For some time, progressive politics in Europe has looked to be in alarmingly bad shape. Around this time last autumn, voters ignored the post-fascist roots of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy movement and made her the country’s first radical right prime minister. In Hungary, a six-party opposition alliance was routed so badly last year that the doyen of national populism, Viktor Orbán, boasted his fourth successive victory could be “seen from the moon”. And so it has gone on. Slovakia has just elected, in Robert Fico, its own Orbán tribute act.
It is this pan-European context that makes Poland’s election result this week all the more remarkable, and potentially instructive. On Monday, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe reported that manipulation of state resources and media bias gave the ruling nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) a “clear advantage” over opposition parties. Its electoral strategy to win an unprecedented third term stuck to the traditional PiS playbook – maximising the votes of older and less well-off Poles outside the cities, through a combination of social spending and culture war rhetoric.
