So, I thought about starting a thread, given that (if we are unlucky) Polish politics may become as "interesting" as Hungarian one later this year.
As you know this year is a double election year, with Presidential elections in Spring (in fact on Sunday is the run off vote) and Parliamentary elections in autumn.
The run-off vote is between Mr Komorowski and Mr Duda. Mr Komorowski is a relatively unremarkable incumbent, supported by the ruling centre-right wing PO who came second (by a hair) in the first round. Mr Duda is a younger more energetic challenger supported by PiS (Kaczynski, head of PiS, is not running - probably because he is seen as too toxic) who came first.
Mr Duda has a relatively smaller but much more disciplined electorate (there are the people who think Poland is going to hell in handbasket; PO are thieves; the Smolensk plane crash was an assassination; and Poland is ruled by traitors and Western arse-lickers). Mr Komorowski has probably larger potential appeal, but after 10 years of PO rule (which has been not unsuccesful but rather bland and very centrist and "careful") there is a substantial feeling of ennui and annoyance with the ruling party. So it looked like Duda may actually end up winning, because the typical PO electorate (relatively succesful middle class) were going to stay home and just let Duda win (admittedly, he has been quite succesful in projecting a "more-moderate-than-PiS" image during the campaign). Then there is the nationalist/populist right who think Duda is too moderate (but would vote for him as he is more Catholic and nationalistic than Komorowski) and the left who dislike both but some of whom were vowing to vote Duda to "shake things up".
Komorowski was really trailing behind in polls until the last Monday's first televised Presidential debate, where he came much better than his opponent - who admittedly blew the rouse by, among others, asking a question attacking the incumbent for apologising for Poles' role in Holocaust and thus painting himself as an antisemite to the more moderate electorate (this is in fact one of the reasons I decided to go to the polls and vote Komorowski rather than staying home).
So it is a toss-up. Now, even if Duda loses, in autumn PiS may actually win - while we have a proportional election system, it is heavily skewed to favour the winners so even if they get, say, 35% of the popular vote but come first, they may have a Parliamentary majority. Furthermore, because of the constant war on the left side between post-communists and liberal left party (the one I voted for in the last elections), Polish left is essentially annihilated and may not even get into the Parliament at all (a party needs to get at least 5% of the national vote to get any MPs).
So we may very well end up with the Parliament where PiS has the majority; PO comes second and is at the same time the most leftist Parliamentary party (being, generally, centre-right/moderately conservative but pro-European) with the rest being split between various right wing populists. If this happens, having Komorowski as the President may be the only thing saving us from full Orbanisation of Polish politics by PiS (as the President gets a veto which can only be overturned with a 2/3 Parliamentary majority - something hopefully PiS and their potential parterns won't get).
So it is looking bleak. :P
I dunno - the part about the weak and non-existent left sounds pretty good to me. :)
Quote from: Barrister on May 21, 2015, 10:23:54 AM
I dunno - the part about the weak and non-existent left sounds pretty good to me. :)
You need left wing - not necessarily in power, but to champion causes such as gay rights, gender equality, care for the poor and the like. Without strong pressure from the labour, the UK tories would have never introduced same sex marriage, for example.
Dear God. I mean I realize PO is not your cup of tea but every sane patriot should make sure they stay in power, in the Presidency anyway. Maybe a party you prefer more might make it next time.
Quote from: Martinus on May 21, 2015, 10:27:13 AM
Quote from: Barrister on May 21, 2015, 10:23:54 AM
I dunno - the part about the weak and non-existent left sounds pretty good to me. :)
You need left wing - not necessarily in power, but to champion causes such as gay rights, gender equality, care for the poor and the like. Without strong pressure from the labour, the UK tories would have never introduced same sex marriage, for example.
I am... unconvinced...
Quote from: Martinus on May 21, 2015, 10:27:13 AM
Quote from: Barrister on May 21, 2015, 10:23:54 AM
I dunno - the part about the weak and non-existent left sounds pretty good to me. :)
You need left wing - not necessarily in power, but to champion causes such as gay rights, gender equality, care for the poor and the like. Without strong pressure from the labour, the UK tories would have never introduced same sex marriage, for example.
Yeah in Poland and Hungary the left wing parties seem completely irrelevant. Is this typical for the neighborhood?
Quote from: Barrister on May 21, 2015, 10:29:24 AM
I am... unconvinced...
Right wing parties in Europe. Not really that awesome.
Quote from: Valmy on May 21, 2015, 10:31:41 AM
Right wing parties in Europe. Not really that awesome.
Center right parties in Europe on the other hand do tend to be pretty awesome.
Quote from: Valmy on May 21, 2015, 10:29:33 AM
Quote from: Martinus on May 21, 2015, 10:27:13 AM
Quote from: Barrister on May 21, 2015, 10:23:54 AM
I dunno - the part about the weak and non-existent left sounds pretty good to me. :)
You need left wing - not necessarily in power, but to champion causes such as gay rights, gender equality, care for the poor and the like. Without strong pressure from the labour, the UK tories would have never introduced same sex marriage, for example.
Yeah in Poland and Hungary the left wing parties seem completely irrelevant. Is this typical for the neighborhood?
I don't have exact data but I would say it is likely - this is because (i) certain nationalist right wing parties (such as PiS in Poland) are actually pretty socialist when it comes to stuff like taxing the rich, being pro "little people" and the like (at least in their slogans if not in practice - for example PiS rule in 2005 gave us the lowest CIT), (ii) there is a lot of stigma for calling yourself leftist because of the still existing communist association (it does not help than in many countries communists essentially became the modern social-democrats, thus hogging the "spot" for modern leftists who are not linked to the past regime), (iii) the people are backward (communism wasn't actually progressive on social issues) so attitudes towards stuff like gay rights are changing very slowly.
