On 30 September, the people of Slovakia elected a new Parliament. Over the last few days, their Greek, Luxembourg and German counterparts have also voted. On Sunday next, 15 October, general elections will be held in Poland. The Dutch will choose their elected representatives on 22 November.
These elections are not all equally important. In Greece, the so-called “local” elections of 8 October concern municipalities, but also the governance of 13 regions. They are unlikely to have much of an effect on the right-wing government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who won an absolute majority in the national parliament in June of this year, but will nonetheless serve as a useful indicator of the state of public opinion after a summer of one disaster after another.
In Germany, two regional elections were held on the same day, one in the largest federal state (or Land) of the country, Bavaria (9.4 million voters, 180 Bundestag members) and the other in Hesse (4.3 million voters, 110 members). They were a litmus test for the federal government of Olaf Scholz, which is made up of Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Liberals (FDP). Traditionally, both Länder are fiefdoms of opposition parties (the CSU and the CDU respectively) and will continue to be so, with clear victories; equally traditionally, the SPD does poorly here. The outcome was the amount of ground lost by the Greens and the FDP, which was fighting for survival – hence the recent tensions within the government and with the EU, for instance over the “green car” (see EUROPE at 13144/1). In both elections, the results show a loss of seats for the three components of the coalition and a gain for the far-right party (AfD), which ended up in second place in Hesse and third in Bavaria. As for the FDP, the biggest loser, with 3%, it will no longer be represented in the Bavarian parliament and will only just be in the Hessian one. As the Greens managed to limit the damage, the balance of power within the Scholz will change, which is likely to spark additional problems.
In a much smaller country (660,800 inhabitants) meanwhile, a general election was being held: 60 members of Parliament to be elected in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. In 2018, the leader of the Liberal party (DP, 12 seats), Xavier Bettel, managed to hang onto his post as prime minister by entering into a coalition with the Socialists and Greens, even though the Christian Social Party (CSV) won the highest number of seats (21). With effect from Sunday evening, this coalition no longer has a majority, due to the decline of the Greens from 9 seats to 4, while the other political groups made a little progress: 29 seats in total is not enough. This means that either the outgoing majority will have to bring another of the smaller parties on board (but the one with the most votes (6) is the populist-leaning ADR), or the CSV (21 seats) must manage to put together a different coalition. The suspense is mounting: there is no guarantee that Xavier Bettel will continue to belong to the European Council.
In that regard, things are far clearer in the Netherlands, where the outgoing prime minister, the Liberal Mark Rutte, is leaving politics altogether. According to the most recent opinion polls (albeit with more than a month still to go before the election), the ‘eco-socialist’ list headed up by the former Vice-President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, would appear to be ahead by a nose.
But now let us turn our attention to Central and Eastern Europe, where the stakes are even higher. In Slovakia, the early general elections of 30 September ended with victory for the SMER party and its leader, Robert Fico. He had already served as prime minister, for a long time and with many worrying turns of events: in 2006, an alliance with the far right, earning him a temporary exclusion from the PES (see EUROPE 9286/6) and then, in 2018, his resignation following the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak, who was investigating his Mafia-like practices, a matter of national significance at the very least (see EUROPE 11987/29). In the elections of February 2020, the centre-right, pro-European opposition party, having campaigned on an anti-corruption ticket, managed to oust the SMER, but the new government was plagued by instability: three prime ministers and approval ratings in freefall.
With 23% of votes cast, Fico is back in power and the President of the Republic, Zuzana Čaputová (Social-Liberal) doubtless took little pleasure in asking him to form the new government. But it would all be academic if the once Socialist SMER had not turned populist and its leader had not triumphed on the back of a very worrying campaign theme: there are more important things to do than to help Ukraine, let’s be friends again with Russia, let’s stop migrants, let’s make sure we don’t get had by the European Union, etc… In other words, Fico has morphed into a ‘mini Orbán’ and there are many in European circles who would secretly rejoice if he failed to gather a majority. Over the European Parliament, the S&D is still thinking about whether to exclude the SMER (see EUROPE 13263/24).
But the most important of all are still ahead of us: the general elections to take place in Poland this coming Sunday. The notoriously Conservative and Eurosceptic PiS party, in power since 2015, is hoping to win a third term of four years. Its United Right coalition is still the favourite in opinion polls, but hot on its heels comes the centrist ‘Civic Coalition’, led by the former President of the European Council and former Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, who has been subjected to vicious verbal attacks by the current leaders. This did not prevent him from pulling off mass rallies, the most recent of which, held on 1 October, is believed to have brought 1 million people to the streets of Warsaw. It can be deduced from this that much of the population has had enough of a government they see as authoritarian and corrupt, which politicises justice, has targeted the right to abortion, is openly hostile to the LGBTQ community, has alienated the European Union and racked up numerous condemnations from its Court of Justice, amongst other things for flouting the rule of law.
As other parties may come on board the Civic Coalition, the powers that be fear that they will lose their overall majority; it is therefore stepping up the nationalist rhetoric and trying to consolidate the support of the farming community – hence the decision to close the country’s borders to imports of Ukrainian cereals and even the one to stop supplying Ukraine with arms, having initially lent it wholehearted support. This all suggests a certain feverishness. And as you would expect, Warsaw is not for swallowing the agreements of the Council of the EU in the framework of the European Migration Pact. We already had a taste of this at the informal European summit of Granada, when Prime Minister Morawiecki came out once again with his anti-European, xenophobic narrative, denouncing “diktats from Brussels and Berlin”. (see EUROPE 13266/2). On the sidelines of the parliamentary elections, the Poles will also be consulted in four referendums, one of them on migration (see EUROPE 13234/34), in a move that has been criticised by the opposition.
The Poles are being asked to make an historical political choice. Their democracy is in danger. If it is to overcome the enormous challenges it faces, the European Union needs loyal members, in the West but also in the East, where the largest of them has considerable influence.
Renaud Denuit