21.00 CET: Exit poll results of the second round of the mayoral elections in Poland indicate a win for the opposition candidate in Warsaw.
Former President of the National Bank, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz of Civic Platform (53.6%) beat incumbent mayor and ex-Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz (46.4%) of the ruling Law and Justice party.
That's a better result than was expected over the last few days. Hanna had been losing support in the opinion polls.
Marcinkiewicz was kicked out of his Prime Minister post earlier this year to secure Warsaw for the government. Didn't work. How long will he remain with the government now? It's known he has differences with the Kaczynskis. He has just given a little speech saying the usual thank yous and that he is now 'unemployed'. The gossip is that he might get either a very nice little earner as head of Poland’s oil giant, Orlen, or re-enter government as Foreign Minister. But maybe a move to the UK, Kazimierz?
Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski just said on TVP that the government’s support, nationally, held up well in the countryside but their campaign didn’t really take off in the cities. Natch…He also is surprised that Marcinkiewicz lost. But the fact is that if the Civic Platform can’t beat the government at the moment in the capital then they may as well not get up in the morning.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Gronkiewicz-Waltz wins
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May be he will now seek employment in PO? I mean he has hardly been treated well by the Twin Ducks and he has many differences with them and other members of PiS
That grin will get bigger and bigger. Still, she's got four years to build two bridges.... and what about the Metro?
What about the metro? And what about the train link to the airport? And what about the second airport?
Most probably we can kiss all of that goodbye as the duck brothers take their revenge on Warsaw.
On the plus side 100% of the foreign scum who were registered to vote at my local polling station turned up and it's at least a 50% chance that we both voted for Hanna!
Just a note on turnout. Poles really crap at going out to vote, right? Worst in Europe?
Estimated turnout for 2006 Mayor of Warsaw elections 52.3%
Turnout in 2004 election for Mayor of London 36.95%...
I was predicting a Marcinkiewicz victory but will be _very_ happy to be proved wrong.
Still, the eternal pessimist inside me will wait for the official results as female candidates tend to do better in polls than in the ballot box and that margin isn't as large as I'd like.
Mike. The margin for error is 3%...the margin of victory is more than 6 percent. Marcinkiewicz has conceded.
If women have an inbuilt advantage in opinion polls [?] then what the hell was going on this week with polls showing Marcinkiewicz in front! One showed him 45 to 43 in front. That means that the undecided went with Waltz, and followed Borowski’s advice.
What Harry said about the ducks taking revenge on Warsaw also worries me. Will PiS stifle any government investment in the capital just because PO won the mayorship? Something tells me they really ARE that petty.
Great news about the turnout though.
Marcinkiewicz's name has also been thrown around for president of the NBP. After some gaffes by Grzelonska, that seems more likely, although I doubt the ducks are willing to give Marcinkiewicz that much power. They're probably just as happy to see him lose -- now they can banish him to political obscurity.
^ Possibly he could just go back to being a homophobic geography teacher?
And Beatroot: Poles are nowhere near as crap as going out to vote as foreigners in Poland are!
If feel a bit sorry for Marcinkiewicz. But it;s his own fault, though. If he hadn't been associated with PiS surely he'd have beaten Gronkiewicz-Waltz.
I met two of the foreign scum who voted in Warsaw. I asked the fist one why he voted PO and, after some umming and erring, spluttered something about ‘flat tax policy’…(as if Warsaw Town Hall has income tax raising powers)…
The second person was a bit of a ‘lefty’. He said that he voted Platform because they were ‘less rightwing than PiS’’. He seemed to think that because PiS were ‘conservatives’ then they were less economically redistributive than PO.
Of course, the opposite is the case: it is PiS who have more leftwing economic policies than PO. When I informed him that he had just voted for a bunch of Thatcherites he looked a little confused.
Both those two votes for Waltz were basically meaningless.
So perhaps Harry can give us five of Hanna’s best policies that we should all get inspired by and regret that we didn’t vote for her…
1) She's not a homophobic bigot.
2) She's not a homophobic bigot.
3) She's not from the same party as the homophobic bigots who are president and prime minister.
4) She's not from a party which formed a government with lying homophobic racist scum.
5) Er, that's it.
How do you know what her policies on gays are? What pro-gay statements has she or any of the other Platformers made? Where were these guys on the Equality Parade?
Voting for a candidate just because you assume that they are not a homophone is no reason to vote at all.
Politics R.I.P...
Voting for a candidate just because you assume that they are not a homophone ...
Don't think I meant to say that, but I like the sound of it!
Well as we all know that the other guy is a homophobe and the leaders of his party are homophobes she's either:
a) Not homophobic
or
b) Not homophobic enough to make public statements about how homosexuals try to infect other people with homosexuality, or how they are all perverts, or how gays should be beaten with batons, etc etc
Either way she's better than the other guy and I as much voted to stop him as to get her in. Probably more of the former than the latter now that I think about it.
We have no idea what various members of Platform think about homosexuals because they studiously avoid saying anything about them at all.
Marcinkiewicz has said bigoted things about gays. Fact. But I don’t see why that is any worse than politicians saying and doing nothing when a section of the Polish population (who probably vote Platform) is under attack – as they were last year when they were denied the right to march and were getting beaten up in Poznan, Krakow…
Yeah, many in PiS are open about their bigotry. But most in Platforma are either silent bigots, or gutless in their opposition (to speak up would make them look like a lefty. How ex-communists in this country have colonized the human rights territory is a truly mind boggling and very Polish development).
I don’t know which of them is worse.
Maybe I prefer to know where I am with people before I vote for them.
^ I know I'm a lot better off having a mayor who might or might not be a homophobic bigot than I am having a mayor can not even be bothered to attempt to hide his bigotry.
Saying and doing nothing does suck. But saying and doing things which are designed to actively surpress people based on your own bigotry is much worse.
I did not vote in this election (as far as I know only EU foreigners were allowed to vote), however, I can give you two - if uninspiring - concrete policy stances on which G-W differed from Marcinkiewicz, which I favor and which would have caused me to vote for her, had I been able.
1. She, and PO in general, are very critical of the amount of bureaucracy it takes to get many things done. She has pleged to reduce bureaucracy
2. One way to reduce bureaucracy is to devolve many of the powers that are currently held by city hall to the gmina administration offices. G-W has clearly expressed her will to do this. Currently, much of the registration for, application for, and approval of so many administrative processes first goes through smaller offices, then gmina offices, then the city hall. Making gminas more powerful will at least cut out one step of this, hopefully more.
To be fair, Marcinkiewicz has expressed the same will, but his party also promised such things during the presidential election -- and instead of reducing bureaucracy, they centralized further, which has only given them a greater hold on power. Red tape has only increased. I don't trust him - or them - on this issue.
A reduction in bureaucracy may not be inspiring, change-the-world politics, but it's something Warsaw needs, and a good reason to favor G-W over Marcinkiewicz.
Gustav - they were ALL droaning on about decentralization. Yawwwwwnnn!!!
is the waltz surname german or slavic?
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