Does this result imply a minority government, or a coalition? If coalition, what is the likely composition in your judgement?

Ouch... this may be a worse sign than the numbers of the crazies. Maybe a true left-wing party is truly missing for a large part of the electorate?

What were previous turnouts?

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

This might be a reason for the apparent "mood swings". Perhaps, only the right-half of the electorate showed up this time for some reason. There might be some long term party sympathies among voters after all, but each election potential supporters of incumbents have very little enthusiasm.

1. Yup, Poland has had alternating landslide victories for the last several elections. Very little party identity among voters combined with difficult times for many.

2. Way to early to say whether the pattern will continue in the next election. Note that the economy has actually done quite well in 2004 and 2005, the EU membership negotiated by the SLD has proven very popular - yet they just got crushed. That is partly because of economic uncertainty with the continued sky high unemployment (18% official, somewhat lower in reality due to a large gray economy). On the other hand real wages have risen pretty steadily under all governments - they're currently over $700/mo pre-tax, they were around $300/mo in the early nineties. That more or less ok economic picture was counterbalanced by massive corruption and ties to organized crime. The SLD has been crushed before - 1991, 1997 and has risen again, I wouldn't count them out. All attempts to create a non-communist left have failed. There was an attempt at a center-left party in this election with some pretty big names as candidates and it got less than three percent.  Disgruntled SLD leaders tried to create a new vaguely left wing party but after an initial surge they failed to make it over the 5% barrier.

3. No indication of a stabilization. The polls showed voters lurching all over the place over the past year. Maybe things will stabilize over the next four years - who knows?

The party names should be self explanatory if you look at the initials.

The first graph is female (red)/male (blue)

The next one is by age group - PO skews strongly towards the young, SLD and LPR towards the elderly

Third graph is by education - primary school (orange), vocational (green), secondary school (blue), students (yellow), university degree (purple) Note that in Poland you finish high school at age 19 and typically graduate from university in your mid twenties. Current university age people are part of a baby boom generation (gotta do something during martial law :). More seriously, here you get some very sharp differences. If this were up to students and those with  higher education then the PO would have a landslide plurality with a narrow majority of seats and the LPR, Samoobrona and PSL wouldn't be in parliament. On the other hand those with either just an elementary or vocational education gave 40 and 31 percent of their vote to the extremists respectively.

Last graph is by place of residence:
rural (green) town under 50k (blue), city between 50k and 200k (orange), city over 200k (red) Note that you have to be a little insane to vote for the PSL if you live in a city - they're a straight special interest peasant party and make no pretense of having the slightest interest in the welfare of the urban population. Samoobrona does pretend, but it is at its roots a peasant party as well.

Now I don't live in Poland, but most of those I know who do fall into the university educated big city dwelling demographic - not surprising that I don't know any people who vote LPR or Samoobrona. And I doubt any of my peasant relatives would cop to doing so even if they did.