Notes from Poland: Polish prime minister committed “gross violation of law” in organising elections, rules court

 Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, committed a “gross violation of the law” and the constitution when ordering preparations for elections earlier this year, a court has ruled. [...]

“The manner of [conducting] elections cannot be restricted by any actions of the executive branch,” wrote Rudnicki. “[Poland] cannot be considered a state of law if [state] organs infringe the provisions of the law.”

The judges also declared that the decision to hold a postal-only vote meant that “voters were not guaranteed an equal, direct and secret ballot”, reports RMF24. [...]

However, Ewa Siedlecka, a commentator for the Polityka weekly, notes that the court’s decision is mainly “symbolic”. Some organisations or individuals – such as voters whose personal data was provided to the post office – could launch civil cases. But Morawiecki and other officials are unlikely to face legal consequences, as PiS has created a system that “guarantees freedom and impunity”, she writes.

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European Council on Foreign Relations: Poland in the EU: How to lose friends and alienate people

 This year, when Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, was the first to call for an extraordinary EU summit to discuss the EU’s reaction to violent events in Belarus, his words did not generate an immediately positive reaction from other capitals. An extraordinary Foreign Affairs Council is eventually taking place today – but credit should also go to Lithuania, Germany, and Sweden. It is not just the result of successful diplomatic efforts on the part of Warsaw, even if the Polish foreign ministry has sought to present it this way for its domestic audience. If any capital is currently leading on the EU’s reaction to events in Belarus, it is not Poland but the much smaller Lithuania – which merits a separate story about how to punch above one’s weight. [...]

The Law and Justice party formed a government in 2015 with a lofty promise to lift Poland’s foreign policy from its knees. Since then, however, the country’s standing in the EU has hardly improved even a bit. If anything, the trend is in the opposite direction. The Coalition Explorer survey of policy professionals reveals that collectively they regard Poland as the second most disappointing country in the bloc, after Hungary. It is also among three countries (alongside Italy and Spain) that are most often seen as punching below their weight in EU politics. [...]

However, as usual, the devil lies in the detail. Apart from a limited group of the EU’s eastern member states (Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria; half of them Polish neighbours), rarely does anyone consider Poland as having the same longer-standing interests on EU policy; and only some of these countries (plus Germany) include Poland on the list of their most contacted partners. This clashes with Warsaw’s ambition to play the role of one of the EU’s post-Brexit ‘Big Five’, alongside Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. [...]

Most notably, the United Kingdom used to be the key western EU member that considered that Poland shared similar interests with it. This translated into strong contacts between the two capitals. Now this alliance has been moved outside the EU framework and, as a result, nowhere in the EU’s western part do policy professionals consider Poland as sharing interests with their country. Germany is the only pre-2004 EU member where Poland is among the most contacted partners – but Poland ranks only fifth, after France, Netherlands, Austria, and Spain (with which Germany does not even have the border). Relations between Warsaw and Berlin are far from perfect, to say the least, largely upon Poland’s own wish.

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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.

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Deutsche Welle: Poland: Where Keynes meets Jesus

Brian Porter-Szucs, author of the book "When Nationalism Began to Hate," believes that Kaczynski hasn't suddenly turned "a communist," and adds: "But many wanted a state that would preserve the communist party's commitment to social cohesion, cultural homogeneity and nationalism, just imbue it with a Catholic rather than a leftist conceptual vocabulary."

Kaczynski himself rarely speaks with anything but a Catholic conceptual vocabulary. That is why some in PiS see the current administration as part of a long-term plan to remold Polish state and society, with a socially conservative, church-infused rhetoric combined with a Keynesian-lite attempt to rebalance a capitalism that some believe has gone far enough in the post-communist country.[...]

The spending plans could also bring Poland close to the EU's budget deficit limit of 3% of GDP in 2020, from under 0.5% in 2018. Some economists even fear Poland could breach the limit. They also think that there will be hardly any money left in the budget for urgently needed increases to public sector pay. [...]

"The schemes were criticized as being too expensive, but Poland's public deficit has fallen, not risen. Rather, these policies have stimulated economic growth while dramatically reducing child poverty and increasing school enrolment." he argues, and adds: "A new European political order seems to be emerging — one that is likely to leave traditional parties of both the left and the right behind."

