Elections 2023: Poland, Ecuador, New Zealand, Slovakia (redux)
In Poland, Tusk’s back with a swing to the left, as Europe breathes easier…in Ecuador, a new look...New Zealand surprises to the right…Slovakia cements its regime
Continuing our pledge at Andelman Unleashed to report and comment on every national election everywhere in the world, this week four dramatic turns of events.
Poland’s left turn
Poles went to the polls Sunday at a level never before seen in their post-communist years as a democracy and wound up delivering an earthquake to the political landscape of their nation and more broadly to Europe as well. Voters sent packing the far right that had dominated Poland for eight years, launching shivers across the European Union that at times seemed to threaten its very foundations.
Due to the heavy turnout—nearly three out of every four Polish citizens came to vote —and the presence of several complicating referenda on the ballot, final results had not yet been posted by Monday. Still, early returns and exit polls all appeared to confirm that Donald Tusk, leader of the center-left Civic Platform will return to the office of Prime Minister he occupied for seven years before leaving in 2014 to assume the presidency of the European Council.
As Raphael Minder and Barbara Erling reported from Warsaw in London’s Financial Times:
Tusk pledged during the campaign to reposition Warsaw on a firm pro-European path, restore the independence of judges and unlock billions of euros of EU funding withheld by the European Commission in a spat with the [right-wing Law & Justice] PiS government over judicial reforms. The vote is seen as the most significant election for the EU this year, potentially redefining the relationship between Brussels and the largest member state in central and eastern Europe after years of feuding. ‘This is the end of bad times. This is the end of PiS rule,’ Tusk said on Sunday night to cheering supporters. ‘We did it, for real. Poland won, democracy won.’
As it happens, Tusk’s Civic Platform came in second to the center-right, Law & Justice Party (known by its Polish acronym PiS) of Jaroslaw Kaczyński, Poland’s effective leader for the past eight years. But the balance will clearly be tipped under the fading fortunes of the hard-right Konfederacja and the advance of left-wing parties that will share power with Tusk. Together, the center-left will hold some 248 seats in the 460-member Sejm or parliament. Konfederacja held just 14 seats.
Now the question is how quickly Tusk can dismantle so many of the anti-democratic measures that PiS hammered through in its years and that got Poland into such hot water with the broader democratic framework of the 27-nation European Union—and that has already cost the country dearly. In October 2021, the EU’s top court levied a €1 million per day fine for ignoring a ruling ordering it to suspend its judicial ‘reforms’ which effectively eliminated an independent judiciary. In April, the court halved that fine since the government still left in place rules that allowed judges to be prosecuted and arrested for decisions the government didn’t care for. The fines are believed to have amounted to some €500 million to date. Some European leaders even wanted to drum the country entirely out of the EU—a precedented that many feared could unleash centrifugal forces that would imperil its very existence.
At the same time, Kaczyński’s government had seized the vast bulk of Poland’s television networks and a number of other media properties, which was seen to be giving the right-wing coalition an outsized advantage in the campaign leading up to Sunday’s elections. Along with Hungary, the Polish government was also deeply opposed to EU efforts to deal in a somewhat humane fashion with hordes of migrants that have clamored for entry. Most of these measures are now likely to be reversed by the new, liberal government.
Indeed, a number of voters were particularly put off by the addition of four loaded referenda to this weekend’s ballots including one that asked:
“Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, in accordance with the forced relocation mechanism imposed by European bureaucracy?”
The very inclusion of these amendments—core elements of the Law and Justice party platform—allowed the party to dip into state funds to subsidize the campaign. Many voters, however, saw this as a political stunt and refused to mark their ballots on these issues, which also appeared to delay the overall vote count.
There was considerable attention during the campaign given to charges of selling Polish work visas—valid for use across the EU—to African and Asian immigrants. A deputy foreign minister accused in the probe abruptly resigned and removed his candidacy for parliament on the Law and Justice line.
Tusk warned throughout the campaign that Poland would be forming a block with Hungary that could result in both countries seceding from the EU, just as Kaczyński resuscitated the old bogey-man of Nazism and Hitler’s armies that blitzkrieged across Germany touching off World War II. A victory for Tusk, he held, would mean Poland being forced to subsume its national interests to those espoused by Berlin and Brussels. Clearly, many Poles did not share this view.
Nor clearly did voters want their government to join in any fashion with Orban’s Hungary. His clout has been utterly out of proportion to its size. But if linked with the larger and more powerful Poland plus a like-minded Slovakia which seems to be installing a government cloned from the same political DNA as Hungary’s autocratic leader, Viktor Orban could have led Europe down a slippery slope into next June’s continent-wide elections for the European parliament.
Ecuador
This nation, riven by drug-trafficking violence and economic turmoil, has a new president. Daniel Roy-Gilchrist Noboa Azin won handily on Sunday over his leftist challenger Luisa Gonzalez.
He has pledged a new era for his nation that so desperately needs one and brings a unique sensibility and background.
Born in Miami, he is the 37-year-old son of a five-time (though never successful) presidential candidate Álvaro Noboa, who together have long controlled the lucrative banana trade in Ecuador. And if you think he had a lot of security protection—he still does, in the wake of the assassination in August of a leading competitor, Fernando Villavicencio, and then the subsequent assassinations in prison of seven accused of complicity in this murder.
