The pro-EU opposition is getting a majority in the parliament. Forming a government can still be difficult.
In Poland, based on partial results, the pro-EU opposition seemed to get a majority in the country’s parliament, when 80 percent of the votes had been counted on Monday.
The ex-president of the European Council Donald Hardly the coalition he assembled around his citizens’ forum was getting 52 percent of the vote.
In light of the partial results, the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) was falling behind with 37 percent of the majority.
Voter turnout in the elections was historically high, which showed the citizens’ commitment to maintaining democracy in Poland, the European Security and Cooperation Organization OSCE estimated in its statement on Monday.
Poland turning more pro-EU
Eastern European researcher Katalin Miklossy The Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki estimates that if the citizens’ forum led by Tusk and its allies form a government, there will be changes at least to Poland’s EU policy.
– If the opposition wins, it means returning to the EU line. At least Tusk’s party will probably change the course of weakening the rule of law and strengthen the institution of democracy. In Poland, it is now easier to make a turn towards the EU.
However, Miklossy highlights how pro-EU Poland would become under Tusk’s leadership. The EU’s goal to make the sharing of responsibility for refugees mandatory does not please Donald Tusk either.
– It is unlikely that the government would stand against this or at least take a very critical view of it. For a long time, it has been quite an essential question that immigrants from the Middle East and Africa should not come to Poland.
A government coalition that is too broad has a bad prognosis
Even if Donald Tusk begins to form a new government, according to Miklossy, difficulties may lie ahead. A government coalition that is too broad, where the parties come from ideologically different sides, does not promise a good forecast for the length of the reign.
– There is no tradition of consensus politics in the Eastern EU. If the coalition is too far-fetched, i.e. the left, conservatives influenced by liberalism, Christian conservatives and those more on the right are gathered together, I think it is likely that it will not have good conditions to stay together.
According to Miklossy, the situation would then be similar to Slovakia. The country had a party coalition that was too broad, which fell into its own impossibility. The coalition had no ideological ties.