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Haaretz: Poland vs Israel: Who's Really Winning the War Over Holocaust History?

Last year’s conflagration was primarily the fault of Poland, which passed its ill-conceived memory law on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and then compounded this with insensitive remarks from senior figures, including Morawiecki’s comments about "Jewish perpetrators" of the Holocaust.

But this time around it is the Israeli side that has set the blaze. The claim by Foreign Minister Israel Katz that Poles "imbibe anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk" was false, essentializing and offensive – not least to the many Poles who risked, and often lost, their lives helping Jews during the war, as well as the many today who devote themselves to protecting and promoting Poland’s Jewish heritage. [...]

The fallout from this could have been contained. Yet instead it was compounded by the Israeli government making no attempt to denounce or distance itself from Katz’s remarks, nor even to rein him in. The very next day he repeated the remarks in another radio interview. The situation was further exacerbated by a slew of commentary in Israeli media that was often uninformed on WWII history and presented further negative generalizations about Poles as a whole.[...]

And this is precisely the problem. These disputes over WWII history bring out the worst elements and attitudes on both sides. They trigger a vicious circle of mutually reinforcing animosity fuelled by competing, one-sided historical memories. The discourse comes to be dominated by the most extreme voices, who have a political or ideological motivation to stir things up.

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Haaretz: Polish Prime Minister to Haaretz: Tens of Thousands of Poles Aided Jews. We Won't Give in to Lies

“I have no problem with someone mentioning the fact that during the cruel, evil, dehumanizing war there were individual criminals in my nation – obviously there were, just as in every other nation,” says Morawiecki. “But when you use these stereotypes that ‘every Pole suckled anti-Semitism out of their mother’s breast’ it’s nothing short of racism.”[...]

“We also have to cope with some anti-Semitism in Poland, but fortunately it is marginal,” Morawiecki said, citing the recent report of the European Fundamental Rights Agency. “Poland is one of the few countries in the EU where the number of anti-Semitic incidents is decreasing, while in many others we are witnessing worrying developments,” he said, noting that anti-Semitism appears to be on the rise in countries like France, Germany, Sweden and Britain. [...]

Morawiecki also cited that the joint statement he signed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last June included a section denouncing anti-Semitism and anti-Polonism. This part of the declaration elicited criticism from some historians who argued that a parallel should not be drawn between the two, and that putting them together in this way diminished the gravity of centuries of anti-Semitism in Poland.[...]

Netanyahu was initially quoted on the Jerusalem Post website as having said that “the Polish nation” colluded with the Nazis. Following a request for clarification from the Polish government, his office issued a statement that “He was speaking about Poles and not about the Polish people or the country of Poland.”

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The Atlantic: Hungary’s Workers Are the Victims of a Policy That Limits Migration

At the same time, though, Hungarian workers have continued to move out of the country in search of higher wages abroad. As many as 600,000 Hungarians—equivalent to around 9 percent of the working-age population—work outside of Hungary, and Orbán’s refusal to countenance immigrants filling the void has only made this shortfall more acute. In December, the government rushed legislation through Parliament to try to address this shortage. The new measures give businesses the right to require employees to work up to 400 hours of overtime a year, nearly twice as much as was previously allowed, and demand only that employers pay for that overtime at some point within three years. Simply put, employers can make their employees work more, and not have to pay them until later. The government maintains that these overtime hours remain voluntary and at the discretion of the employee, but many workers and trade unions argue that they have little choice in the matter.[...]

In recent years, the Hungarian leader has successfully circumscribed the media and single-handedly rewritten the constitution to cement his political control (with more changes promised). His government has also stacked previously independent institutions with loyal allies—another law passed in December allows the justice minister to handpick judges in administrative courts, drastically hindering judicial independence. Orbán’s election victory last year gave him a new mandate and renewed momentum to push his agenda. Opposing political parties were weak and fractured, and any popular protest attempts to challenge him had been sporadic and ineffective. The “slave law” appears to have changed that dynamic, though, highlighting not only Orbán’s intransigence when it comes to allowing in immigrants, but also the few levers available to his government to address the labor shortage.

