Notes from Poland: “No apologies, no shame”: the rise of Poland’s guerrilla LGBT activists

Various legal efforts have been made by LGBT groups to stop the vans, but have largely been unsuccessful, due to the fact that Poland’s laws against hateful and offensive speech do not cover sexual orientation or gender identity.

Although a court in Gdańsk ordered Fundacja Pro to temporarily stop using some of the slogans it claims are based on “scientific” evidence, another judge in Wrocław rejected a case against the organisation, saying that its activities are “informative”. [...]

Speaking with Notes from Poland shortly before her latest detention, Margot explained what she calls the groups’ “no apologies” approach. They have sought to “throw off the discourse of docility and shame” that she associates with the respectability politics of more moderate members of the LGBT movement. But this radicalism does not exist in a vacuum; it has “adapted to the growth of homophobia”. [...]

For some, the insult to religious feeling was a step too far; others questioned the wisdom of strategies that make LGBT people standout, preferring campaigns that present them as “normal people”. One interviewee said they should be looking for issues that they have in common with religion, such as the idea of love.

read the article

Dissent Magazine: The Law and Justice Party’s Moral Pseudo-Revolution

Today’s political divide between PO and PiS can be traced to the electoral collapse of the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). In 2005, having eroded their base of support through social spending cuts and corruption scandals, SLD’s electoral share in the Sejm (parliament) dropped by 30 percent. The two right-wing parties, PO and PiS, scooped up the lost votes, marking the beginning of the political duopoly in Poland that persists to this day. [...]

While the negative characteristics of the governing camp have been widely reported in the Western press, we hear less about the sins and failings of the opposition. PO’s primary weakness is its lack of a clear political identity. It is against PiS, but it is difficult to say what it is for. Even among hardline PO voters, one hears few positive statements about the party or its program. In pro-PO circles there is a culture of condescension toward the poorer part of PiS’s electorate, reminiscent of Reaganite discourse about “welfare queens”: PiS voters are supposedly bums who have babies to collect benefits, which they spend on vodka and vacations to the Baltic coast. Among the pro-PO middle class, there are some who have an inability to differentiate, as the great writer of the Polish left Stefan Żeromski once did, between snobbery and progress. [...]

PiS is vocally anti-communist. But its relationship to the communist era is more complicated than its rhetoric would suggest. As the opposition loves to point out, many members of the party’s in-crowd were once members of the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR), the communist party that governed the country for over four decades. For example, Stanisław Piotrowicz, who had been a prosecutor during martial law in the early 1980s, was recently appointed to the Constitutional Tribunal. Unlike the vulgar anti-communism of the 1990s, which blamed unemployment on “red capitalists” and argued that all Poland needed was one great purge, PiS’s critique is not directed at nefarious ex-communist personnel. Instead PiS rails against what happened after 1989. According to the party, the privatization process following the transition was distorted by secret service involvement, corruption, or just plain criminal activity. According to Jarosław Kaczynski, what occurred was not marketization but “Latinization,” which turned Poland into a Latin American oligarchy. Only PiS, he claims, can bring about justice in economic relations, an argument that appeals to a large cross-section of society repulsed by the dirty dealings of the political and business elite, including former SLD voters. [...]

In contrast, PiS’s welfare programs cannot be dismissed as trivial or symbolic. While the tendency of the liberal opposition to call PiS “socialist” sometimes outdoes the Tea Party’s abuse of that word, it cannot be denied that 500 złoty per month for each child has really helped the Polish poor. PO has learned the hard way that to stay relevant in Polish politics, one has to declare one’s commitment to this policy. The same goes for lowering the retirement age, which PO had increased when it was last in power.

read the article

4Liberty: Spring in Poland: Liberal View on Robert Biedron’s New Political Party

Robert Biedron’s project may be strategically significant if it leads to gaining the support of the entire leftist electorate before the forthcoming parliamentary elections. In this scenario, Robert Biedron would succeed in minimizing the loss of votes that may be otherwise issued in favor of the Razem or the Green parties, etc., but which would not be enough to land these parties any parliamentary seats.[...]

The launch of the Spring party has one crucial advantage: its leaders must now reveal the party platform. When analyzing the planks recently presented by Robert Biedron, a praise should be the starting point. It must be clearly stated that a bold party platform covering issues of ideology, gender equality, minority rights, secular state is very much needed and deserves a spokesperson in Poland.[...]

