Polish Politics and Elections

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh, it seems German Minority (MN) will retain its one MP.

For those unfamiliar, national minority committees are exempted from a 5% nationwide threshold, and only need to exceed 5% in their districts. The MN is running in Opole only.

Pretty comfortably in the end, with the same percentage as last time.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I have some work to do first, but I'll make some provisional constituency maps this evening.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Eh, Konfedracja polled well (as did SLD) in quite a few of the polling stations here, so be careful not to push the obvious narratives too far. Of course those polling stations have very low turnout relative to the size of the Polish population here.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well, this was part of ethnically German Silesia which was closest one to the historical ethnic border with ethnically Polish Silesia, so most of the Germans there were more prepared to stay (some of them married Polish people, some of them were able to hide German roots, rural population had greater incentives to stay as they had land etc.) in the state which until ca. 1980s tried to polonize everything. Generally there were two places where Germans stayed in Poland after 1945 in some significant groups - region of Opole (and to some extend western part of Silesian voivodship) and region of Wałbrzych where German miners were crucial for coal mining after the war. Those two groups stayed, but until today we have only Upper Silesian group. The rest generally left Poland to live in Germany.

The Upper Silesian Germans have quite an interesting history - one of those odd little border country minority groups that are the result of existence of the border. Didn't have a particularly good relationship with nationalists or the state before 1945 either, which was presumably a factor in staying on afterwards.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's quite a fascinating region for a number of reasons. The Upper Silesia (by which I define the Upper Silesian and Opole Voivodeship) became one of the main destination for repatriated people from the former "eastern borderlands" (Kresy). Some say, half-jokingly, that Lwów simply "moved" to Wrocław. In other words displaced people from the east filled the void left by displaced Germans in the west, which was pretty handy for the government, as served to quickly polonize the land.

It never quite worked out as intended: the original plan (a classic piece of Galaxy Brain postwar idiocy) was to repopulate the countryside (and in Further Pomerania etc. as well) to the same density as before the war as well which, of course, never happened (to such an extent that the old borders are very clear even from satellite images: so much marginal farmland just reverted to woodland etc.) because the soil is terrible and it's all really very remote. You'd think they might have been aware that these regions were notorious for rural depopulation from the 1850s onwards and maybe might have wondered why, but...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Places where Konfederacja had higher support are pretty weirdly spread over the map.

That's because they had such a remarkably even distribution of support. Nowhere where they really stood out negatively or positively: very unusual.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If you look at the broad strokes (I'm not insane enough to do proposography of the individual municipalities), the Holownia map looks like a map of areas that had lots of resettlement from now-Western Belarus and areas with high concentrations of ethnic and religious minorities. Peak 'that would be an ecumenical matter', so actually a fairly logical coalition for someone like him to end up with.

E.g. clear signs of strong support from Silesian Germans and so on.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I saw a Polish election poster in Derbyshire the other day. Efforts to appeal to the diaspora are real.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Interesting exit poll, but remember: the only country where you can be absolutely sure that the exit poll = the result is France.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The difference in the diaspora vote between other European countries (inc. GB o/c) and Canada especially is hilarious.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The difference in the diaspora vote between other European countries (inc. GB o/c) and Canada especially is hilarious.

I've only just now tuned in to this election (yes, yes, I know). Can you elaborate?

UK: KO 49.0, PiS 14.3, TD 12.4, NL 12.1, K 9.4
Canada: PiS 47.1, KO 32.4, K 6.3, NL 5.7, TD 5.0

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The full size of the diaspora vote in the UK is quite a thing: 144,000 valid votes cast (even more than 101,000 in Germany). Same patterns as seen earlier, though PiS have slipped to third looool.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The little group in Upper Silesia are one of those fascinating borderland minorities that crop up here and there around very old boundaries (often now, as in this case, former ones) all across Europe. They used to sometimes be referred to in German by the term Wasserpolak, which was basically an ethnic slur and means exactly what it looks like it does. Anyway, back in the 90s the German Minority list used to overperform the number of people with German heritage (and not just for reasons of turnout), and now it seems that things have flipped the other way.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.