[maze-le]

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)?

[ajuc]

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).

[lossolo]

> 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)

I think you went a little too far here.

[rasz]

>SLD - leftist party, ruled Poland from 2001 to 2005.

SLD people, albeit under different (PZPR) banner, ruled Poland since 1945.

[ajuc]

Yeah, and I would never vote them because of that. But their policies since 1989 were economically very right-wing and free-market.

Also - they ruled 2 times after 1989, not only in 2001-2005 but also in 90s.

[ajuc]

Notice "economically" in what I wrote.

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?

[lossolo]

> 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?

conservative-socialist ?

[ajuc]

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.

[bitL]

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.

[tannhaeuser]

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.