polish government rebrands as 2004 democrats
after recent elections, the western ruling class declares that polish democracy is back baby. but voters just kicked out the right for...the right lol.
Phew, so democracy is doing ok in Poland after last week’s big parliamentary elections tossed the nationalists out of power after 8 long years. Now we’ve got the main opposition party, Donald Tusk and Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, PO), back in power. They’re into culture, neoliberal economics, rock music, and they even speak English. America and the Western ruling class loves ‘em because it shows the world that the exporting of our righteous way life is working.
I’m seeing a lot of coverage about Poland these days and not a lot of it makes sense. Leading up to last Sunday’s election, pretty much every media story told us that if the right wing ruling party Law & Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) got re-elected, Poland would cease to exist, once again lol. Yes, it was not a good 8 years. Most Polish coverage focused on how Law & Justice destroyed everything, from the environment to immigration rights to abortion rights and gay rights. Now following the opposition party’s "momentous” victory, virtually every publication, from Vox to the New York Times to the Washington Post to Poltico and Reuters, talked about how “democracy” is back, and that the biggest “change” is coming to Poland since the fall of communism (sound familiar?) It was the largest voter turnout since Poland had its first free parliamentary elections almost 35 years ago, but what are the people getting? What does Civic Platform, led by former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, believe in? And how different are the two parties actually? Not very, and that’s what all these stories missed.
Start with LGBTQ rights, which has been the main culture war in Poland. Over the past decade, Poland started having its first civil rights demonstrations when people began to march for gay rights, as well as women’s rights. The nationalists said “being gay was a disease worse than communism,” even though communism killed 100 million people. The party’s anti-gay rhetoric led to a proliferation of anti-LGBTQ sentiment throughout the whole country. Some towns set up anti-LGBTQ zones, which is pretty funny considering Poland has never been welcoming to the gays in the first place.
But Civic Platform, which was in power before Law & Justice, doesn’t actually support gay marriage. It supports civil unions between same-sex couples, but it has not come out in support of gay marriage. Chalk that up the influence of the Catholic Church, which still holds a lot of power over Polish society, including both main political parties.
The nationalists were also hardliners on immigration, stating during the Middle Eastern refugee crisis in 2015 that Syrians couldn’t enter because they contained diseases (when white people fled Ukraine, it was okay though). When the Belarusian government started sowing discord and weaponized refugees at their border with Poland, the nationalists built a wall and took a lot of flack for how it handled the crisis.
But the opposition party was no different on the immigration issue than the nationalists. This year Donald Tusk took to social media and said that Kaczyński, the defacto ruler of the nationalists, was, “preparing a document that will allow even more people to come from countries like Saudi Arabia, India, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.”
“Poles must regain control over this country and its borders,” Tusk declared, immediately moving to the right of the nationalists.
In reality, the nationalists, who for 8 years were portrayed by the Western media as anti-immigrant xenophobes who never crossed paths with someone who wasn’t a white Polish Catholic, actually issued the most residence permits to immigrants in the E.U. over the past five years. But those stories don’t get a lot of play because they don’t fit the E.U. media’s narrative that Law & Justice is anti-immigration.
As for abortion, the Polish neoliberals didn’t support liberalizing abortion laws when they were in power. So by the time the nationalists took over, they made it even harder for a woman to get an abortion, further narrowing abortion rights to only if a woman was raped or if her life is at risk. After 12 weeks, Civic Platform doesn’t support a woman getting an abortion. Earlier this year, it removed a candidate running for office who said she supported abortion during any stage of pregnancy.
Or how about the environment? I mean, Poland just recently discovered that climate change is real. While the Polish neoliberals campaigned this year on cleaner energy, not much more progress will really be made by them over the course of their term. Contrary to what the media said over the years about Poland being an ashtray under the nationalists, Poland actually made pretty good clean electricity progress under Law and Justice, but because of delays and backlogs of implementation that are happening as the neoliberals return, don’t expect much more to happen in the coming few years.
“This combination of connection delays and grid congestion may in turn dim the overall enthusiasm for further clean power capacity development in Poland over the coming years, regardless of which political party may be in power,” said Reuters in a rare story that didn’t succumb to the usual left versus right political narratives.
Then there is economics, which is the untold story of post-communist Poland. Since the liberal centrism of the global north spread to the former Soviet Union 35 years ago, both major ruling parties have embraced it with open arms. Poland experienced inequality growth for the first time, with the working poor being left behind. Part of the rise in inequality was due to a decrease in union membership.
From Jacobin:
While in 1990, 36.7 percent of wage and salary earners belonged to labor unions, by 2012 figure stood at just 11.6 percent — the fifth-lowest figure among OECD countries, for which the average was 25.9 percent that year. Unsurprisingly, the first quarter-century of reintroduced Polish capitalism also produced a substantial rise in income inequality. While in 1989, the Gini index stood at 26.9, it reached 32.7 already by 1996, and in 2004 reached a record high 35.4 (much more than the EU average of 31.1).
This happened under both parties. When a pre-nationalist Law & Justice first gained power in 2005, it passed one of the largest tax cuts for the wealthy in Poland’s history. Next came Civic Platform, which also was very into Third Way economics. While cities prospered and Poland became a GDP powerhouse, the rural east and southeast were left behind, paving the way for Law & Justice to sweep back into power in 2015 with the backing of the rural poor. This time they did something no other party had done in recent historical memory: it introduced conservative identity politics to the masses.
So when you actually look at it, there are not many big differences between the two main parties. Polish voters, reeling from years of Soviet trauma and neoliberal hypnosis, kicked out the right wingers for…the right wingers. So depressing. In reality these two parties act like someone suffering from multiple personality disorder: They are convinced they are two different people, when really they are one person, one idea.
Members of Civic Platform think they’re liberals when really they’re right wingers, and the nationalists are closer to liberal centrism than they think. During 80s late communism, members of Solidarność embraced capitalism, and by doing that, they convinced themselves that they were still liberals. That mentality continues today with Civic Platform. The party already had its shot, and all it did was give us rulers who were just like them, except with shittier manners. The neoliberals created the nationalists.
This is not to mention Civic Platform will continue to finance the war in Ukraine and maintain ties with the Catholic church, just like Law & Justice before it. Civic Coalition sounds like the 2004 Democratic Party ticket, which was pro-war, pro-church, and pro-corporate austerity. Basically, they stood for nothing, and only existed as some sort of soft opposition. It’s worth noting that a big reason Civic Platform was able to win this time by was by forming a coalition with other smaller, more progressive and centrist parties, the Left (Lewica) and center-left Third Way (Trzecia Droga). That should tell the Polish neoliberals where the mood of Poland is headed.
Media coverage hid behind words like, “the rule of Law,” “autocracy” and “democracy,” because it didn’t have any reason to tell voters why Civic Platform was actually a good party. The tenor of these stories were more like, “here’s why the other guys suck,” and not so much, “here’s what this party offers.” That’s a big problem with modern politics in general. We get more caught up with hating the other team than worrying about our own. So a pretend narrative has to be constructed to make us think the nationalists and the neoliberals are different.
Anyway, it’s just weird and lazy seeing the same old story being written about Poland. Out of all the Polish coverage, the only story I’ve seen that understands what’s happening in Poland is this one by Jacobin. But that’s it. If you want to go deeper, it’s a good read. Shout out to Jacobin.
Okay, that’s it.