The first thing I did when I arrived in Poland two weeks ago was to go to a polling place. It was Sunday, there were presidential elections, and my friend needed to vote before we went to a concert in the evening.
She was undecided as she entered her old elementary school: should she vote for the current president, who at least has an administration in place? Should she register a protest vote in disgust over the lack of decent candidates and return the entire ballot with names struck out?
Much as she might have wanted to express her disgust, it was not in her interest to do so -- if no clear winner emerged after the first round, she reasoned, there would be a second round, and the cost of the polling would come out of the state budget, and therefore the taxpayers' pockets.
In the end, turnout was even less than usual, under 50%, and those voters were split. The winner was Andrzej Duda, who at 42 has the tight skin of a younger Vladimir Putin. Just behind him was the current president, Bronisław Komorowski, with the pop star Paweł Kukiz coming in third (called by one Polish website "the most charismatic vocalist and songwriter of the last two decades of the 20th century").
There were 124,000 invalid ballots -- people who chose to protest, but couldn't bear to vote for a singer?
There will be another election this Sunday between Duda and Komorowski. (Kukiz received 20% of the vote -- more, thank goodness, than the candidate who had promised to legalize child pornography, but still...) Having coffee with one of my former students this morning, I asked him about the protest vote, and he admitted that he himself had cast a protest vote for Kukiz. We can only hope that the leading candidates -- and future Polish politicians -- are paying attention.
It has been hard for me to interpret the political situation in Poland, since my Polish is none too fluent, but I will say a couple of things. First, Komorowski seems to be on the right path with statements such as "the nation of victims was also the nation of perpetrators." The war continues to be a charged subject in Poland, but it is important to try to make people accountable for their actions, and maintaining the 19th century "Poland as victim" narrative exclusively is simply counterproductive. From the news that flashes on subway trains, it seems that the general feeling is with Komarowski here. I was able to decipher "Duda gra kartę żydowskiej": "Duda plays the Jewish card."
Second, the immediate reaction to the low voter turnout was a campaign to hit the record this coming Sunday. Voters all over the world -- from London to New York to Brasilia, and of course all over Poland -- will get the chance to beat the 21st century record of 61.08% in 2000. The Facebook crowd seems to be aiming for something higher.
My student missed last night's televised debates and tried to chat up a girl at the bus stop to find out what happened, but she was not dishing. "This is my private business," she said, and refused to talk about her politics.
He wasn't asking about her own politics, though -- he just wanted her description of how things went. His impression (like mine) is that the debates aren't doing any good; from his Twitter feed it seemed like pro-Dudaites claimed Duda had won, while the Civic Platform supporters claimed it for Komarowski. (For analysis and the WWII discussions, see here.) Upon reaching home, my student turned on the television to try to assess the situation and had the same experience I had (for which one had no need of understanding the Polish language) -- the round table discussions of the representatives of various political parties were shouting over each other so loudly that there was no telling what they were saying. Democracy in action?
I've been taking photos of the graffiti I see while I've been here, and the below is one of my favorites:
My student is convinced that there is (at least) one good thing about politics in America -- we are not afraid to announce who we are for. (The thought of yard signs had him positively tickled.) Poland will not have real democracy, he says, until Poles begin to live democracy. He assessed the situation this way: "It's not just something that you achieve and then say, okay, we've got democracy, what about free markets? what else should we get and put on the shelf?" Graffiti is not the same as yard signs and bumper stickers, but maybe it is a start.
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| There were a lot of names on that election list! |
Much as she might have wanted to express her disgust, it was not in her interest to do so -- if no clear winner emerged after the first round, she reasoned, there would be a second round, and the cost of the polling would come out of the state budget, and therefore the taxpayers' pockets.
In the end, turnout was even less than usual, under 50%, and those voters were split. The winner was Andrzej Duda, who at 42 has the tight skin of a younger Vladimir Putin. Just behind him was the current president, Bronisław Komorowski, with the pop star Paweł Kukiz coming in third (called by one Polish website "the most charismatic vocalist and songwriter of the last two decades of the 20th century").
There were 124,000 invalid ballots -- people who chose to protest, but couldn't bear to vote for a singer?
There will be another election this Sunday between Duda and Komorowski. (Kukiz received 20% of the vote -- more, thank goodness, than the candidate who had promised to legalize child pornography, but still...) Having coffee with one of my former students this morning, I asked him about the protest vote, and he admitted that he himself had cast a protest vote for Kukiz. We can only hope that the leading candidates -- and future Polish politicians -- are paying attention.
It has been hard for me to interpret the political situation in Poland, since my Polish is none too fluent, but I will say a couple of things. First, Komorowski seems to be on the right path with statements such as "the nation of victims was also the nation of perpetrators." The war continues to be a charged subject in Poland, but it is important to try to make people accountable for their actions, and maintaining the 19th century "Poland as victim" narrative exclusively is simply counterproductive. From the news that flashes on subway trains, it seems that the general feeling is with Komarowski here. I was able to decipher "Duda gra kartę żydowskiej": "Duda plays the Jewish card."
Second, the immediate reaction to the low voter turnout was a campaign to hit the record this coming Sunday. Voters all over the world -- from London to New York to Brasilia, and of course all over Poland -- will get the chance to beat the 21st century record of 61.08% in 2000. The Facebook crowd seems to be aiming for something higher.
My student missed last night's televised debates and tried to chat up a girl at the bus stop to find out what happened, but she was not dishing. "This is my private business," she said, and refused to talk about her politics.
He wasn't asking about her own politics, though -- he just wanted her description of how things went. His impression (like mine) is that the debates aren't doing any good; from his Twitter feed it seemed like pro-Dudaites claimed Duda had won, while the Civic Platform supporters claimed it for Komarowski. (For analysis and the WWII discussions, see here.) Upon reaching home, my student turned on the television to try to assess the situation and had the same experience I had (for which one had no need of understanding the Polish language) -- the round table discussions of the representatives of various political parties were shouting over each other so loudly that there was no telling what they were saying. Democracy in action?
I've been taking photos of the graffiti I see while I've been here, and the below is one of my favorites:
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| Poles, protest! |
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