The 2018 regional elections in Poland

ABSTRACT

Regional elections in Poland have traditionally been depicted as a highly nationalized affair, with state-wide parties receiving the vast majority of seats and the campaign replicating the patterns of party competition at the national level. The 2018 regional elections were no exception. Run in the heat of national political conflict, the campaign was a test for the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party before the 2019 elections to the Polish and European parliaments. While receiving the largest vote share nationwide, PiS gained the majority of seats in 6 of 16 regional parliaments, but failed to win the mayoral race in Poland’s ten largest cities. The novelty of the 2018 vote lay mostly in the unusually high turnout figures, which marks a more general trend in recent elections in Poland at all levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Poland
• elections
• political parties
• regions
• local government

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In Poland the generic term self-government elections (wybory samorządowe) is used to denote both regional and local elections. If one wants to distinguish regional from local elections, one speaks of elections to sejmik wojewódzki (the name of the regional assembly). The term regional parliament is rarely used (with the term parliament reserved in the Polish political culture for the national level).

2 In 2019, there were 2477 communes and 380 powiats (including 66 cities and towns).

3 While a number of changes were introduced before the 2018 elections, they are not relevant to the topics discussed in this paper, as they mostly concerned municipal elections.

4 Of 107 towns and cities, KO won in 28, SLD in 7, PiS in 5 and Kukiz’15 and PSL in one each (based on official data). The remaining winners were independent candidates, though many of them were supported either formally or informally by the state-wide parties.

5 The name literally translates into Nonpartisan local government activists.

6 The media reported on PiS attempts to convince councillors in many regional assemblies, particularly from the PSL, to defect to their party.