To some extent, Orbán’s reliance on economic growth to counter his opponents is itself a dangerous strategy. While wages have been slowly increasing, partly thanks to economic growth and partly because of the labor shortage, the average Hungarian still makes only barely half that of the average person in Austria, a country that shares a border with Hungary (and that, a century ago, shared an empire). There are also reports that while Hungary’s overall economic indicators are improving, unemployment figures in particular appear to be buffeted by a state-run public-works program that employs large numbers of people.  [...]

Other countries have turned to immigration to address labor shortages. In fact, Hungary is not alone among Central European countries in facing such a problem. Poland, like Hungary, has vocally opposed the EU’s migrant quotas, for example, yet it has brought in thousands of Ukrainian workers fleeing that country’s conflict. And still, Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s prime minister, suggested in July that he would consider relaxing the country’s opposition to immigration, telling reporters, “If there is a demand on the labor market which Poles are unable or unwilling to meet, we need to take up the challenge so that we maintain our economic growth.”

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Bloomberg: Poland’s Populists Are Suddenly Vulnerable

The party won a resounding victory when compared with local elections in 2014, based on the results tallied by Oct. 24. It took regions it didn’t control before. But it was clear the share of the vote was down from 2015, when the numbers swept it to power with a record parliamentary majority. Questions are being asked why it couldn’t build on that success. “People realized that Law and Justice isn’t immortal,” says Joanna Mucha, a lawmaker for the opposition Civic Platform group.

Until now, nothing seemed to faze the leadership. A protracted impasse with the EU over a power grab of the independent judiciary and public media and a confrontation with the U.S. and Israel over a law making it a criminal offense to suggest Poland played any role in the Holocaust were met with kudos among supporters. They bought into the narrative of a plucky government standing up for their nation against what the party calls “anti-Polonism.” In April, as relations with allies deteriorated, Law and Justice still commanded an average lead in the polls that was wider than its sweeping victory in 2015. It helped that the economy was—and still is—growing at a healthy clip. That’s because Poland is the biggest net recipient of EU aid, and consumers are enjoying Law and Justice’s increased spending on social welfare such as subsidies for families.[...]

“It’s a clear verdict that the populist revolution is getting weaker,” says Marcin Zaborowski, senior associate at Visegrad Insight, a journal of analysis and opinion focusing on central Europe. “It’s also a personal defeat for Morawiecki, who has been a better, modern face of the party, geared to more centrist voters, and this bid has failed. The result will weaken the position of Morawiecki within the party.”

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Politico: Hungary and Poland’s multispeed Europe

Of course, not joining the euro and being circumspect over immigration and asylum are legitimate policy choices (even if, for instance, 53 percent of Hungarians are supportive of the common European currency). But one should be under no illusion about the consequences. The monetary union is by far the EU’s most important political project, and as such it’s bound to be at the center of the bloc’s integration efforts.[...]

As the United Kingdom, the EU’s second (or third, depending on what measure one uses) largest economy, leaves the bloc altogether, the periphery will look much less attractive. True, there will still be Denmark, with its opt-out from the common currency, and Sweden, where voters rejected adopting the euro in a 2003 referendum. Few others, however, see non-euro EU membership as an attractive destination. Bulgaria, for example, agreed in July with the Eurogroup on initiating the process leading to membership in the monetary union — a first such attempt since January 2014, when Latvia and Lithuania adopted the common currency.[...]

Bulgaria has also committed itself “to thoroughly implement the reforms monitored by the Commission under the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism in the areas of judicial reform and the fight against corruption and organized crime.” It is hard to imagine the governments in Budapest and Warsaw acquiescing to similar demands, even symbolically, while also continuing in their widespread authoritarian abuses. [...]

As a result, the periphery is going to be an increasingly lonely, awkward place. It was, after all, the inability to commit itself fully to the European project that helped to drive the U.K. to its 2016 Brexit referendum. For Poland, Hungary, and also the Czech Republic the problem is primarily political. Staying out of the eurozone denies the three post-communist countries a place at the table for weighing in on key decisions.

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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.”

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Jacobin Magazine: Poland’s Legislated Antisemitism

Legislative monstrosities like these, written in a hurry and voted through parliament in the dead of night, are a specialty of the PiS. That they are strange, absurd, and imprecise is not just a result of the haste in which they are written and the lack of any prior consultation or discussion. This law, which contradicts both the constitution and common sense, was designed deliberately. Its purpose is to give PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński — who exercises total power in Poland, even though formally he’s just an ordinary member of parliament — and his acolytes the ability to prosecute any case they deem necessary at a given moment. Given PiS control of the courts, article 55 can even be enforced retroactively as an ex post facto law.  [...]

