As the right savours victory, people wonder how far it will go

ONLY one thing is generally agreed about the result of Poland’s election held on October 25th; for the victors, it was a triumph on a scale that nobody else has managed to achieve during the quarter-century since multi-party democracy was ushered in. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the veteran leader of Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS), is the architect of that success. His party came first with 37.6% of the vote, giving it 235 out of 460 seats in the lower chamber of parliament (the Sejm) and the first independent majority in post-communist Poland. The centrist Civic Platform (PO) party, in power since 2007, finished with 24.1% of the vote. As PiS savours its victory, people at home and abroad are wondering where its ideological heart lies.

On the pessimistic side, liberals at home and abroad are warning of the “Orbanisation” of Poland; they fear the country might now follow the example of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who is seen by critics as a curber of liberty and a xenophobic nationalist.

PiS politicians much prefer comparisons with the British Conservative Party, with which they are closely allied in the European Parliament. As is emphasised by Zdzislaw Krasnodebski, a PiS member of that assembly, the party considers itself much more moderate than France’s National Front or even than the Christian Social Union which dominates Bavaria.

The PiS certainly takes a traditional line on social issues like gay marriage and abortion. But calling it “conservative” is misleading, argues Radosław Markowski, a political scientist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Poland’s new rulers are definitely not believers in small government, as many people point out.

On the contrary, Mr Kaczynski has been trying to carry out a “continuous revolution aiming to build a strong state, even at the expense of certain liberal and democratic procedures”, in the words of Jan Kubik, director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London.

Mr Kaczynski has a penchant for grand projects. As prime minister in 2006-07 he and his late twin brother Lech, who was president when he died in a plane crash in 2010, spoke of founding a “fourth republic”, to replace what they saw as the morally corrupt third Polish republic, in existence since 1989. (A large photograph of Lech bearing the words “President of the Fourth Republic” hangs in the PiS’s headquarters in Warsaw.) Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who holds a doctorate in legal studies, spoke in October of the need for a “reconstruction of the state”.

Some people worry that PiS could try and change the constitution, strengthening the role of the president, as set out in a draft constitution which was drawn up by the party in 2010 (but recently disappeared mysteriously from the party’s website). Such a presidential system would be a “catastrophe for Polish democracy”, says Mr Markowski.

Comparisons with Hungary are not unfounded. Mr Kaczynski admires Mr Orban. When PiS lost the previous general election, 2011, Mr Kaczynski said by way of self-consolation that he was “deeply convinced that the day will come when we will have Budapest in Warsaw”.

That day is nigh, Polish liberals now fear. PiS’s opponents are in disarray after the election. In the defeated Civic Platform, Ewa Kopacz, the outgoing prime minister, may soon face a leadership contest. The centre-left Social Democrats did not even make it into parliament, after they failed to cross the 8% threshold for coalitions. Hope may lie in a new party: Nowoczesna (literally: “Modern”), an economically and socially liberal group led by Ryszard Petru, an economist who has worked at the World Bank, which got 7.6% of the vote.

Yet although power remains concentrated round Mr Kaczynski, Law and Justice is not a monolithic party. It won by reaching out to a variety of groups, from farmers to young urban voters, and from the Catholic right to more moderate voters who were simply tired of PO.

Some are reassured by the fact that Mr Kaczynski will not take the job of prime minister himself; he is giving that job to his party colleague Beata Szydlo, in keeping with a promise he made last summer. Yet critics wonder how long it will be before he finds a pretext to take over and start trying to build a stronger state with himself at the helm.