(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
This Sunday’s Elections Could Make Poland the New Hungary [1]
['Luke Johnson', 'Omar Shaban', 'Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling', 'Matt Ford', 'Jason Linkins', 'Grace Segers', 'Michael Tomasky']
Date: 2023-10-13
According to Politico’s Poll of Polls, PiS leads Civic Coalition by 36 percent to 30 percent. Neither party is likely to win an absolute majority, forcing either to join with smaller party coalitions. Since 2015, PiS has held an absolute majority with no coalition partners in the main legislative chamber, known as the Sejm, which no other party has achieved since Poland transitioned to democracy in 1989. While the opposition won control of the Senate in 2019, it is a much weaker body than the 460-seat Sejm, where PiS currently holds 235 seats.
If it needs to form a coalition, PiS would likely join with Konfederacja, a libertarian, nationalist, and anti-Ukrainian grouping. Although Civic Coalition has not altogether ruled out an alliance with Konfederacja, it is more likely to join with two coalitions, The Left and Third Way, which it has thus far failed to unite into an opposition bloc. Much of the outcome depends on whether the smaller factions, all of which poll around 9 or 10 percent, do ultimately reach their electoral thresholds of 8 percent to enter Parliament.
On a recent afternoon, Adam Adamczyk, 38, a city councilor in Brwinów, a small town outside Warsaw, said it was hard for him as a Civic Coalition member to reach people in the pro-government media bubble. He said that some people who support PiS and watch TVP either refuse to speak with him or insult and scream at him. Others were more amenable: “Sometimes, what I can show them and what I can tell them makes them think that there can be something different,” he said. While Civic Coalition has focused on rallying crowds in big cities, Adamczyk called for focusing on rural voters: “I believe that the one and only thing [we] can do is to try to get to [PiS supporters] directly: to visit all the small towns and villages.”
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com/article/176156/sundays-elections-make-poland-new-hungary?utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social
Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/
