Although local elections often don’t make international news headlines or involve widely recognizable household names, anyone who cares about the state of liberal democracy would do well to pay attention to them. In Turkey, for example, recent elections not only revealed widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; they also offered broader lessons for long-struggling opposition parties about how to select effective candidates and run effective campaigns.
Poland’s local elections on April 7 were another case in point, because they offered the first signals of democratic parties’ relative strengths since the general election last year, when a liberal coalition finally ousted the illiberal Law and Justice (PiS) government. For Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s coalition, the elections were thus a kind of referendum on the government’s first four months in office.
But the outcome also has enormous practical significance. Major parts of national policies are implemented in accordance with decisions made at the sub-national level, which is also where European funds are distributed. And, of course, there are hundreds of positions to be filled by local politicians.