Of course this also means that you have at least three types of leftists (post-communists; real socialists; and progressivists) who do not really see eye-to-eye, so a big tent leftist party, similar to Democrats in the US, has not yet emerged.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on May 21, 2015, 10:33:38 AM
Quote from: Valmy on May 21, 2015, 10:31:41 AM
Right wing parties in Europe. Not really that awesome.
Center right parties in Europe on the other hand do tend to be pretty awesome.
True. PiS though is not that.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on May 21, 2015, 10:33:38 AM
Quote from: Valmy on May 21, 2015, 10:31:41 AM
Right wing parties in Europe. Not really that awesome.
Center right parties in Europe on the other hand do tend to be pretty awesome.
But they are very easy to blame - because they refuse to give people a "vision" (our ex-PM, now President of the European Council, Mr Tusk once famously quipped that if you have a "vision", your place is not in politics but in a looney bin) and are more content with simply managing and administering - so when things start to go wrong (even if they go wrong in a relatively cushiony way - as Poland has through the recent crisis) people begin to grumble.
They have also the unenviable position of being seen as progressive anti-Catholic and anti-Polish Euro-sodomites by the right and obscurantist conservative slow moving country bumpkins by the left.
Quote from: Martinus on May 21, 2015, 10:38:42 AM
But they are very easy to blame - because they refuse to give people a "vision" (our ex-PM, now President of the European Council, Mr Tusk once famously quipped that if you have a "vision", your place is not in politics but in a looney bin) and are more content with simply managing and administering - so when things start to go wrong (even if they go wrong in a relatively cushiony way - as Poland has through the recent crisis) people begin to grumble.
They have also the unenviable position of being seen as progressive anti-Catholic and anti-Polish Euro-sodomites by the right and obscurantist conservative slow moving country bumpkins by the left.
It is always hard for the center to hold. But hold it must.
Quote from: Valmy on May 21, 2015, 10:35:29 AM
Quote from: Admiral Yi on May 21, 2015, 10:33:38 AM
Quote from: Valmy on May 21, 2015, 10:31:41 AM
Right wing parties in Europe. Not really that awesome.
Center right parties in Europe on the other hand do tend to be pretty awesome.
True. PiS though is not that.
No, PO is that. I think people are just tired of them. And at the same time, because for many years they have been running on the anti-PiS fear, they have grown somewhat lazy and arrogant ("at least we are not PiS"). Since after 10 years, you have a lot of younger votes who do not really remember the 2 years of PiS rule, and besides, people generally tend to forget things after a while, this strategy has eventually started to fail.
The leftists, of course, in all of this, are dumbasses (at least it is not all the left who want to vote PiS to spite PO - many of us actually do hold our nose, clench our teeth and vote for PO).
By the way, one new fixture for capturing the "protest vote" is this rockman and "popular tribune", Paweł Kukiz, who came third in the elections (he got over 20% of popular vote, which is quite a feat for an independent candidate). He is a very much wild card (and a bit of an idiot) with a weird mix of views, which are all over the place (sort of occupy Wall Street meets Tea Party type). He is closer to PiS than PO but I guess different enough from both.
He has not really presented any programme (or a plan to start a party yet) and his key demand right now is to introduce majority vote system for Parliamentary elections, saying it will make it more representative. Which is precisely the opposite (just look at the last elections in the UK)...
Anyways, if you want me to get into details, the reason for the curious state of Polish politics comes down to demographics. Since 1989 there have been what I personally refer to as three ages - the golden, the silver and the bronze age.
The golden age started in 1989 and ended in the second half of the 90s. This was the age when all the today's movers and shakers got into politics and business. If you had even a bit of cash, or knew how to speak English and had a decent degree, you could get a really great job or position. The problem (at least in the eyes of PiS, but I do not necessarily say they are wrong), the people who were best placed to do so (because they could had been sent off to Western universities to study in the 1980s and so on) were the children of communist nomenclature. Those who could not benefit from the world of new opportunities were left by the wayside and became today's "old church ladies" - the hard PiS electorate.
Then came the silver age, which ended, I would say, around the time we joined the EU - so in 2004. Poland wasn't a "Wild West" of opportunities any more, but if you worked hard and got educated you could still land a very good job at this time, as the market was still quite young and the demand for skilled workforce was still higher than the supply. This is when people like me got into the job market and ended up very comfortable - we are not the movers and shakers, but we are the privileged, upper middle class. These people, now with young kids, mortgages and good jobs vote for PO, because they want stability above all else.
And then came the bronze age. The demographic boom entered the market and found all the good jobs already taken. Those who were lucky - and were kids of the golden age winners were already set and did not need to care about jobs and the like. Those who weren't so lucky finally found themselves in a really precarious, uncertain position (this is the generation out of whom a lot of people initially emigrated to the UK). This is also the generation who ended up taking Swiss francs mortgages and got screwed on that. And the like. They are effectively frustrated and cockblocked by life. These are the people who vote for the likes of Kukiz or Korwin Mikke (the right wing populist with a bow tie) - and they are most Tea Party style libertarian.
Leftists do not really fit very well into this picture, unless you are really ideological.
So, according to the latest poll it's 48% for Duda and 44% for Komorowski. :bleeding:
Quote from: Martinus on May 21, 2015, 11:06:05 AM
So, according to the latest poll it's 48% for Duda and 44% for Komorowski. :bleeding:
Well Marty you survived one bought of PiS(s) government. You can survive another.
Quote from: Valmy on May 21, 2015, 11:08:51 AM
Quote from: Martinus on May 21, 2015, 11:06:05 AM
So, according to the latest poll it's 48% for Duda and 44% for Komorowski. :bleeding:
Well Marty you survived one bought of PiS(s) government. You can survive another.
