In politics, as in the weather, forecasts can be unreliable. utilizing the last day of the run before the parliamentary elections, however, I decided to make a tiny speculation and thus effort to answer the question – what will the Polish Sejm look like after the election and who will win the majority there?
The following electoral forecast was based on respective factors which were auto-balanced and combined into a single projection. Their usage only makes sense in consolidated organization systemsand this is undoubtedly the Polish agreement. Since 2005, the power has been exercised by the Law and Justice or Citizens' Platform, choosing only number or marginal coalitions. 4 of the 5 current committees form parties that have existed on the political phase for at least 18 years.
What, then, was utilized for the results forecast below? Firstly, the average results of all 5 nationwide committees from these laboratories were taken into account, which published in the last 3 weeks at least 3 surveys based on the same methodology. They were: Kantar, IBRIS, Social Changes, with the most polls published by IBRIS. Where they have emerged, growth or decline trends in the declared endorsement and their possible evolution until 13 October 2019.
Interestingly, electoral polls The main studios showed no crucial change in the statements of support for the individual committees following the debates on "large antennas" of TVP and TVN. A slight decrease in support for the Civic Coalition and a simultaneous subtle increase in support for the SLD Committee may besides well be a consequence of mediocre performances by representatives of the main opposition formation, as well as the speech of Lech Wałęsa, who at the KO convention caused shock and amazement by the words about the late Cornelius Morawiecki.
Similarly, it is hard to speculate about the reasons for stabilising or even strengthening support for the Law and Justice – whether it is more the effect of performances by Marcin Horala in TVN and Szymon Szynkowski a.k. Sęk on the TOK FM radio (at which, notabene, was compromised by Rafał Grupiński from KO), or changes in the rhetoric of the full run since the beginning of October. In the last case, a clear turn towards conservative values was initiated by Jarosław Kaczyński during a number of regional PiS conventions. Unfortunately, there are no circumstantial legislative announcements to defend Christian values and household rights. This is simply a typically instrumental play, which in fresh days of the run is intended to encourage participation in the “hard” PiS electorate election. The probable origin of this tactical change is survey of the degree of mobilisation of individual electorates, in which PiS supporters declared a much lower average degree of determination to participate in the vote against the KO and SLD voters (Lewica).
The cyclical investigation into the support of political parties in the electoral campaign, of course, has any flaws that disturb their explanation and mention to the political situation. The publication of the polls is sometimes delayed in relation to individual events made public on a national scale, which immediately alter actual support for a peculiar committee. The problem is besides the percent of the undecided (in the polls of the last week of the election run it remains at 8-10 percent), since at the polls of the undecided ones there is no longer – then there are votes for circumstantial committees or candidates, and the percent of the invalid votes is always much lower than the undecided polls.
For these reasons, the electoral forecast besides includes the number of votes cast on the presently moving groups from the October 2015 parliamentary elections and the May 2019 European Parliament elections.
In forecasting the absolute scale of support, attendance plays a key role. The typical option here assumes 53 percent presence at ballot boxes, which is about 15.96 million decently cast votes. It is hard to presume that the overall attendance evidence will be beaten after 1989, although mainstream media say that the mobilisation of individual electorates has reached a very advanced level. Well, the same was stated in all elections after 2007, but this did not always translate into attendance above 50 percent (vide 2011). In this case, we presume that on Sunday there will be a vote of 2 percent more voters than in 2015 and 4 percent more than in 2011. The level of 53% corresponds to the level of mobilisation from the early parliamentary elections in 2007, erstwhile the PiS lost power to the later PO-PSL coalition.
Electoral Forecast – elections to the Sejm on 13 October 2019:
Law and Justice – United Right – 44.6%
Civil Coalition – 28.3%
Alliance of the Democratic Left – Left – 12.4%
Polish People's organization – Coalition Poland – 6.8%
Confederation of Freedom and independency 4.8%
Forecast turnout53%.
On the basis of polls and forecasts, no binding conclusions should be drawn on the division of seats in the Sejm, as the Polish electoral law provides for the existence of districts with different number of mandates, and besides due to the fact that in individual districts the division of mandates is very diverse, established and importantly different from the consequence on a national scale, which has been mentioned for years as a division into Poland A and Poland B or Poland PiS and Poland Platform.
However, if we mention to the above forecast to a balanced distribution of votes and the allocation of mandates according to the statutory d’Hondt method for all 41 districts, then the following political representations should take place in the fresh Sejm:
Law and Justice – United Right – 223 mandates
Civil Coalition – 141
Democratic Left Alliance – Left – 62
Polish People's organization – Coalition Poland – 34
As can be seen, the forecast predicts that the PiS will get 8 mandates below the threshold of an independent majority. In the absence of the Confederate Committee, the governing Law and Justice Committee, it takes a small more, due to the fact that 46 percent of the vote to get specified an absolute majority (231 seats or more).
With a 53% turnout, the vote threshold needed to participate in the parliamentary mandates should be around 800 000 votes. Even a slight overrun of this threshold by the Confederate Committee, with most likely a tiny percent of the votes inactive under the threshold (2.8% or less), should let this committee to get at least 20 seats in the Sejm and at the same time drastically reduce the chances of the Law and Justices to stand alone.
The forecast was not included in the legislature elections, which are presently under way in the single-mandate constituency system, with a majority comparative as giving the winner a mandate within a single round.
Dr. Paul Momro