However, from he liberal perspective, the planks related to ideology are the only part worth praise. The presented socio-economic program is a combination of wishful thinking, social populism, and (oddly enough) ultra-liberalism mixed with lack of any serious financial analysis that would explain how the proposed changes shall be financed (and who should pay for them).[...]

Robert Biedron’s Spring has one more advantage. It is chiefly a party of a new generation and a group of thirty- and fourty-year-olds. Although I’m not a hard-core supporter of promoting only young politicians (I welcomed, for instance, the news that the European Coalition is created with participation of such seasoned politicians as Radosław Sikorski or Marek Belka), it is evident that Polish political scene suffers from a generation gap.

read the article

Foreign Policy: The Future of Politics Is Coming to Poland

Since the implosion of the post-communist left in the mid-2000s, Poland has been governed alternatively by the national-conservative Law and Justice and the centrist Civic Platform, which have finished first and second in every election during that period. Together, they currently hold some 80 percent of seats in parliament and continue to dominate in the polls, with a combined 65 percent or so support. They set the agenda, with their mutual antagonism fueling Poland’s toxic political environment, often dubbed the “Polish-Polish war.” This was especially evident in the wake of the recent murder of Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz, with initial hopes for a display of national unity quickly dashed as the two political camps began using the tragedy to attack one another.

However, there are reasons to suspect that this duopoly may be more fragile than it appears. Polls consistently show Kaczynski and Grzegorz Schetyna, the leader of Civic Platform, to be the country’s two most distrusted politicians. A poll published this week found that 71 percent thought Kaczynski should retire from politics. Just as Civic Platform lost power in 2015 having run out of ideas and energy after eight years in office (and has recovered neither since), Law and Justice, although it has governed effectively and introduced some popular policies honed during its long period in opposition, appears now to be struggling for inspiration. [...]

The most noteworthy development has been the launch, last Sunday, of a long-awaited new progressive party called Spring, led by Robert Biedron, a liberal former mayor and member of parliament. He describes Civic Platform and Law and Justice as part of the same problem, repeatedly emphasizing that he does not wish to engage in their war and saying in a recent interview that the two of them are a “corpse we will bury.” Yet it has been striking that, since announcing plans to re-enter national politics, Biedron has focused his attacks primarily on Civic Platform, despite in theory having much more in common with it than with Law and Justice. It is clear that, while he wants to remove Law and Justice from power, he sees his initial challenge as establishing a separate identity from the existing opposition and competing with it for votes. A poll in September 2018 showed that among potential voters for Biedron’s party, 61 percent would be defectors from Civic Platform, with the remainder from other centrist and left-wing parties.[...]

Alternatively, however, Biedron has the potential to energize nonvoters, those who are opposed to Law and Justice but, until now, have been unimpressed by the alternatives. Given Poland’s consistently low turnout (around 50 percent in the last three parliamentary elections), this creates great potential for disruption.

read the article

Social Europe: Politics in Poland: eternal duopoly or refreshing breeze?

Most analyst are of the opinion that the parliamentary elections will be a battle for the centre. This is particularly evident in the strategy of the PiS government, which after two turbulent years exchanged the revolutionary cabinet of Beata Szydło with a more moderate team around Mateusz Morawiecki, a technocrat acquainted with the western and domestic establishment. It’s already become routine in approaching elections for the PiS to hide away its most radical and controversial figures to attract more centrist voters, who do not necessarily believe the 2010 Smolensk air crash to have been a plot by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, or don’t feel the need to enthrone Jesus as the king of Poland. [...]

What’s more, the nationalist faction of the coalition quickly emancipated itself, also sometimes teaming up with the governing PiS, as in the case of the centennial Independence March in November 2018 in Warsaw, when the president’s celebrations practically merged with the biggest far-right demonstration in Europe. Also, the recent nomination of a nationalist activist and MP, Adam Andruszkiewicz, as secretary of state at the Ministry of Digitalisation is a clear sign of the PiS flirting with the nationalist right. Perhaps it is learning from the Hungarian experience: it wants to disable the nationalist movement before it becomes a serious political opponent, as Jobbik became to Fidesz. For sure, the nationalist circles will call in the big guns in May as well as in October 2019. [...]