The problem is that I don't think they will give up so easily this time. Last time, after 2 years, when their coalition split up, they gambled by calling a snap election and hoping to win a single party majority. This gamble did not pay off and they were ousted from power. Now, after 8 years they are much more pissed off and much less likely to do it again. Plus back in 2005 we did not have a war at our borders. During their 4 years in power they can really do a lot of harm now.
In what way would their foreign policies be different? I guess I figured this was one place where Poland had a solid consensus on. I mean I guess PiS(s) does have disturbing anti-western rhetoric but does it really mean they see Putin as the model like Turkey and Hungary do?
Quote from: Valmy on May 21, 2015, 11:16:34 AM
In what way would their foreign policies be different? I guess I figured this was one place where Poland had a solid consensus on. I mean I guess PiS(s) does have disturbing anti-western rhetoric but does it really mean they see Putin as the model like Turkey and Hungary do?
They would be as isolationist as Turkey and Hungary AND even more hostile than the current government towards Putin. You can imagine how well it may end.
What do you mean by isolationist?
So they see Putin as both model and mortal foe. How post-modern.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on May 21, 2015, 11:31:31 AM
What do you mean by isolationist?
I presume finding the nationalist 'Polish Way' and rejecting the corrupt decadence of the West.
Quote from: Valmy on May 21, 2015, 11:41:21 AM
Quote from: Admiral Yi on May 21, 2015, 11:31:31 AM
What do you mean by isolationist?
I presume finding the nationalist 'Polish Way' and rejecting the corrupt decadence of the West.
Yup.
Quote from: Valmy on May 21, 2015, 11:40:50 AM
So they see Putin as both model and mortal foe. How post-modern.
Can they partition Ukraine with him? :tinfoil:
Quote from: Valmy on May 21, 2015, 11:41:21 AM
Quote from: Admiral Yi on May 21, 2015, 11:31:31 AM
What do you mean by isolationist?
I presume finding the nationalist 'Polish Way' and rejecting the corrupt decadence of the West.
ah: so alone, poor and backwards
So, we have a new President. Great.
Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss?
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fbi.gazeta.pl%2Fim%2Fd1%2Fed%2F10%2Fz17749969Q%2Cfot--kadr-z-serialu--House-of-cards--Agencja-Gazet.jpg&hash=4fc991912ef81366e19c5423ea0f428fe09c3b6d)
The new Polish President with the First Lady as compared to Mr and Mrs Underwood.
Uncanny!
Cause those are such odd outfit choices for a political couple... :P
I can see a resemblance this time, especially in the way the guys set their mouths and the way the ladies squint.
Quote from: Martinus on May 24, 2015, 11:43:07 PM
So, we have a new President. Great.
Well, keep him away from the cockpit.
So I wonder what PO will do before the autumn elections. It is quite clear that their model of "We are not PiS" has lost its appeal as they lost the young vote who no longer remembers the PiS rule of 2005-2007 (Duda won the young vote by a landslide). And since the new President will only be sworn in early August and the Parliamentary elections are in October, it is unlikely he will do enough to make people hate PiS again (especially as already he is saying he wants to be an inclusive President of all, and distances himself from PiS's extreme wing so even assuming it is a rouse and not genuine, he is unlikely to drop the act before October).
PO really has two options - it will either veer to the right in a (in my view, misguided) attempt to steal votes from PiS - or it will veer left and try to fight for the votes of the "orphans" after the two leftist parties which disintegrated this year and who stayed home during the Presidential elections. The former will not give it much, imo - PiS voters just hate PO and consdier them traitors so it is unlikely anything PO says will sway them (and they will not outbid PiS in crazy). On the other hand, a move to the centre-left would allow PO to survive and possibly result in them becoming the Polish Democrats (to PiS's Republicans).
The President elect has had his first interview after the elections. There were two questions about gays.
When asked about gay marriage/civil partnership, he said he is against it but that he is for legal recognition for same sex relations in the same way non-formalised opposite sex relations get (which means they are treated as "close relation" for the purpose of various stuff like medical information and decisions, criminal proceedings etc.) - this is exactly what the outgoing President's view was so no change here.
He was also asked if he would object to having a gay person working for his office. He said he would not discriminate in employment based on sexual orientation unless "the person would go around half-naked". :unsure:
It is now being speculated the only place he has seen gay people is porn.
Did anybody ask him which half is naked in this scenario?
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FcbX74QI.jpg&hash=2f9c40612e0560e1c6608b5f0ffdd39fc86ece4d)
Election results and boars per square kilometer
Kinda interesting that both of those roughly follow the old German border lines. :hmm:
I suddenly want a baked potato.
Quote from: Tonitrus on May 29, 2015, 08:06:53 PM
Kinda interesting that both of those roughly follow the old German border lines. :hmm:
Yes, definitely (well, elections, not boars at least). PO is traditionally winning in the old German section while PiS is winning in the old Russian and Austria-Hungarian sections. The partitions are alive and well.
Generally, the poorer the area, the more likely it is to vote PiS - PO wins in the West and in all the big cities.
But the middle class urban vote may soon need to find another horse to bet on, as PO is sinking - they do not seem to understand why Komorowski lost and are bound to repeat their defeat in the Parliamentary elections. They have grown stale, complacent, fat and arrogant after 8 years of rule.
Quote from: Martinus on May 29, 2015, 07:30:38 AM
He was also asked if he would object to having a gay person working for his office. He said he would not discriminate in employment based on sexual orientation unless "the person would go around half-naked". :unsure:
It is now being speculated the only place he has seen gay people is porn.
Or its a reference to Putin.
Quote from: Tonitrus on May 29, 2015, 08:06:53 PM
Kinda interesting that both of those roughly follow the old German border lines. :hmm:
Bet it is very close to the Hajnal Line
Quote from: Martinus on May 29, 2015, 07:30:38 AM
The President elect has had his first interview after the elections. There were two questions about gays.
