusz Korwin-Mikke trust even more Poland. On the other hand, PiS politicians such as President Andrzej Duda, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the real rulers of the country, are among the first on the popularity scale for the Poles.
DPA
CO chief Grzegorz Schetyna - catastrophically unpopular
KO boss Schetyna had already played in the civic platform rather the second fiddle. Donald Tusk, a liberal premier until 2014, had pushed him into the second rank. Only after Tusk had become EU Council President in Brussels, Schetyna could rummage forward. His style of leadership is considered authoritarian, he himself as unimaginative and uncharismatic. In a radio interview, he barely manages to enumerate the main program points of his campaign fluently, he stammered, stumbled.
"We do not know any of their political initiatives"
Schetyna and Kidawa-Blonska - so criticize even the KO actually rather devoted journalists and political scientists - would have failed to explain to the voters, what they are actually content. Climate protection? Fight against the smog? More European integration? Minority protection, gay marriage? A health reform?
"We do not know any of their political initiatives, we know nothing about their views on economic policy," writes the magazine "Wprost". The KO acts as if it has not believed for a long time in the governing party's plenitude.
The Liberals should have had an easy time. Since coming to power in 2015, the PiS has subjugated the justice system and isolated the country in the EU. It has compensated the political damage to the voters with costly but conceptless social spending - rather than really tackling reforms.
But even the mass protests against the disempowerment of the constitutional tribunal led not the liberal opposition, but extra-parliamentary initiatives. Instead of setting modern ideas against nationalist ideology, the Civic Platform relied on invoking the demon Kaczynski over and over again, the danger that PiS poses to democracy and the stability of the zloty - probably rightly but too monotonously.
PiS party relies on lush social promises
PiS has screwed back the national pathos before the election, relies on lush social promises: increase in the minimum wage, child benefit, a thirteenth pension. The message behind it is: Now the "simple Poles" are finally to reap the fruits of the boom. The sustained economic growth of around 4.5 percent will help.
An absolute majority in parliament comes in sight. This could use PiS after the election to further secure the rule. For example, by curtailing the competences of local government in the cities.
In the thriving metropolises such as Gdansk, Poznan or Wroclaw, the opposition of their liberal voters can still be halfway safe. In Warsaw not quite so. Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, actually a bearer of hope, recently informed the public too late when a sewage pipe broke in the sewers of his city. The PiS government had to send the military to prevent feces from continuing to flow unhindered into the Vistula.