In 2019 the stakes are high in Poland. For the PiS it is a matter of maintaining its monopoly and keeping the more radical right under control. For the liberals, it is about revenge and regaining power, lost after eight years in 2015. The new, emerging actors have nothing to lose—they can only win by mobilising voters tired of the PO-PiS duopoly. The biggest challenge, however, is that facing the left: the European and especially the parliamentary elections will be a fight for its survival on the Polish political scene.

read the article

Foreign Policy: Extreme Nationalism Is as Polish as Pierogi

The question is why, in Europe’s most economically successful post-communist country, has a ruling party ended up struggling to separate itself from openly extremist nationalists? In answering that question, and deciding what to do about it, it’s not enough to examine Law and Justice’s rise to power—one must also understand the peculiar culture of Polish nationalism that the party appeals to. In Poland, perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, there is no necessary contradiction between a commitment to democracy and to the most extreme forms of nationalism. [...]

Wladyslaw Gomulka, the communist party leader from 1956 to 1970, thus promised communism would be implemented the “Polish way.” In practice, this entailed blending nationalism with communism, the former aimed at reassuring Poles the national identity forged in the 19th century would be preserved in the new order. From the late 1950s, the red-and-white Polish flag thus “became much more prominent than the red communist flag,” while “state propaganda intensified the use of the adjective ‘Polish’ before standard communist slogans,” Porter-Szucs wrote. [...]

This conspiratorial view is exemplified in the writings of Rafal Ziemkiewicz, a prominent nationalist author and participant in previous far-right Independence Day marches, who described post-1989 Poland as a “post-colonial state” built not to serve Poles, but to exploit its resources for foreign overlords (Western capital) and their “local collaborators.” In a society with abundant experience of living under state structures serving foreign interests, much psychological fertile ground exists for such conspiratorial beliefs to germinate, and germinate they have in the past three decades, egged on by no less than Poland’s current ruling party. [...]

This camp believes that the only pathway to preventing these hated lefty ideologies from permeating Poland is via a robust defense of the country’s “independence.” Whatever the result of the current face-off over Sunday’s independence march, it represents the opening salvo in an inevitable civil war on Poland’s right between Law and Justice, which wants a controlled nationalism, and those who crave it unleashed in its rawest and crudest form. The battle for who best represents the ideals of God, honor, and Fatherland has just begun.

read the article

openDemocracy: Poland's left must offer a real alternative to break the right-wing deadlock

The period of neoliberal hegemony in Poland replicated many of the so-called populist features of the present PiS administration. The division between the elite and the people was emphasised; however in this case it was the elite that was pure and progressive and the people corrupted and regressive. Similar to contemporary populism, Polish politics was also divided into two antagonistic blocs. No overtly neoliberal party was ever able to win political power in a democratic election, despite its overbearing ideological influence in public and intellectual life. Politics fractured along historical lines, with ‘post-Communist’ and ‘post-Solidarity’ camps dominating the political scene until the mid-2000s. Whilst the political debate often oscillated around questions of historical legacies, both blocs implemented similar neoliberal economic programmes once in office. By the time that Poland had entered the EU in 2004, both of these political blocs had all but disintegrated due to the unpopularity of their policies, meaning a new recomposition of party politics was required.[...]

On the one hand, the lives of many of the poorest in society did not improve and even worsened during PO’s consecutive terms (the percentage of those living in extreme poverty rose from 5.6 percent in 2008 to 7.4 percent in 2014.) . Concurrently, the lives of many of the aspiring middle class were becoming increasingly difficult. The transition to capitalism had brought with it a rapid expansion in university graduates; and for some time higher educational qualifications helped to ensure upward social mobility. This provided the material basis for the liberal ideology of meritocratic individual achievement and a justification for the structural inequalities generated by the transition to capitalism. However, the relation between education and income has been steadily weakening in recent years; and those with higher education are finding it increasingly difficult to secure full-time employment. The percentage of the workforce employed on temporary insecure contracts grew from just 5.6 percent in 2000 to 27.9 percent in 2015 (increasing from 14.2 percent to an incredible 73.1 percent for 15 to 24 year olds during the same period.) It was becoming increasingly hard to secure stable employment; raise the capital to buy a secure home; have access to high-quality public services; and look forward to a retirement with a liveable pension. [...]

After gaining power in 2015, PiS did something that was anathema in Polish politics: they fulfilled many of their electoral promises. During their first year in office, PiS introduced a generous package of child benefits, named “Family 500+ Plus” in reference to the 500 PLN (£102.84) per month in child support available for second and subsequent children under the policy. The average monthly wage in Poland is 3,429 PLN (£705.25) after tax. PiS also raised the minimum wage and lowered the pension age. The 500+ child benefit had an immediate positive effect. Child poverty decreased, between 2015 and 2017, from 23 percent to 11 percent, with the number of children receiving child benefits rising from 2 million to 3.8 million (although over 3 million children are still excluded).[...]