When asked about gay marriage/civil partnership, he said he is against it but that he is for legal recognition for same sex relations in the same way non-formalised opposite sex relations get (which means they are treated as "close relation" for the purpose of various stuff like medical information and decisions, criminal proceedings etc.) - this is exactly what the outgoing President's view was so no change here.
He was also asked if he would object to having a gay person working for his office. He said he would not discriminate in employment based on sexual orientation unless "the person would go around half-naked". :unsure:
It is now being speculated the only place he has seen gay people is porn.
From the conservative party that must be taken as remarkable progress from where things stood when you were a teenager.
Quote from: alfred russel on June 08, 2015, 02:42:48 PM
Quote from: Martinus on May 29, 2015, 07:30:38 AM
The President elect has had his first interview after the elections. There were two questions about gays.
When asked about gay marriage/civil partnership, he said he is against it but that he is for legal recognition for same sex relations in the same way non-formalised opposite sex relations get (which means they are treated as "close relation" for the purpose of various stuff like medical information and decisions, criminal proceedings etc.) - this is exactly what the outgoing President's view was so no change here.
He was also asked if he would object to having a gay person working for his office. He said he would not discriminate in employment based on sexual orientation unless "the person would go around half-naked". :unsure:
It is now being speculated the only place he has seen gay people is porn.
From the conservative party that must be taken as remarkable progress from where things stood when you were a teenager.
Still, it's kinda awkward. I think the general public is progressing faster than our ruling elite - which is one of the reason with the current dissatisfaction with politics as a whole. People have travelled West and came back - and they no longer buy this shit.
No wonder Putin works so hard to demonize the west.
Yup. But yeah, Poland has progressed. As I posted few months ago, a well known Polish gay activist (a Polish equivalent of Peter Tatchell) was elected the mayor of a medium sized Polish town (where he never lived before) last year and so far his star is consistently rising. Right now he is considered to have a good shot at Presidency of Poland in 2020.
Quote from: Martinus link=topic=12907.msg882343#msg882343
Still, it's kinda awkward. I think the general public is progressing faster than our ruling elite - which is one of the reason with the current dissatisfaction with politics as a whole. People have travelled West and came back - and they no longer buy this shit.
Same here. Polls clearly indicate that people support guy marriage, but Merkel does not want it. Probably out of power politics to placate the remaining conservatives in her party. It is no th an issue that would win her votes, but she could easily lose votes over it.
Quote from: Zanza on June 08, 2015, 04:29:37 PM
Quote from: Martinus link=topic=12907.msg882343#msg882343
Still, it's kinda awkward. I think the general public is progressing faster than our ruling elite - which is one of the reason with the current dissatisfaction with politics as a whole. People have travelled West and came back - and they no longer buy this shit.
Same here. Polls clearly indicate that people support guy marriage, but Merkel does not want it. Probably out of power politics to placate the remaining conservatives in her party. It is no th an issue that would win her votes, but she could easily lose votes over it.
"Guy marriage" is such a great Freudian slip. :D
So are you guys telling me that the US is making a big mistake in legalizing gay marriage, since so few European countries are? :(
Quote from: Admiral Yi on June 08, 2015, 04:32:06 PM
So are you guys telling me that the US is making a big mistake in legalizing gay marriage, since so few European countries are? :(
Precisely. For once, you seem to have understood my intention perfectly. :P
Quote from: Martinus on June 08, 2015, 04:31:12 PM
"Guy marriage" is such a great Freudian slip. :D
Hmm, I would usually say it was auto correct, but u and a are pretty far apart on the phone keyboard. :hmm:
Quote from: Grinning_Colossus on May 29, 2015, 07:00:48 PM
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FcbX74QI.jpg&hash=2f9c40612e0560e1c6608b5f0ffdd39fc86ece4d)
Election results and boars per square kilometer
heh, back when I was at university (15+ years ago) our professor of contemporary history (or whatever the term is: French revolution to today) talked about how the Polish partition was still visible in election-results.
Never seen it so clear though.
Neat.
QuoteSecret recordings, posh restaurants, Cuban cigars and intrigue finally catch up to Polish government
It began with something so small: a tiny microphone hidden near a dining table in a fancy Warsaw restaurant.
But after the bug caught Polish government ministers discussing private deals, Cuban cigars and off-color jokes — including a comparison of U.S.-Poland relations to oral sex — over expensive meals, a scandal that began as small-talk quickly spread. There were arrests, accusations of international spying and sealed documents leaked on social media.
On Wednesday, almost exactly a year after they first emerged, the secret recordings claimed their biggest scalp yet when four Polish government ministers and the speaker of parliament abruptly resigned.
The resignations are bad news for the already embattled governing party, Civic Platform, which two weeks ago narrowly lost its grip on the presidency. Its chances to retain control of parliament in elections four months from now are disappearing faster than the drinks heard clinking on the restaurant audio tapes.
"Today, on behalf of Civic Platform, I extend my heartfelt apologies" to party supporters who for the past year "listened to the tapes with disgust, irritation," Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz said in announcing the resignations, according to the Associated Press. "As long as I am the prime minister, I will not allow for political games over the tapes during the electoral period," Kopacz also said.
But "Waitergate," as it has been called, also has implications for Europe and the United States.
Polish politicians have claimed Russia was behind the recordings and is maneuvering to exert greater control in the region. Under Civic Platform, Poland has been a close partner of the United States — sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan — and a vocal member of the European Union.
In many ways, Waitergate sounds more like a spy thriller than a political scandal. It began in several of Warsaw's fanciest eateries: places such as Sowa & Przyjaciele, a swanky restaurant sporting candlelight, leather couches and $1,200 bottles of wine.
Not on the menu, however, were the listening devices hidden around at least one of Sowa & Przyjaciele's tables, according to Newsweek. It's unclear who orchestrated the eavesdropping, but beginning in 2013, a handful of Poland's top politicians were recorded eating $500 meals while discussing less than savory things.
