By Olivier Bault.
One could speak of a parliamentary crisis done for nothing from the point of view of the “total” opposition, that is to say of the two liberal libertarian parties backed by Brussels for a year in their attempt to organize a Maïdan in Poland, “by the foreigners and by the street”, to quote Grzegorz Schetyna, the leader of the Civic Platform (PO). As a reminder, the PO ran with the Agrarian Party PSL from 2007 to 2015. The second liberal libertarian party is the Nowoczesna Party (“Modern”, what a program!) of Ryszard Petru, a former World Bank economist which has also worked for several big private banks.
In spite of more than a year of repeated attacks by Brussels and street demonstrations (usually quite small but with a very aggressive tone and very much relayed by the media) organized by the “Defense Committee for Democracy” (KOD) (that brought at least 120,000 zlotys / €28,000 to its leader Mateusz Kijowski), a CBOS poll published on January 16 shows that the PiS conservatives are now reaching the same result as in the parliamentary elections, in October 2015: 37%, against 16% for the Civic Platform (PO) and 9% for Nowoczesna, which loses 5 points. The Nowoczesna and PO parties are the two parties which occupied the hemicycle of the Diet for nearly a month, taking turns day and night.
The chart below shows the evolution of the results of the CBOS Institute’s polls for more than a year compared to the results of the 2015/10/25 elections (squares on the left):
Prawo i Sprawiedliwość = Law and Justice (PiS, social conservative, having an absolute majority in parliament since the elections of October 2015)
Plateforma Obywatelska RP = civic Platform (PO, formerly liberal-conservative but liberal-libertarian under Donald Tusk then Ewa Kopacz)
Nowoczesna Ryszarda Petru = the Nowoczesna party of Ryszard Petru created before the 2015 elections to recover the disappointed by the scandals, liberal-libertarian
Kukiz’15 = a heterogeneous group of conservatives, patriots and nationalists
SLD = social democrats (left-wing post-communist)
PSL = agrarian / peasant party, rather conservative on the social level, used to form coalitions when there is no absolute majority (which is generally the case) since it generally governs with the highest bidder in terms of posts
