Polish Politics - It's not what you think.

My take on the political situation in Poland, and why it's neither as good nor as bad as you think.

As a Polonophile and someone who lived in Poland for a decade, seeing Tusk’s globalist government go “mask off” and abandon any principle of the “rule of law” they bleated on about for years is very sad.

It’s hardly surprising though, as Tusk was given his previous top EU jobs on the back of the work he’d done making Poland accessible to European (largely German) firms to the point that most of the Polish economy is controlled by German owned concerns. When I worked in Warsaw, almost every corporate client I had was German owned - well over 95% of them.

That said, despite the corruption and not reforming the tax code as he was elected to, Tusk’s first government from 2007 wasn’t a disaster. His politics then reflected the financially conservative and socially liberal concerns that the majority of urban Poles held and he didn’t serve them particularly badly. The PiS-led coalition he took over from had been almost comically stupid, and required coalition partners who seemed to be literary caricatures of medieval peasants.

The Law and Justice (PiS) party, who’ve ruled the country for the last decade, are certainly not the “based Poland” party that the English language internet thinks. For a start, they are controlled by the scheming Jarosław Kaczyński, the remaining twin who has influenced most of the last 20 years of Polish politics. His personal history and career are more motivated by the whole bag of chips he carries on his shoulder than any greater ideology. Despite being a life long bachelor with zero romantic interests ever, few rumours about his personal life ever seem to come up. He is a rabid Russophobe, but this characteristic is common just about everywhere in Polish politics and barely noteworthy in Poland. He’s also generally quite anti-German too. Having recognised that nobody really liked him any more, and that he has the charisma and speaking ability of a boiled cabbage he avoided the higher profile positions from 2015 onwards and controlled the party from the shadows.

Bigos, more characterful than a Polish politician.

PiS were not the “far right” party which western media portrayed either. They’re basically a mix of Catholic nationalism, socialist economic policies (and distrust of small enterprise) and a thread of agrarianism. This agrarian thread is common throughout Polish politics, where rural voters and farmers are a powerful bloc. They enacted policies to increase birth rates (free money each month), reduce abortions (making them restricted in law, if not in reality) and generally trying to reform the country in the way they wanted. A chunk of these reforms concerned the judiciary and dated back to the issues around the end of communism, where to ensure the smooth and peaceful transition through the end of the Polish People’s Republic various high ups and judges were allowed to continue in their positions. Quite why this was still such a big issue thirty years later and one to give the EU ammunition over is another issue entirely. If a pro-EU party had done exactly the same thing it would never have caused a ripple in the papers.

Of course, PiS are a political party so most of what they actually did was dumb or the opposite of their promises. They have a habit of attracting rather venial and uneducated people to the party and have a long history of corruption and misappropriation. Where this comes to logging parts of Europe’s last remaining primeval forest, or denouncing non-European immigration elsewhere whilst giving out record numbers of immigration visas to Poland it’s all kind of sad. They have kept increasing the minimum wage, which sounds fine until you experience the reality of huge numbers of younger people working on junk contracts or forced into dubious self employment - higher minimum wages just increase the ruinous social security payments these people end up stuck with and offer little benefit to those not working for the biggest of companies. There’s a reason why even more right wing and nationalist Poles aren’t particularly keen on PiS.

European bison, happy to live in Poland ignoring politics. Unless you clear-cut their habitat

There have also been ongoing issues of the the national TV station, TVP. It has turned into something of a political potato with PiS staffing it with their loyalists and now Tusk making sure that those loyalists were fired and barred from the building by police barricades. This does have rather the ring of a banana republic to it, but you could just as easily see it in the US or UK nowadays. Remember that the main commercial channel, TVN, is staunchly pro-EU and pro-globalist. It’s theoretically not under political control.

There have recently been further issues, including Tusk not allowing PiS the traditional right of electing a party member as vice-speaker (previously always a member of the opposition) and now having two elected PiS members arrested for earlier crimes. Crimes’ they’re no doubt guilty of, but had been pardoned of by the PiS party member who is president.

I’m not going to say that PiS were a great ruling party for Poland, as they weren’t. Tusk and his coalition have come into wreck anything that had been done to reinforce the idea of Poland as an independent state and to try to make sure it goes back to being a well behaved EU colony.

An iconic product, and a necessity for a foreigner trying to understand Polish politics using western terminology

It’s also worth remembering that no party wants to tackle more serious problems like the pensions time bomb, the huge size of the state, the fact that being the low-wage offshoring country of choice through the 2000s and 2010s wasn’t a good long term plan and the fact that the much desired and discussed rearmament will actually need paying for. This is no different to most other countries really, far better to avoid the big problems and just blame the other party for not doing it.

Poles though, have centuries of experience with the failures of self serving people in a sort of democratic government. The country will no doubt continue to get richer (or at least the GDP will grow) but at the cost of adopting the same foolish policies western Europe has seen fail - high immigration, outsourced defence, a lack of energy security and a crack down on any “illiberal” ideas or rhetoric. There’s also the elephant in the room of over a million Ukrainians now living in Poland, and the increasing likelihood of Ukraine giving up in their unwinnable war with Russia.

I’d essentially sum this up as neither as good nor as bad as anglophone commentators think, and far more a case of “business as usual”. There’s a reason Poles have quite a phlegmatic view of politics.

Netflix produced this comedy series, 1670, set in the heyday of Poland’s democratic-ish Commonwealth heyday. It’s well worth a watch.