In July 2013, Marek Belka, governor of the central bank, was recorded telling the interior minister that he could help the government win reelection by easing monetary policy in exchange for axing the finance minister. (According to Polish law, the central bank must remain apolitical, the BBC points out.)
That exchange was just an appetizer, however, compared to the juicy conversation captured between Radosław Sikorski, Poland's foreign minister at the time, and then-finance minister Jacek Rostowski.
Sikorski called Poland's alliance with the United States "bull—-" and "worthless" before comparing the relationship to oral sex.
"We'll get into a conflict with the Russians and the Germans, and we'll think that everything is super because we gave the Americans a blow job," he said. "Losers. Complete losers."
Sikorski was also overheard accusing British Prime Minister David Cameron of "incompetence in European affairs" and using "stupid propaganda" to appease critics, according to Newsweek.
These and other conversations were leaked by Polish magazine Wprost starting in June 2014. They were an embarrassment to Civic Platform, particularly Sikorski, a handsome and high-flying politician with close ties to England and the United States.
Sikorski had led student strikes in Communist Poland during the political unrest of the early 1980s, later receiving political asylum in Britain. He studied at Oxford before becoming a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan and Angola. While in Britain, he met and married Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author and journalist who writes a column for The Washington Post.
For many Poles, Sikorski's comments — illegally recorded as they were — seemed to show another side to the outwardly pro-Western politician.
The expensive meals — more than the minimum monthly salary in Poland — and conversations about Cuban cigars were arguably even more damaging. "Poles were angered that politicians, lobbyists and business people were debating political stratagems and deals while dining over baby lobster, paid for with taxpayers' money," according to the AP.
The recordings roiled Poland.
Days after the Wprost began releasing the recordings, police raided the magazine's headquarters, prying laptops out of editors' hands. The government, meanwhile, launched a criminal investigation while publicly pointing fingers at Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in remarks reminiscent of the fall of Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal, has emphasized that the bugging of private conversations is strictly illegal and has blamed the leaks on 'an organized criminal group that is destabilizing the state,'" Newsweek reported in July. "Tusk has encouraged the widespread belief that Russia is behind the bugging because it seeks to undermine the Polish state, as it has in neighboring Ukraine. Fingers are being pointed at Marek Falenta, a Polish multimillionaire whose company imports coal from Russia and who was detained in connection with the recordings."
Despite the uproar, however, it initially seemed that Civic Platform would escape any serious consequences. Tusk stepped down in September after being appointed president of the European Council — a major coup for both the politician and for Poland — passing the torch to Kopacz. Sikorski, meanwhile, became speaker of parliament.
But Waitergate wouldn't go away.
The scandal was still on voters' minds last month when president and former Civic Platform member Bronisław Komorowski lost reelection to Andrzej Duda of the opposition Law and Justice party. It was a stunning defeat for a party that had dominated Polish politics for nearly a decade.
The scandal escalated again earlier this week when a blogger and activist, Zbigniew Stonoga, published 2,500 pages of sealed documents from the ongoing investigation into the audio tapes. "The materials, which Stonoga claimed to have found on Chinese Internet sites, include testimony from the accused and from witnesses, along with personal information such as addresses and phone numbers, and evidence for the case," according Russia's state-owned Sputnik news agency.
Stonoga was arrested and charged with illegal publication of classified documents, according to the AP.
After the recordings became headlines once again, Kopacz decided to clean house in hopes of holding onto parliament in elections later this year, according to the BBC. She has also called for the resignation of the prosecutor in the case.
Sikorski and ministers in charge of health, treasury, security and sports all announced Wednesday that they were stepping down for the good of the party.
More than a year after the scandal first broke, and two years after the recordings were made, it's still not clear who was behind Waitergate. Several servers have been accused of involvement. Falenta, the Polish coal magnate, has protested his innocence.
If it was Russia, as Tusk suggested, the plan looks to have backfired. Duda, the new president, has promised to support Ukraine in its fight against pro-Russian separatists.
Ultimately, the mystery over who bugged the bread basket remains unsolved.
This is, very much, the kind of scandal that elevated Orban into power in Hungary.
Hungary leads, Poland follows. ^_^
Quote from: Tamas on June 11, 2015, 01:08:46 PM
Hungary leads, Poland follows. ^_^
I wish I weren't so invested in the system, otherwise I could join you in London. :P
Quote from: Martinus on June 11, 2015, 12:54:00 PM
QuoteWaitergate
Great. America has now ruined every single scandal for all time to come :weep:
Quote from: Valmy on June 11, 2015, 01:12:11 PM
Quote from: Martinus on June 11, 2015, 12:54:00 PM
QuoteWaitergate
Great. America has now ruined every single scandal for all time to come :weep:
No kidding.
Quote from: Valmy on June 11, 2015, 01:12:11 PM
Quote from: Martinus on June 11, 2015, 12:54:00 PM
QuoteWaitergate
Great. America has now ruined every single scandal for all time to come :weep:
It's only a matter of time before a scandal involving doors is called gategate
So Poles are mad about their politicians dining in fancy restaurants? Or talking smack? Or about the overreaction by the government going after the journos?
Quote from: The Larch on June 11, 2015, 03:32:59 PM
So Poles are mad about their politicians dining in fancy restaurants? Or talking smack? Or about the overreaction by the government going after the journos?
Yeah, I'm perplexed why this more than a one day flash in the pan story.
This is very much like the Necklace Affair.
Quote from: Martinus on June 11, 2015, 03:47:00 PM
This is very much like the Necklace Affair.
A completely justified condemnation of the corrupt harpy Marie Antoinette? Good.
