Polish society is still liberal. Please do not think our current government and their actions are representative of what Poles think and support. Majority is at the moment fighting our own government ...
For the record, my submission of the article above doesn't mean that I think Poland is not liberal in any way (I'm Polish by the way). I just found the article pretty in-depth and interesting thus worthy of posting here.
Thanks a lot for posting this, I had never encountered Poland in history classes (French edu system) except for the 20th century history parts, and had no idea about either the Union in itself or its political system. We heard a lot about the Italian quattrocento, as it lead up to the French Renaissance, but of what was happening in Poland, not a peep. In the same fashion, we didn't hear that much about even the holy German empire, as history in France is taught in a very French-centric way from the fall of the Roman Empire up to the 1st world war. I think it would do us a world of good to approach history in a more global fashion, paying less attention to rote learning of chronologies, and hearing more about the stories of ideas and peoples throughout the ages.
It's interesting for me (as a Pole), but for the opposite reason to the author - I'm interested in the parables to Polish history he found looking from angolsaxon protestant POV. I was aware of some of them (Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus), but not all.
The main problem is, even though the government is fairly bad, the opposition is just as bad.
Mainly, the PR and political agenda of the opposition just doesn't exist. The recent political ideas of the opposition are just the government's ideas with a small twist.
So yea, we are fighting them, we're protesting, but we don't have seriously viable well organized alternatives, which is why they'll probably win again.
Fortunately, they're becoming less anti-EU as time passes, which gives me hope, that at least we'll be heading in the overall EU-wide direction.
Very far from majority. The right-wing party got 37.58% with the turnout of 50.92%. Their main argument, repeated and nauseam, was "We will gave 125€ a month per child to everyone". It turned out partially false afterwards, but a new tradition of buying votes for money has been born.
That's how democracy works everywhere. Majority within voting part of society decides who will rule, and it's ok because non-voting part doesn't care. Also, every election is a fair of promises. This gov't at least partially fulfilled theirs, no wonder their voting base is the largest.
Literally same promise was made by Indian Prime Minister in 2014 elections, to give Rs 15,00,000 to each citizen from all the unaccounted black money stored in foreign countries by Indians. After he got elected, his party said it was just a saying, not an actual promise.
37% of people who bothered to vote. With about 50% not bothering to do so. After 8 years of "liberal" party ruling and some scandals. It's like calling USA conservative because they voted Trump.
I spent a week in Poland and saw homosexual girls passionately kissing in the public and more burkas than I have expected. Overall more liberal than I have expected from the public image we see here in Lithuania.
I was last in Warsaw about twelve years ago, bought a T-shirt from an activist that translated as "I don't like the pope". Was advised to consider not wearing it if I visited any small towns.
Surprisingly I was in Paris this year as well and... OK, jokes asides :-)
France is liberal place. No discussion here. Burqas ban is not changing that. In my opinion, context is important. Poland being Islamophobic, while France is not.
The point is the unusual tolerance found in the offbeat combination it is unusual for those strongly religiously traditionalist as those who wear burkas willingly to /not be bothered/ by something like same sex public displays of affection. Not being offended or leaving immediately at the sight or anything. The combination is fairly high entropy in an information theory sense.
It is certainly a sign of being liberal that one is allowed to wear whatever they like for any reason, and the state does not say, "Your religion is bad and you are oppressing yourself, and we are here to rescue you."
There have of course been illiberal but left-wing states that are willing to say exactly that. Most Communist governments have banned religion of any form on the grounds that the state knows better, but I don't think those governments are usually called "liberal."
I am german and have some polish friends. They are among the most liberal people I know, sometimes a bit crazy, but always open for new developments and people. This is why I find it so strange, that all the Poles I know seem like a direct contradiction to the current government of Poland.
I always supposed, that the liberals ind Poland are more open towards migration to Germany or the UK, so that the ones that are staying tend to be a bit more conservative. Do you think that has something to do with it, or are other factors more important (despite all the criticism, the PIS does seem to care more about families and general social security)?
Selection bias. Learn Polish and go talk to someone in small village in Podkarpacie to understand PIS.
As for political explanation: basically, PIS is the only economically socialist party in Poland right now. They introduced social programs on unprecedented scale. The part of Poland that was mostly ignored by the transformation is voting them because of that. Think Trump and Rust Belt, but if Trump actually did something.
There are some fringe leftist parties but they have like 1-3% support and aren't in the parliament.
Also, because of forced communism in 1945-1989, and right-wing propaganda everywhere for the last 29 years - "left" is very bad political brand to associate with in Poland. People seriously criticize politicians and want to jail them for "propagating a totalitarian regime" (which is a crime in Poland) when they wear Karl Marx on a t-shirt, to give you an idea how bad it is :)
So, PIS managed to persuade Poles that socialist economical policy is actually right-wing, because they associate with church and call everybody else leftists and communists.
They are also anti-business, and anti-EU. And there is also a healthy dose of xenophoby (Muslim refuges will come if you vote PO and rape you or do terrorism), and conservatism (LGBT is relatively unpopular in Poland, even among young people, compared to the west).
I try to avoid this label, because it stops all discussion, but they are basically national socialists (without the death camps).
