Separating the terrible twins

Polish democracy grew up on Sunday, when the country's voters rejected the strident, xenophobic nationalism of Jaroslav Kaczynski. The election mattered not just because it was the first time a generation born after 1989 could vote. Nor because the liberal conservative winner Donald Tusk won the strongest mandate of any prime minister in the post-communist era. It was important because it saw a new generation of voters express its impatience with a leadership that saw the rise of Poland exclusively through the prism of 20th-century invasion and occupation. Though Mr Kaczynski's twin brother Lech still holds the presidency, Poland has turned a corner.


The election of Mr Tusk's Civic Platform (PO) is not going to change Poland's foreign policy overnight. It was the PO that came up with the slogan "Nice or death" in the row over the voting rights that Warsaw had initially won at the Nice Treaty. Poland will remain critical of the EU and distrustful of Vladimir Putin's Russia. It will agree to the deployment of a missile defence base in the north-west of the country, but the man tipped to be its foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, will demand a higher price for Warsaw's acquiesence in terms of the modernisation of the Polish armed forces. Poland will still defend its national interests, with more pragmatism and less of the damaging anti-German rhetoric.

Lech Kaczynski remains in power, and it is one of the ironies of his brother's defeat that he will have to appoint a new prime minister. Before the election, he threatened to use his power of veto to block any legislation he did not agree with. If he carried out this threat, he would only be broadening the coalition of support that Civic Platform would enjoy in parliament. The government will be formed from a coalition of Civic Platform and the Peasants' party. This would be enough to secure a parliamentary majority but not the 60% of votes needed to overcome a presidential veto. If this happened, the Left and Democrats - an alliance of social democrats and former communists who hate the Kaczynskis more than most - are expected to vote with the government.

Poland is now politically more coherent. Gone are the teetering coalitions that threatened to collapse at the first whiff of scandal. Gone too from parliament are unsavoury extremist parties like the populist Self-Defence or rightwing League of Polish Families. Their vote collapsed from 18% at the last election two years ago to just over 3%. In its place is a parliament dominated by three factions: the liberal conservatism of Civic Platform, the nationalism of Mr Kaczynski's Law and Justice party, and the centre-left social democrats. If it looks like any other country, it is a measure of how far Poland has travelled.