Villavicencio had made the clearly fatal mistake of outspokenness over the ties between organized drug cartels and the government, which he pledged to eradicate, only accelerating desire for change among the electorate. This helps to explain the victory of Noboa, a center-right candidate whose victory was in sharp contrast to leftist leaders in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Bolivia, and serves as a potential model for next weekend’s contest in Argentina. That Gonzalez was hand-picked by former leftist president Rafael Correa, certainly helped her name recognition but hardly the broader feeling of a need for change among a shell-shocked population.
Fewer than 35% of Ecuadorians are fully employed—many of them in the narco-transshipment business, like the folks who prepared a shipment of nine tons of cocaine worth $660 million in a load of bananas headed to Europe and happened to be seized on arrival in Rotterdam. Meanwhile, Ecuador’s prison population surged to 40,000 in 2021 from barely 11,000 in 2009, while its murder rate soared 500% between 2016 and 2022. In the first six months of this year, some 1,390 violent deaths were recorded.
While Noboa has pledged to fix much of this, he has a tough road ahead—and consecutively two four-year terms to solve it before he is term-limited out at the ripe old age of 45.
New Zealand lurches right
In recent years, New Zealand has gone through enormous turmoil—the covid epidemic that swept through just as it thought it had avoided the brunt of the scourge. There was a terrorist attack in this resolutely nonviolent nation, even a volcanic eruption. Not to mention an economic trifecta of inflation hovering around 6%, housing shortages, and fiscal anxiety. For six complex and difficult years, Labor Party leader Jacinda Ardern steered her nation remarkably as prime minister, a term which ended suddenly and unexpectedly with her announced resignation in January and departure from parliament three months later.
No more fuel in her tank, she said, to everyone’s surprise. All of this led up to the vote Saturday when the nation suddenly lurched to the right, even hard-right, to the surprise of most.
Voters wound up giving the center-right National Party 39% of the vote and 9% to its partner, the right-wing ACT (Association of Consumers and Taxpayers) Party. Still, when it comes to seat counts, they will have a 1-seat majority in the 121-seat parliament and will form a government. However, further on the sidelines was the hard-right New Zealand First Party with 6.5% of the vote and 8 seats, and which is also expected to play a role in the new cabinet, though 20% of votes remain to be counted. Labor was the principal loser, dropping 31 of its 65 seats, which under Ardern had allowed it to rule with an absolute majority.
So, National Party leader David Luxon pledged as prime minister “to deliver a strong and stable government that is going to get things done.”
Luxon’s 100-day plan includes a host of tax cuts, especially on fuel, focusing the central bank on controlling inflation which could suggest higher interest rates ahead, a crackdown on crime with special police powers to search gang members, and then there’s his stand on abortions. He’s personally against them. But during the campaign, he vowed he’d “absolutely resign rather change abortion access.” There is much to be parsed on the new direction New Zealand might take.
Slovakia paves its route
Not so much in Slovakia as the view is beginning to come into a hard, and not terribly appealing, focus. Two weeks ago, Andelman Unleashed chronicled the unexpected win by center-right Robert Fico, who has pledged to end all arms shipments to Ukraine, even those transiting through Slovakia. Now, with barely 23% of the vote, a plurality, the victor has been seeking coalition partners, and as feared in much of Europe, he’s found at least two partners—including the far-right, pro-Russia, ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party.
It’s still up to anti-corruption campaigner, President Zuzana Čaputová whether or when to approve the coalition and swear in the new government with Fico as prime minister. It seems unlikely she will be able to resist.
As I wrote in my CNN column, Fico based much of his campaign on ending all military support to Ukraine and promoting an early ceasefire alongside peace talks with Russia—which would be most welcome by Vladimir Putin who would certainly use any such respite to rebuild his arsenal before resuming his campaign. Nationwide, Fico himself was the largest single vote-getter in Slovakia, while three of the top five in parliament are members of his anti-Ukraine Smer party. Speaking after the election, Michal Šimečka, leader of Slovakia’s pro-Ukraine Progresivne Slovensko party, which finished in 2nd place, called the result “bad news for the country.”
One of seven frontline states bordering Ukraine, Slovakia has sent considerable quantities of weapons from its own stockpiles, including its own air defense system from the capital, Bratislava. It also has a prodigious ammunition manufacturing industry that has been in the service of Ukraine from the start of the Russian invasion. Just last April, the government pledged to expand the critical artillery ammunition production five-fold to meet Ukraine’s requirements in the conflict.
More broadly, Fico himself is a close ally of other Putin-friendly European leaders, most notably Viktor Orban, prime minister of neighboring Hungary, who was one of the first to tweet his congratulations to Fico late Saturday:
“Guess who’s back! Congratulations to Robert Fico on his undisputable victory at the Slovak parliamentary elections. Always good to work together with a patriot. Looking forward to it.”
Fico, for his part, has parroted many of Putin’s core beliefs since the start of the Russian invasion. “The war in Ukraine didn’t start a year ago, it started in 2014, when Ukrainian Nazis and fascists started murdering Russian citizens in the Donbas and Luhansk,” Fico told a campaign rally.
Together, Fico and Orban—both leaders of nations which are members of the European Union and NATO—will likely form a blocklette of their own, but now without the added clout of a resurgent right wing in Poland. Still, there are powerful and rising rightwing forces elsewhere in Europe—especially Germany’s AfG party that must be reckoned with in any future electoral contests, especially for the European parliament.
We’ll be back a week from today with reportage and commentary on Argentina, choosing a new president and parliament. Plus we’ll be monitoring the fallout from today’s balloting and others around the world.
Noboa is the big ? imho .... he has a phalanx of heavily-armed troops who go everywhere with him....we can only hope!
Thank you 😊