Simultaneously, there are severe limitations in the economic and social programme of PiS. Despite the success of 500+, this remains a conservative welfare policy which, for example, is decreasing the participation of women in the workforce. A left-wing alternative is to universalise these benefits while investing in public services, such as nurseries and housing. In order to help fund these investments, the left must do what PiS has avoided and reform the regressive taxation system. Also, the PiS government, despite its nationalist rhetoric, remains heavily dependent upon the inflow of EU funds to maintain economic growth. Once these funds are reduced in a couple of years, the base of the PO and PiS governments’ macroeconomic policies will have been eroded. The question will then be raised as to how government spending can be increased and directed towards those areas in most need of investment. Also, despite its social rhetoric, PiS remains a right-wing party that will tend to oppose the labour disputes of trade unions. Only the left can provide a political voice to such movements.

read the article

The New Yorker: Is Poland Retreating from Democracy?

Pietrzak founded his patriotic association during the term of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who was a member of the liberal party Civic Platform. Tusk, who was elected in 2007, presided over what was perhaps the most dramatic period of growth in Polish history. Since the nineties, both the economy and salaries have doubled. Peasants, historically Poland’s largest social class, all but disappeared. Among the hulking Stalinist blocks of Warsaw’s city center, skyscrapers—Axa, Deloitte, MetLife—shot up. Sushi shops and espresso bars proliferated. “In how many towns in this country did you have latte before 2005?” Dariusz Stola, who runs the polin Jewish-history museum, quipped. But growth has been uneven. While Warsaw saw the introduction of Uber Eats and Mercedes taxis, rural areas in the east lagged behind. “Every rich person in the country is rich in the first generation,” Stola said. “And that makes a lot of relative deprivation. ‘Why did he become rich? I remember his father being as poor as mine.’ ” After Poland joined the European Union, in 2004, around two million Poles, in a country of thirty-eight million, migrated to other European countries. [...]

In the summer of 2017, the sociologist Maciej Gdula interviewed Law and Justice supporters from a provincial town not far from Warsaw, many of whom had benefitted greatly from the economic boom. Still, they felt despised by Polish élites. Kaczyński, they thought, offered a vision in which “you no longer have to go to university, get a mortgage and buy a flat, and declare that you have ‘European values,’ in order to be a fully-fledged member of the Polish nation,” as one reviewer of Gdula’s book, “The New Authoritarianism,” put it. [...]

Yet, according to surveys, the percentage of people who think that Poles suffered as much as Jews during the war rose from thirty-nine in 1992 to sixty-two in 2012. When high-school students were asked recently in a nationwide poll what happened at Jedwabne, forty-six per cent said that the Germans murdered Poles who were hiding Jews. “After the fall of Communism, there was a tendency to conform to the Western interpretation,” Omer Bartov, a professor of modern European and Jewish history at Brown, told me. Now that Poland is coming into its own, there is a sense that “we don’t need these norms forced on us by the West.”

read the article

openDemocracy: Unsympathetic people: the overwhelming success of Poland's exclusionary agenda

According to a recent poll, the attitude of the Polish people towards other nationals changed dramatically over the period of just one year. Compared with 2017, Polish approval rates of many nations took a deep plunge. Sympathy towards Jews and Arabs, already low, dropped in 2018 by 13 and 6 percent, respectively. Given the persistent anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic propaganda in the Polish media, this is rather unsurprising. Approval of the Germans dropped by 16 percent, as if the difficult and protracted process of the reconciliation between Poland and its “eternal enemy” had never happened.

What is really puzzling is that Polish approval of their southern neighbours, the Czechs, took a nosedive by 15 percent; Italians, Russians, Vietnamese and Japanese by 13 percent, and the British by 8 percent. Even the Hungarians and Americans are liked less among Poles by 14 and 11 percent, respectively. [...]

Before attempting to provide one, we should note that while the rapid change in the attitude of Poles towards other nationalities is puzzling, we – the Polish people – are not alone in this. The public attitude towards other nationals nowadays is noticeably swinging in Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, as well as in the USA and Great Britain. [...]

