Polish Politics and Elections

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https://wbdata.pl/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/pojedynek-Duda-Trzaskowski.png[/img]

See other maps here https://wbdata.pl/mapy-wyborcze-wybory-prezydenta-2020-i-tura/

Looks like Poland is realigning in a way from the usual West vs East alignment to a more "traditional" rural areas vs urban areas alignment or is the map misleading in that way?

Tbf I do think Trzaskowski will win in the rural west in the runoff.

I mean part of the reason the East-West divide is a thing in Poland is thanks to the comparatively high urbanization and historic development of the West. When PO loses by 10 points than the western rurals are going to slide away leaving the committed cities. However, if we look at where Trzaskowski over and underperformed his national result, the East-West divide still is apparent - albeit with a few gaps such as the rural parts of the old Polish Corridor being better for PiS than their neighbors.

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I think that the map is misleading although at this point it is difficult to say to which degree. The "orange islands in a sea of blue" optic is certainly problematic. What counts is the scale in between.

The best approach is probably to look at the second round maps from 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 (when available of course) and then to do some classic swing/trend analysis. Using the first round maps is probably misleading as well because of third party candidates distorting the picture. Hołownia for example despite being from Białystok was strongest in the West and North-West. His results in the big Eastern cities (Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow) were only average.

[palandio]

Guessing that because Opole region in Upper East Silesia had so many mixed ethnicity Germans with some Polish ancestry, they were able to avoid, at least in some cases expulsion after WW2. In so many other areas east of Oder Neisse line the areas were so purely German that few could claim a Polish ancestry?

And mixed marriages as there were some Poles in the Opole region even before the IIWW and this was the borderland regions.

"Some Poles" is an understatement. Ancestry-wise the population east of a line that runs a few kilometers west of Opole was majority Polish, with the exception of certain cities. But extensive Germanization politics during the Kaiserreich and mixed marriages led to a population that covered the whole spectrum from 100% Polish identity to 100% German identity. An important feature in Upper Silesia was the absence of a confessional barrier, since the local Germans were usually Catholics, differently from the areas further north. After WWII many fled or were expelled to Germany, but those that were considered Polish enough were allowed to stay if they wanted. Many also left during the decades since then, because German nationality law permits the immigration and immediate naturalization of ex-citizens and their descendants. The remaining Upper Silesians either have fully integrated into Polish society or retain a certain German heritage, even if ethnically it's usually only a part of their family history.

The other cases are:
- The (before WWII) almost purely German areas where people usually had no recent Polish ancestry at all.
- The border regions further north where (with exceptions) the confessional barrier prevented the forming of a "hybrid" population.
- Mazuria, where originally the bulk of the population spoke a Polish dialect ("Mazurian", counted separately by the Prussian authorities), but since they were usually Protestants the Polish element of their identity usually vanished completely during Germanization. After most had already fled during the 1944/45 Soviet assault, the rest was in principle allowed to stay in Poland and be re-Polonized, but not so many did, and almost all that stayed left to Germany during the next years. Hence no relevant German minority in Mazuria today. (I have some Mazurian ancestry, but they left already long before WWII for economic reasons.)

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You can actually see them, to some extent, on satellite maps taken at night and also showing woodland cover and so on as the population density in rural areas added to Poland after 1945 is a lot lower than in the rest of the country: attempts to repopulate the new territories were only properly successful in the cities and conurbations, and largely for the same reasons as those areas continually leaked people from the early 19th century onwards when they were still German; i.e. remote, poor quality soil and so on.

This makes me wonder if areas with particularly high % of those descended pre-1945 Poles (presumably mostly rural) vote divergently from other parts of western Poland.

I'm not sure if Lower Silesia is such an area, but PiS won there even though it's as far west as it gets.

There is one exception that I embezzled in my earlier post, and that is the pre-1945 Poles in the area of Olsztyn, which could be counted either as Mazurians or (if you want to emphasize their Catholicism) Warmians. This group is much smaller than the Upper Silesian group.

We should also distinguish between areas that came to Poland after WWII and areas that came to Poland after WWI.

In areas that came to Poland after WWII there are the Upper Silesian group and the much smaller Warmian-Mazurian group and maybe, maybe a tiny group of Catholics with mixed heritage in Gdańsk, and that's it more or less. There was basically no Polish minority in Lower Silesia and that's why there are almost no pre-1945 Poles or Germans in Lower Silesia today. Same thing for other regions. In Upper Silesia you can still see the old linguistic line on election maps and the areas on the eastern side (where the pre-1945 Poles and Germans live) vote even more "liberal" than the entirely repopulated areas on the western side. Similar picture in the Olsztyn area, although it's unclear to which degree this is just the "liberal agglomeration" effect that can be seen elsewhere in Poland.

Then there's the areas that came to Poland already after WWI. The area as a whole had a clear Polish majority, although there were some exceptions in the area of Bydgoszcz and Toruń. Many Germans opted for leaving towards Germany already in the early twenties ("Optanten") and the rest was expelled after WWII. Since these areas already had a Polish majority, they didn't need to be repopulated systematically. From the maps it seems that these areas vote more like other areas on the Western side of the 1914 line. Some have claimed that this is an effect of the Poznań, Gdańsk and Bydgoszcz agglomerations, but even the rural areas vote far less conservative that comparably rural areas on the Eastern side of the 1914 line. [Edit: These areas also seem to be Third Way strongholds.]

Looking at Greater Poland and Pomerania (in the Polish sense, not the German one which would place Pomerania further to the West) makes me think that 1945 is not the only explanation for the Polish geographic electoral cleavage.