It turned out that Poles, represented in previous historical accounts — whether by communists in the 1945-1989 period, or by right-wing liberals, nationalists, and neoliberal post-communists since 1990 — as only victims of either German or Soviet terror, were in fact complicit in the Nazi Holocaust. In the book My z Jedwabnego (We from Jedwabne), published in 2004, Anna Bikont presented a brilliant reconstruction of the events on the territory near Jedwabne following German occupation in July 1941. She showed that there were in fact many towns where Poles, without the participation of Germans, only their permission, murdered their Jewish neighbors. Descriptions of the pogroms included elaborate torture, rape, mutilation, and ended with burning their victims alive. It was so shocking that it caused a large segment of public opinion, together with right-wing historians and journalists, to simply deny these facts as impossible and unbelievable. [...]

From the dozens of memoirs and diaries of Jewish victims and survivors, as well as historical studies that have been published in Poland over the last twenty years, it has become clear that Jews in hiding were more afraid of Poles than of Germans. Germans could not recognize Polish Jews, while Poles picked them out unerringly. Some Poles, of course, helped or tried to help Jews in hiding, but they did so in opposition to the majority. This majority was infected with the prewar, pan-European virus of antisemitism and saw the Jews as their mortal enemies.

Researchers from the Polish Center for Holocaust Research estimate the number of Jews murdered directly by Poles or denounced by them to be in the tens of thousands. Some estimates even speak of 100,000 victims. The perpetrators of these murders and denunciations were: Polish policemen, Polish employees of the German construction service, members of the volunteer fire brigades, peasants, and city dwellers. Jews were also killed by partisan units of all political stripes: the extreme right-wing National Armed Forces (NSZ), the majority Home Army (AK), and the Peasant Battalions (BCh). Even some troops of the communist People’s Guard (later renamed the People’s Army) committed some murders, although for the most part Jews who were in the ranks of the People’s Guards or under their protection survived.  

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The Atlantic: The Dark Consequences of Poland's New Holocaust Law

But it’s hard to see how they can walk it back. Proposed by a hardliner in Law and Justice, it’s significant that the law was rushed through just days after undercover reporters for a private Polish television channel filmed a neo-Nazi group in Poland waving Nazi flags, wearing Nazi uniforms, and burning a swastika. The report prompted Polish authorities to open an investigation into “public propagation of fascism.” But that, of course, put Law and Justice in a tough spot with its die-hards, who were already upset after a recent cabinet reshuffle had brought in some moderates. The reshuffle, in turn, came after Poland was trying to make nice after the European Commission threatened it with sanctions if it moved ahead with changes to its judiciary that European officials say threaten the rule of law—the biggest test yet for the bloc.

Messages crafted for domestic consumption reverberate far beyond national borders. “I wouldn’t say this is a completely planned and calculated action, it’s more a reflection of a complete self-isolation and lack of understanding of other countries,” Pawel Machcewicz, a historian and former director of a new WWII museum in Gdansk, told me. “They are surprised but they cannot back down because for their constituents that will mean the weakness, the betrayal of Polish dignity,” he said. [...]

Gross told me he didn’t think the law would have many practical consequences for established historians, although he worried that it might prevent younger ones from studying the Holocaust. Above all, he was concerned about the teaching of history in Polish schools. “No one will dare to teach the Holocaust,” he said. “The ignorance in Polish society about the Holocaust is extraordinary. There were surveys made and the majority of the people who were asked the question ‘Who suffered more during World War II under German occupation, Poles or Jews?’—the majority of the people responded ‘Poles.’ How ignorant do you have to be?” [...]

I’ve often thought back to this line as capturing the inchoate resentment that seems to drive the current Polish government. The French political scientist Dominique Moïsi has written that three emotions tend to drive politics: humiliation, hope, and fear. Poland falls into the humiliation camp. A feeling of grievance, a sense that the wider world doesn’t truly understand the suffering of the Polish people, but also a sense that the Holocaust—in which three million Polish Jews were slaughtered on Polish soil—was giving Poland a bad name.

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