Quote from: Valmy on June 11, 2015, 05:00:48 PM
Quote from: Martinus on June 11, 2015, 03:47:00 PM
This is very much like the Necklace Affair.
A completely justified condemnation of the corrupt harpy Marie Antoinette? Good.
:rolleyes: Peasants.
Quote from: Valmy on June 11, 2015, 05:00:48 PM
Quote from: Martinus on June 11, 2015, 03:47:00 PM
This is very much like the Necklace Affair.
A completely justified condemnation of the corrupt harpy Marie Antoinette? Good.
What I meant that, when dissatisfaction and frustration of the masses reaches a certain boiling point, even inconsequential things can grow to become catastrophic scandals.
Quote from: Valmy on June 11, 2015, 05:00:48 PM
A completely justified condemnation of the corrupt harpy Marie Antoinette? Good.
Relax and have some cake.
(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/d5/98/02/d598025a6ee0946b4ecfd570ff78298d.jpg)
Warsaw Pride today, 20,000 participants, 20 protesters. :P
Quote from: Martinus on June 11, 2015, 11:20:07 PM
What I meant that, when dissatisfaction and frustration of the masses reaches a certain boiling point, even inconsequential things can grow to become catastrophic scandals.
I knew what you were getting at :P
Though I find the comparison between the hopelessly stale and corrupt Ancien Regime to the whines of people in a modern prosperous state to be rather weak but point taken -_-
Poland demands a return to the good old days of PiS(s) powah.
An English language article from the Guarniad. Surprisingly in-depth and well researched:
QuoteThe conspiracy theorists who have taken over Poland
Jarosław Kaczyński has convinced Poland that it is threatened by a shadowy leftwing cabal – and become the country's most powerful man
In late January 1993, three years after the abolition of the Soviet-imposed Polish People's Republic, a crowd of 5,000 demonstrators marched on the Warsaw residence of Lech Wałęsa. As the chairman of Solidarity, the independent trade union and mass opposition movement that negotiated communist Poland's demise, Wałęsa is widely credited with initiating the chain of events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and a peaceful resolution to the cold war. But after he became post-communist Poland's first democratically elected president, his critics circulated rumours that he had been a communist collaborator all along. Chanting "We want a president, not an agent," the demonstrators burnt the Nobel peace prizewinner in effigy.
Their leaders included a former Solidarity functionary called Jarosław Kaczyński. Armed with a megaphone, he angrily denounced his former leader: "He was supposed to be our president, but he turned out to be their president, the president of the reds!"
Short, white-haired, and always dressed in black and white, Kaczyński is now the most powerful man in Poland. In 2015, the party he founded with his identical twin brother Lech, Law and Justice, won the first parliamentary majority for a single party since the democratic transition; since then, it stands accused of attempting to reverse that transition by seizing control of Poland's independent democratic institutions. Although Kaczyński holds no office other than his seat in parliament and the chairmanship of his party, President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Beata Szydło are entirely beholden to his patronage. Law and Justice's eminence grise – part Yoda, part Karl Lagerfeld – runs a country of almost 40 million people from his party office in central Warsaw.
At the time of Poland's liberation more than a quarter of a century ago, the Kaczyński twins were middle-ranking members of the Solidarity leadership. They participated in the 1989 round-table talks between Solidarity and the communists, which paved the way for the elections that led to the collapse of communism. However, they built their careers on the argument that Wałęsa and the liberal intellectuals at the top of Solidarity betrayed Poland's transition to democracy by allowing communists to keep their hands on the levers of power in exchange for the status of high office. Known for having starred as child actors in the communist-era film The Two Who Stole the Moon, theirs was a symbiotic political dynamic, with the more softly spoken and personable Lech softening the image of the vitriolic and misanthropic Jarosław. But their partnership was cut short by Lech's death in a plane crash in 2010. Fuelled by a cocktail of grief and revenge, the controversy surrounding his brother's death gave new impetus to Jarosław's mission to "remodel" Polish democracy.
With a penchant for conspiracy and a vituperative speaking style, Jarosław Kaczyński routinely brands his opponents "gangsters", "cronies", and "reds". Before the parliamentary elections in October 2015, he claimed that migrants from the Middle East were bringing cholera and dysentery to Europe, risking the spread of "various parasites and protozoa". More recently, he implied that people demonstrating against the Law and Justice government were "the worst sort of Poles" – an epithet they have adopted as a badge of honour.
Since taking office in November, Law and Justice has focused its attention on the pillars of Poland's democracy. Parliament has taken direct control of state media, on the basis that "public media are ignoring their mission towards the nation". It has also taken direct control of the appointments of senior civil servants. The head of the prime minister's office has described the removal of state officials as a means to "eliminate the social pathology" that existed under the previous government headed by Law and Justice's main rivals – adding that "it will be possible to immediately fire any person for whom the fact or even the suspicion of them having been involved in this pathology is confirmed."
In December, Law and Justice passed a law designed to paralyse the constitutional tribunal – the country's highest judicial body, which rules on the legality of government actions – by requiring the court to consider its backlog in chronological order, thereby obstructing any judgment of the present government's decisions.
Commonly labelled conservative or nationalist, Law and Justice blends the religious and patriotic rituals of Poland's long history of resistance to foreign oppression with hostility to free-market capitalism and a heavy dose of conspiracy regarding the machinations of Poland's enemies. It is the vanguard of a movement that goes far beyond the party itself, supported by sympathetic smaller parties, ultra-Catholic media, nationalist youth organisations and an assortment of cranks and cynics who share a hostility to liberalism in all its guises. As foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski told the German tabloid Bild, his government "only wants to cure our country of a few illnesses", such as: "a new mixture of cultures and races, a world made up of cyclists and vegetarians, who only use renewable energy and who battle all signs of religion ... What moves most Poles [is] tradition, historical awareness, love of country, faith in God and normal family life between a woman and a man."
