Dem
51
GOP
49
While folks in Louisiana and New Zealand voted on Saturday, the good people of Poland cast their ballots on Sunday. We could have sworn that Poland is overwhelmingly Catholic, and that Catholics are supposed to be busy with other things on Sundays, but maybe we were misinformed.
For the last 8 years, the country has been led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his far-right Law and Justice Party (LJP). The LJP has stacked the courts with friendly judges, imposed strict limits on abortion, cracked down on LGBTQ rights, tried to silence media critics and pursued an isolationist-leaning foreign policy. Perhaps this platform sounds familiar.
The main challenger in Sunday's election was former prime minister Donald Tusk of the Civic Platform (CP), who said this election was about the future of democracy. That's right, a former national leader named Donald T. is the country's best hope for saving democracy. That's not a sentence you write every day. In any case, Tusk and the CP are right-wing, just not as far right as LJP. And note that we are using English-language acronyms because the Polish-language acronym for LJP is very close to the thing that the vice presidency is not worth a warm bucket of.
It is actually going to take a while for the results to be finalized, but exit polls suggest that the LJP lost its comfortable majority, and will end up with about 37% of the seats in the Polish Parliament. The CP will end up with about 32%. However, the other 31% of the seats are largely going to parties more likely to work with CP than with LJP. So, it is more likely than not that Tusk will regain the PM job. If so, then it means all three notable elections this weekend ended up being "throw the bums out" elections. (Z)