Region: Polish PM Tusk's election lead is shrinking

As the Oct. 9 elections draw nearer, poll numbers are showing that Prime Minister Donald Tusk's ruling Civic Platform (PO) still holds a lead over the leading opposition party, Law and Justice (PiS), but the gap between the two has begun to shrink.

The most recent survey taken by pollsters Homo Homini Sept. 24 and 25 showed PO had a five-point lead over PiS, 33.1 percent to 28.1 percent. Those figures represented the closest any poll had found the two parties to be as the campaign hits its final stretch.

"The battle will be fierce and continue to the last day," Tusk said during a bus tour of the country.

Tusk's Civic Platform has continued to be Poland's most popular political party since winning the 2007 elections, and winning again Oct. 9 would make it the first political party since the fall of communism to be re-elected after its first four years in power.

Tusk has the economy on his side. Poland is the only EU country to effectively avoid falling into a recession during the financial collapse that has plagued Europe and much of the world since 2008. Poland's economy - the seventh-largest in the EU - has grown an average of 4.4 percent annually since 2007, and average wages have increased about 18 percent during that same time, according to a Sept. 14 Bloomberg report. In comparison, between 2007 and 2010, the overall EU economy grew only 0.1 percent.

But opponents have criticized Tusk and PO for merely resting on their laurels and riding the wave of strong economic policies that were put into place before they took office while meanwhile offering little in the way of substantive policies of their own.

"The policies of Donald Tusk's government are a denunciation of dreams of what Poland can be," said former Prime Minister Jarosłav Kaczyński, the head of PiS.

Political analyst Krzysztof Bobinski, president of the Unia & Polska research center in Warsaw, told Bloomberg that Tusk and PO have "become increasingly content-free. Its leaders have realized that if they put forward ideas, they might make enemies, so they mumble and promise to work hard and get less and less specific."

Kaczyński is seeing signs that his plan to hit Tusk hard on unemployment among young people is working. Kaczyński, like Tusk, has taken to the road in hopes of reaching voters, especially young voters, in smaller towns. At recent speeches, the former prime minister has floated statistics like a 25 percent unemployment rate among college graduates in hopes of luring voters under 30 years of age. He also has said that half of the country's unemployed are under 30. The results, in addition to the Homo Homini poll, have been largely positive.

A voter survey by pollster TNS OBOP released Sept. 22 showed PiS had gained four percentage points on PO, which had lost two points, cutting PO's lead to seven points. TNS OBOP had released several polls throughout the campaign that had PO's lead in the double digits.

A senior PO official told Reuters that internal party polls show PO would win by between six and eight percentage points.

PiS internal polls show the race even tighter, suggesting the election is too close to call and that either party could ultimately win with a tiny lead of between two and three points.

"The general opinion is that Kaczyński started his campaign very early, and it is beginning to pay dividends now," said Jacek Kucharczyk, head of the Polish Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw. "But despite what you're seeing in all of these various polls, I don't think the support for Kaczyński is there. The appetite for his brand of radical politics just isn't there."

Some analysts predict the outcome of the elections could come down to voter turnout. Most expect a lower turnout this year because of the relatively stable economic conditions, which many say would tend to favor PiS. If the younger voters switch their allegiance from being typically pro-PO and vote, instead, for PiS, or even stay home, PiS could benefit greatly as its core electorate is made up largely of elderly and more rural voters who can usually be counted on to get to the polls.

"What Kaczyński is counting on isn't so much that the young voters will vote for PiS, it's that they are disenchanted enough with Civic Platform that they stay home and don't vote at all," Kucharczyk said. "He is very willing to win by default, and that seems to be his strategy now."

Jack Buehrer can be reached at
jbuehrer@praguepost.com