polish elections: everything can change…except war
a ton of articles ahead of Polish elections next week say depending on whether the nationalists or center-left coalition wins, a lot can change. but they don't talk about what won’t change.
I’m writing about Poland today because the country has a big parliamentary election next week, and its relationship with the European Union and Western democracy has shifted since Russia invaded Ukraine. Also, Poland always has something going on.
Recently, Yascha Mounk, one of Obama’s fav writers, said that the upcoming elections in Poland are super important, but that, “Nobody in America is paying attention to them.”
That’s kind of true, but why is that? Just a few years ago, the beltway was watching very carefully. The general U.S.-E.U. consensus has been worried about Poland since the nationalist Law & Justice Party took power in 2015 and slid the country backwards just as it finally found its post-communist footing and reached a modern moment. It seemed like on a weekly basis the European Union, those winecave bureaucrats in Brussels, was scolding the Polish government for violating “the rule of law.” Poland was forcing judges into retirement in order to reshape the judiciary, restricting abortion rights, chopping down ancient forests, monopolizing the press, and suppressing an emerging LGBTQ movement. When Biden was a candidate, he said Poland was at risk of becoming “totalitarian.” For eight years now, the global press has basically written the same article about Poland: it’s turning into Trump. Poland and the Western deep state were enemies.
But when Putin invaded Ukraine on February 25, 2022, all of that beef disappeared. Gone is the rhetoric from the Biden Administration about Poland being totalitarian and undemocratic. The hunger for war has brought the neoliberals and nationalists together like never before. Poland and the U.S. are strong war allies now. And Poland is a war machine. It's budgeted 4 percent of its GDP for military spending in 2024. That’s higher than America. Poland has inked deals with the U.S. and Korea for tanks and howitzers, as well as Patriot air defense systems, rocket launchers and combat aircrafts. Its army is now better than Germany’s, and some predict it will surpass the British army by the end of the decade. Since the turn of the century, Polish military expenditures have more than doubled, from $5.2 billion in 2000 to $12.1 billion in 2020, according to the World Bank. In 2015, Poland decided to meet NATO’s guidelines of investing 2 per cent of GDP on national defense. This increase in war spending has been done under both the center-left Civic Platform and right wing Law & Justice. The main opposition party, Civic Platform, is aligned with the E.U. and will probably be even more loyal on the war front than Law & Justice.
But this past week a bunch of stories in Politico, The Economist and The Guardian, as well as the rest of the concerned corporate press, did not talk about how Poland’s commitment to the Ukrainian war effort will continue unabated no matter who wins, and that’s not good. The press is always good at finding conflict between parties, but it sleeps on bi-partisan problems. Instead the press has dealt with the war as a necessary reality, a heroic effort to support the fight for global democracy against the autocrats. The war is not being viewed as a massive financial suckhole with no end in sight that is aligning us with Ukrainian Nazis. Ukraine itself is being used to destabilize Russia and act as the latest stand-in for America’s forever wars. The U.S. has spent $77 billion overall to aid Ukraine, nearly the entire state budget for Virginia. It’s come out that millions in unemployment benefits are being spent by the Social Security Administration in Washington on Ukrainians. I doubt spending billions on Ukraine is a priority right now for people trying to feed their families. We are not doing well at home, but we’re hellbent on World War 3 with a faraway nuclear superpower. What’s it all for? No one knows, except maybe for Raytheon.
Instead these stories focus on culture wars and the erosion of our precious “democratic norms.” Anne Applebaum, the D.C-born expert Polish journalist, wrote a long explainer in The Atlantic about what’s at stake in the election without delving into what prolonging the war is doing to America, Poland and the whole planet. Yes, if Law & Justice loses power, it will be better for the LGBTQ community, migrants, and rule of law. Polish leadership is definitely comprised of sheltered Catholics who think gay people didn’t start appearing in the country until E.U. cosmopolitans introduced it to Bon Appetite magazine and rainbow flags. But whether economic life for every day Poles will improve under either major party is very much an open question. While cities progressed since the fall of communism, the rural areas have been left behind. My family is from the northeast part of the country—the poorest part—and a lot of the time it feels like communism never ended. There is a reason why Law & Justice has the support of the rural poor. But the only story we keep hearing from reporters is Law & Justice is mean and doesn’t have any manners. I get it, the party sucks, but there’s more to it than that.
To get back to the original issue, the reason why America doesn’t care about the upcoming Polish elections is because it doesn’t really have to. No matter who wins—the nationalists in power now, or the E.U.-endorsed Civic Platform Coalition—Poland will remain a major war ally for America, the E.U. and Western capital writ large. Everything else can be forgotten. War really does mess everything up.