As far as the reversal in the Polish attitudes towards their neighbours is concerned, I would like to suggest that its explanation is to be sought in the fact that, ever since the peaceful “Solidarity” revolution in 1989, Polish politics has been fuelled by the struggle over who truly takes credit for the successful overthrow of Communism. Driven by this, Polish politics became the arena for a struggle of personalities between its main actors, with ideology and political agendas playing an important, but ultimately secondary and instrumental role.

read the article

Political Critique: Poland The ‘good shift’ – new authoritarianism and beyond

Using biographical and qualitative interviews, the authors studied voters in a provincial but well-off town in the Mazovia region, where PiS got nearly 50% of the votes in the last election. The researchers talked to the representatives of working class (people doing manual work and providing simple services) and middle class (white-collar workers in private and public sector). Both groups are important because the ruling party does not appeal solely to poor and poorly educated voters. The study team stated: “Indeed, Kaczyński’s party got the biggest support among farmers and workers, with 53.3% and 46.8% of the vote respectively. We should remember, though, that these groups vote less frequently than other groups (…). PiS would never have received so many votes were it not for the support it got from the middle class, i.e. administrative and service industry employees. Their victory here was not overwhelming, but they managed to collect the most votes – 35.4%. Civic Platform (PO) won within just one of the professional groups listed in the questionnaire, i.e. among the CEOs and managerial staff (…). PiS was also the winner among businessmen, reaching 29.1% and people with a higher education 30.4%”.

The idea that PiS voters form a non-homogenous group is clear if we look at the polling day results. However, the study by Maciej Gdula points to the actual attractors for PiS voters. Different social groups seem to support PiS for different reasons, and their political identification is backed by different reasons, which are not always linked to personal experience or tangible material gains. The study shows that “supporting PiS comes from gratification related to the possibility to participate in the political drama directed by its leader.” [...]

These three roles correspond to the three pillars of what PiS has to offer, making it possible for different groups of voters to identify with Kaczyński’s project. First of all, it is “setting accounts with the elites” identified with the establishment of politicians, public servants and cultural milieu of the Third Polish Republic. Secondly, it is about the inclusion into the national community that allows other aspirations and aesthetics than those of the middle class. Thirdly, it is about morally justified domination over those that are more vulnerable. [...]

 It is worth noting some subtle differences. The working class is dominated by an image of the Third Republic’s elites, especially the government, as being out of touch with common people and defaulting on their electoral promises. The middle class’ hard feelings, on the other hand, focus on their corruption and immoral approach to public life.

read the article

Political Critique: Surfing the wave. How conservative populists hijack politics

Not every group mentioned shares the same agenda, but similarities exist that outline a common ideology. These Conservative populists (Conpops) resemble classical conservatives in their belief that Society’s strength comes from its traditions which must be preserved. Conpops add to this a belief that establishment politicians have sold out to globalization and its actions the source of all the country’s ills. The solution is a return to traditionalism, accomplished by ethnic unity, restrictive immigration, strict gender and religious hierarchies, and a reclamation of national sovereignty. These ideas and Conpops’ aversion to liberal democratic norms places them somewhere between center-right parties and far-right Fascists. [...]

Conpopism is popular because it offers an authentic vision for the future. Voters have so little trust in politicians that someone who has firmly held beliefs simply stands out. But either you’re sincere or you’re not and surfers by definition aren’t.  They can’t simply jump on hoping to hijack a movement. Voters will either reject them outright or punish them once they’ve shown their true colors. Prior to Brexit, Boris Johnson was known as a slightly left-of-Conservatism politician who was a Conservative Party loyalist. He, however, saw an opportunity for self-promotion and took a prominent role in the pro-Brexit campaign. Since the Brexit Referendum, however, the public has turned and Johnson’s approval ratings have sunk like a lead weight thrown from Big Ben. The movement he hoped to appropriate has thrown him out as an establishment interloper and he has been left without a leg to stand on. [...]

They haven’t. Instead, mainstream parties have attempted to cling to power by either surfing or offering the same stale politics. In the Dutch 2017 General Election, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) were only narrowly defeated by Prime Minister Mark Rutte. But Rutte pivoted hard during the election, even taking out enormous newspaper ads, calling for immigrants who “don’t respect Dutch customs” to leave the country. Some infractions? Homophobia, Sexism, and calling Dutch people racist. By winning using a strategy that blames immigrants for intangible ills in society, Rutte placed himself in a horrible bind. Either he follows through, forcing immigrants to leavE the Netherlands and the Dutch economy implodes (Immigrants are 11% of the population) or Rutte completely backtracks and loses all credibility. Meanwhile Wilders’s ideas have been completely normalized and his party has secured itself as the second largest in the country. Other European parties should take a long look at the Netherlands before adopting similar rhetoric.

read the article

Political Critique: Poles Apart

The Polish opposition uses these European tendencies to show the growing isolation of the right-wing populist government (most starkly symbolised by the 27:1 vote to re-elect co-founder and chairman of Civic Platform Donald Tusk as the President of the European Council). PiS on the other hand sees them as yet more proof that behind nice words about democracy and common values lie traditional, national interests, that are often in direct opposition to ‘Polish national interest’. [...]