> PIS is the only economically socialist party in Poland right now
Not exactly, you have SLD, you have Partia Razem, both of them are a lot more socialist than PIS. What makes PIS different is that they add patriotism/nationalism and church into the mix. So they are so called leftist when it comes to economy but conservative when it comes to world view.
> Also, because of forced communism in 1945-1989, and right-wing propaganda everywhere for the last 29 years - "left" is very bad political brand to associate with in Poland. People seriously criticize politicians and want to jail them for "propagating a totalitarian regime" (which is a crime in Poland) when they wear Karl Marx on a t-shirt, to give you an idea how bad it is :)
Well, SLD - leftist party, ruled Poland from 2001 to 2005.
> I try to avoid this label, because it stops all discussion, but they are basically national socialists (without the death camps)
PIS is objectively more economically socialist than SLD. And not by a small margin.
1. SLD introduced no social programs when it ruled (PIS introduced 3 already and promises more)
2. SLD continued privatisation (PIS is doing the opposite - buying private companies - banks, coal mines, telecommunication companies, bus and train factories, and joining them into big national holdings)
3. SLD continued free-market reforms (except for the NFZ - national health foundation), PIS reforms the law the other way - introducing targeted anti-big-business taxes, regulating who can buy farming land (only a farmer who lives in nearby province or a church), where a new drugstores can be built, and what the prices for buying raw fruits and vegetables should be (that one is only a promise for now).
4. SLD did nothing regarding housing, PIS introduces a program where the state will build cheap houses and assign them to young families (previously PO introduced similar program but state wasn't building anything, just helped with financing the mortgage the young marriage took, PIS is changing that so that state will do everything - build the house, take the mortgage, manage it, and people are only going to live there and pay part of the rent)
5. PIS is trying to force the big national companies to build an electric car that will be the solution to all Polish problems. Despite the companies having nothing to do with electric cars, there's little Polish-owned manufacturing to speak of, never mind electric cars. To reiterate - the state is telling insurance providers and petrol rafineries to build an electric car :) How is that not socialist?
SLD (despite the name) when it was in power was more free-market and liberal oriented than even PO when it comes to economy :) PIS is far more socialist on that count.
Razem is the fringe party I mentioned. Less than 3% of support.
> I think you went a little too far here.
That's the problem. But how do you call a right-wing nationalist party that is economically socialist?
> 1. SLD introduced no social programs when it ruled (PIS introduced 3 already and promises more)
What about miners pensions? Of course you can't compare both of those parties because budgets and economy was a lot different then and Poland just entered to EU when they were ending their cadence.
Anyway, you now wrote what SLD did when they ruled but in original post you wrote:
PIS is the only economically socialist party in Poland right now, emphasis on right now. You should check current political programs of SLD and Partia Razem. They are more economically socialist than PIS.
> Less than 3% of support.
That doesn't make what I wrote any less true. It's like saying that gay people do not exists because there is only couple of percentage of them in society.
> But how do you call a right-wing nationalist party that is economically socialist?
I'm not sure I understand which miner pensions you mean, there were lots of miners' privileges, mostly relics from before 1989. But even giving you that - it's still one small program in 2 terms compared to 3 big programs in less than 1 term combined (PIS ruled for about 4 years as of now).
And you haven't answered all the deregulation and privatization SLD did compared to the central planning PIS does now :)
> You should check current political programs of SLD and Partia Razem. They are more economically socialist than PIS.
There's no indication SLD is going to be any more socialist this time around. They were promising similar things before and never delivered (thankfully). I'm labeling them basing on what they did, not what they promise (similarly - PO promised to be a liberal right-wing party, but is actually conservative center-right, they lost many voters over that).
> It's like saying that gay people do not exists because there is only couple of percentage of them in society.
I specified I mean mainstream parties in my original post. Razem is a typical protest-party, people don't vote them because they believe they will be in parliament and do what they promised, people vote them as a "fuck you" to the mainstream parties.
They are as relevant to Polish politics as the tee party is in USA :) We also have a pro-Russian party Zmiana in Poland, but they will also never get to the parliament, so who cares.
> conservative-socialist
I guess. But there are a few ways to be conservative (for example, in any normal country PO would be called conservative center-right, and PIS is much more conservative than them, to the point of being extremists. See how they rename every institution from "public" to "national" for one example, or how they focus their propaganda on nationalist interpretation of history, and nationalist conspiracy theories about leftists, Soros, refuges, Jews, cultural marxism, gender, etc.
You are in touch with extreme part of their society, i.e. people adventurous enough to move abroad taking much higher risks; the comfortable ones likely stay at home and vote as their low-risk strategy leads them to. You probably also aren't interfacing with people that were literally pushed out of the country for survival reasons, forced to take menial jobs abroad and experience "2nd class citizen" at full scale either; those might vote against liberal values as well and would prefer stronger state to take care of them.
I've got the same impression, but a Pole I'm currently working with told me that election results only represent about 30% of the electorate, and that things are complicated as far as societal groups go - more liberal groups would be associated with former-socialist parties, the church being seen as representing the (economic interest of the) "establishment"; things like that. Maybe a a Pole could explain it better.
This is weird statement. Majority doesn't care too much about political ideologies in Poland as in any other country. Meanwhile the ruling party still gets more voters than any other.