Many find the Law and Justice phenomenon utterly bemusing. Although still a relatively poor nation by western European standards, by any objective measure Poland's recent history is one of triumph. It has the most successful and dynamic economy of any former communist country. After centuries of occupation and partition, Poland is now an independent state anchored in western political, economic and security institutions such as the EU and Nato. Poles have never been as prosperous and secure in more than 1,000 years of existence, and they now enjoy individual and collective rights their ancestors could only dream of.
And yet a significant minority of Poles believe that Poland and Polishness remain subject to foreign control and malign internal forces. It is a belief rooted in Poland's traumatic past and the chaos and controversies of its post-communist transition – encouraged by Jarosław Kaczyński's consistent assertions that this transition was, in fact, a sham. Poland's present turmoil is the story of how anger at Poland's liberals mutated into a war on liberal democracy itself.
Although the country's recent illiberal turn is commonly described as the latest component in a wider illiberal wave in central European politics, it has much deeper roots – which go back to the civil war that broke out among Solidarity's leaders in what should have been their finest hour. Surveying the wreckage of Solidarity's collapse, the Irish journalist Jacqueline Hayden noted in 1994 that "Abuse and vilification are regarded by some as the norm in the world of politics, but when the poisoned cup is passed from associates who were until very recently marching under the same anti-communist banner, the result is a phenomenal purification of the political atmosphere."
It was a war that was as much personal as it was political, with enmities that had been stewing for a decade erupting as the lid of communist rule was lifted. In the 1980s, Solidarity had 10 million members across a series of autonomous regional chapters, which were often more radical and less amenable to compromise than Wałęsa and the liberal intellectuals on his advisory committee, who pursued a strategy of constructive engagement with the communist authorities.
Today, many Law and Justice supporters refuse to acknowledge that the anti-communist struggle is over. In 2015, a publisher sympathetic to Law and Justice brought out a photographic history of the Solidarity movement with the subtitle Years of Struggle, 1980-2015. It begins with a picture of Lech Wałęsa signing Solidarity into existence in September 1980 and ends with a picture of Andrzej Duda, Poland's smirking Law and Justice president; its opening montage intermingles black and white images of Solidarity demonstrations in the 1980s with colour photos of contemporary protests against Law and Justice's political opponents. Understanding Law and Justice's claim to represent the "true" heirs to Solidarity, and their assertion that their opponents represent those who betrayed the revolution, is the key to making sense of the convulsions that threaten further to destabilise Europe in its hour of crisis.
* * *
Poland's democratic transition was negotiated, incremental, and compromised. After Solidarity won massive electoral support in partially free elections held in June 1989, Poland's last communist president, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, was forced to appoint a Solidarity leader as prime minister – an arrangement known as "your president, our prime minister". Tadeusz Mazowiecki, one of Lech Wałęsa's leading advisers, became prime minister, but the communist party retained ultimate control, with Jaruzelski remaining as president and communist generals running the key "power ministries" of interior and defence.
Mazowiecki's administration, drawn from a tight-knit circle of liberal intellectuals, engineered the key aspects of the transition, securing approval for a radical plan to institute a free-market economy, and overseeing the removal of the reference in the constitution to the Communist party's "leading role". The Polish People's Republic was abolished on 31 December 1989, the Communist party was dissolved a month later, and Jaruzelski, the architect of the imposition of martial law in 1981, finally left the scene in December 1990.
Despite these achievements, the arrangement was a recipe for public disillusionment. The pain inflicted by the economic reforms was frontloaded, with widespread job losses. Although on a much lesser scale than in Ukraine or Russia, party insiders were able to take advantage of the privatisation process to buy up state assets – and the liberal intellectuals newly installed in high office were seen as accessories to their corruption. For those who believed that overthrowing communism would bring immediate prosperity and right the wrongs of the past, the fact that they were still poor while communist officials profited from the transition made it seem like the old order had not really been overthrown.
The resulting anger was shared by those middle-ranking elements of the Solidarity leadership, including Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, not included in the new arrangement. Having led the sub-group on trade union law during the round-table talks Lech was respected, but middling in status. Jarosław had a lower profile than his twin (unlike Lech and thousands of others, he was not interned during the imposition of martial law in 1981), but he would make his name when the tensions in the leadership led to a split known as Solidarity's "war at the top".
In May 1990, Jarosław broke from the Solidarity parliamentary caucus to establish his own party, Centre Agreement. He joined forces with the radical elements within Solidarity, who had long resented the conciliatory approach of Wałęsa's liberal advisers, and fanned the flames of public fury at the iniquities of the transition. This anger was directed against his former allies, whom he accused of participating in a "hybrid Jaruzelski-Mazowiecki power system" – working alongside the hated communist leaders and against the interests of the people.
Jarosław's point was not simply that the liberals were working too closely with the communist nomenklatura – they had joined it. "Jaruzelski-Mazowiecki" was a "power system" – their president, their prime minister. A line had been drawn, with the communists and the liberals on one side, and everybody else on the other. The conclusions that people should draw were radical, and toxic: the liberals were traitors, and since the real revolution had not yet happened, it was still to come.
The Kaczyńskis found an ally in Lech Wałęsa, still Solidarity's chairman, who had demurred from the premiership in 1989 because he had his eyes on the presidency. Many of Wałęsa's top advisers were now in government, but he was still answerable to the thousands of angry Solidarity members who were losing their jobs during the transition to capitalism and democracy. This gave him an obvious interest in shifting blame to the liberal intellectuals running the Mazowiecki government, while demanding that he should replace Jaruzelski as president and take command of the transition process.
At the end of 1990, Wałęsa stood against Mazowiecki for the presidency. This showdown between Solidarity's charismatic, proletarian leader and his urbane former adviser symbolised the breakdown of the alliances within Polish society that had made Solidarity possible. Jarosław Kaczyński ran Wałęsa's winning campaign and was rewarded with a position as the head of the presidential chancellery. Jarosław's argument that his former allies had betrayed the revolution had propelled him from relative obscurity to the Presidential Palace in less than a year.