First, liberal institutions and politicians in this view are seen as moderate, yet some of their social agendas are not moderate at all. The previous centre-right government led by Civic Platform (PO) hiked up the pension age and reduced who is eligible for early retirement. While currently criticising the government for ignoring over 900 thousand signatures for a referendum against the current education reform the party does not admit it had the same disregard of popular concerns when it declined to organise a referendum on the retirement age. [...]

Faith in dialogue as a way to convince people over to progressive ideas is being substituted by just mobilising already convinced voters from one’s political camp. This process is pushing liberal democracy away from its inclusive principles into the territory of social conflict, division, and segregation. In effect the vision of “two Polands” – the liberal one and the conservative one – becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, basically playing into a polarising PiS narratives about both the way majoritarian democracy should work and how the ‘liberal camp’ has nothing but disregard towards the ‘common folk’ that Kaczyński’s PiS party tries to represent. [...]

This lack of success of the alternative proposed by the opposition – i.e. the liberals sticking to the political ‘business as usual’ – can be seen in the opinion polls that showed the PiS on a massive 40%, and the PO on 21% straight after the battle over the independence of the courts. Polls also show that 50% of Poles would prefer to leave the EU than be forced to accept refugee quotas from Brussels. The strategy of top-down enforcement of liberal democracy (and – let me repeat it – a narrow version of it) will not bring progressive Poland to life.

read the article

Quartz: The rise of Poland’s far right has important lessons for Americans who hope Donald Trump is just a one-term president

By “great,” Kaczynski meant patriotic, traditional, Catholic, pro-life, able to stand it’s ground against the European Union, and deeply anti-Russian. But first and foremost, Kaczynski’s great Poland entailed ridding the government of “corrupt” elites, among which Kopacz was a prominent figure.

This probably sounds familiar to US readers. President-elect Donald Trump has talked a big game about his plans to “drain the swamp” in DC. He’s said the establishment in Washington is made up of criminals and that he would “lock them up. A year before Trump, Kaczynski promised the same thing called his own political opponents criminals, and also promised to throw them in jail.

Kopacz, along with the rest of the Civic Platform’s leadership and the Polish liberal media, never really saw Kaczynski coming. [...]

In the US, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton coined the term “deplorables” to describe the half of the Trump supporters she saw as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” In Poland, liberals likewise bemoaned a group they called “Poland B,” the Law and Justice party crowd, who they saw as uneducated and rural, living barely above the threshold of poverty, struggling from one paycheck to another—in contrast with “Poland A,” living in big cities, drinking café lattes, and participating in the global exchange of culture and finance. Poland B was also deeply religious, xenophobic, homophobic, and racist. At least, that’s how the mainstream media depicted those people. [...]

In June 1989, Adam Michnik, one of the architects of the Round Table Agreement, explained the rationale behind it in an interview for a Belgrade, Serbia-based weekly NIN. He said that Communists, as owners of or shareholders in all those corporations, would be personally interested in the success of the newborn democracy, rather than in its demise. The argument sounded quite reasonable at the time. But 27 years later, it’s become painfully clear that capitalism only made some rich: Poland’s GDP per capita has doubled since 1989, making the country the sixth-largest economy in the European Union—but 6.2 million people still live in relative poverty.

And so “Poland B” began to wonder why they fought so hard for a country where they now struggle to get a job at a post office, while leaders and bureaucrats of the former regime that deployed tanks to keep them in check back in the 80s were now driving Porsches and sipping Martinis. [...]

I agree with Traub that the same sociopolitical mechanism was behind Law and Justice in Poland, Brexit in the UK, and Donald Trump in the US. But I disagree with Traub’s explanation. He traces it back to the 2007-08 financial crisis “which shook the faith of many working-class and middle-class voters in the wisdom of liberal elites.” I think it was about dignity.

read the article