Once in office, President Wałęsa had little use for Jarosław's brand of guerrilla politics, throwing him out after 11 months because he needed people who could "do a job, not just wage a war". Jarosław responded by deploying the same argument against Wałęsa that he had used against the liberals, accusing Wałęsa of being a communist agent dedicated to obstructing a revolution that Wałęsa himself had done perhaps more than anybody else to bring about. Jarosław's allies in government hinted that they had access to files that would prove Wałęsa and the liberal intellectuals around Mazowiecki were communist collaborators. A parliamentary commission eventually ruled that the threat of these "dishonestly drawn up lists" had been used by one of Jarosław's allies, the interior minister Antoni Macierewicz, to hold on to power illegally. Jarosław and his supporters argued that the commission's ruling was simply more proof that communists retained control of the Polish state. (Macierewicz is now serving as minister of national defence).
The infighting among the erstwhile Solidarity allies brought Poland's former communists back into power: the Democratic Left Alliance, the successor to the Polish United Workers' party that had ruled the country until 1989, won parliamentary elections and the presidency in 1993 and 1995. The post-communists and the liberals negotiated a new constitution, which enshrined the rights of non-believers in law and denied the Catholic church legal primacy in public life – enraging fundamentalist Catholics and those who believed in the liberal-communist conspiracy.
When the new constitution was put to a national referendum, many regions where the influence of the Catholic church is strongest, particularly in the east, voted against it. The constitutional process gave the conspiracy of a secret liberal-communist alliance a philosophical basis: there is no difference between liberal secularism and communist atheism, because both are used to persecute the church; there is no difference between liberal democracy and communist authoritarianism because both are used to impose a godless minority's will on "ordinary Poles".
The result of the constitutional process was that the various post-Solidarity factions were broadly divided into two camps: those that considered the new constitutional order to be legitimate, and those who argued that it was not. This division led to the establishment in 2001 of two rival post-Solidarity parties: Civic Platform and Law and Justice.
Civic Platform, led for most of its existence by Donald Tusk before he became president of the European Council, included many of the liberal architects of the post-1989 republic and their supporters – those who had negotiated the transition, those who determined its free-market economic model, those who established a conciliatory tone and pro-European orientation in foreign policy, those who negotiated the constitutional settlement reached in 1997. Sharing political ownership of the constitutional order, they trumpeted the achievements of the "New Poland".
Law and Justice, by contrast, acted as a vehicle for the dissatisfied: a coalition of those hostile to the economic, cultural and constitutional pillars of Poland's "liberal democracy" and the "leftists" (an umbrella term for communists and liberals) who defended them. As the personality most closely associated with the poisonous nature of Solidarity's "war at the top", Jarosław's reputation was partially rehabilitated by his more mild-mannered twin brother Lech, who served briefly as a popular justice minister between 2000 and 2001 and then became mayor of Warsaw.
The Kaczyńskis argued that a communist-liberal układ (meaning "deal" or "pact") had given rise to "a system of interests that emerged from the former communist regime, which joined together with some people from the Solidarity camp", whereby state officials with communist sympathies operate in conjunction with financial institutions, media companies and intelligence services to rig the economy and subvert Polish democracy. It was essentially the same argument as Jarosław had made in 1990: their rivals, the Democratic Left Alliance and Civic Platform, were fronts for the corrupt "power-system" that had denied Poles their revolution.
When Law and Justice came first in parliamentary elections in 2005, Jarosław had the right to take the post of prime minister but, in deference to his own negative reputation, he chose to nominate a proxy in his place. A month later, Lech Kaczyński defeated Tusk in presidential elections. Soon Jarosław disposed of his proxy and became prime minister himself, in coalition with the agrarian-populist Self Defence party and the nationalist-religious League of Polish Families, implementing a zealous programme of "decommunisation". The minister of justice hunted for agents of the "system" in state bodies, a proposed decommunisation law demanded signed affidavits from members of various professions to prove that they had not collaborated with the communists before 1989, and the military intelligence service, assumed to be a nest of communist spies, was disbanded.
Jarosław acted on the justification that, whereas he was fulfilling his role as successor to the heroes of the anti-communist struggle, his political rivals, including Civic Platform, represented the communists themselves, telling a rally of supporters held at the former Lenin Shipyard, where Solidarity began and where protesting workers had been shot by communist paramilitaries in 1970, that "We are standing where we have always stood, they are standing where [the paramilitaries] stood."
But his coalition fell apart in 2007, with Civic Platform winning the subsequent election and Donald Tusk replacing Jarosław as prime minister. Lech Kaczyński remained as president, dedicating himself to frustrating the Civic Platform-led government. Blamed for his spoiling role and a series of unseemly spats with the government, his support collapsed, and by the beginning of 2010 his chances of re-election at the end of the year were widely assumed to be non-existent. Poland never got the chance to find out.
* * *
On 10 April 2010, President Lech Kaczyński was flying with a delegation to the Katyn forest near Smolensk in western Russia to commemorate one of the darkest moments in Polish history, the murder of over 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police in April 1940. The pilots of his plane were befuddled by thick fog as they attempted to land, and crashed into a forest adjoining Smolensk's airfield. All 96 passengers were killed, including the president, his wife, the chief of the general staff, the heads of all three armed services, the director of the intelligence service, the president of the National Bank of Poland, and the children and grandchildren of officers murdered nearby 70 years before.
Poles are conscientious mourners. On All Saints Day, 1 November, millions go to cemeteries to place flowers and candles on the graves of their loved ones. As the late autumn sun sets, the sky goes dark, but the ground is illuminated and the light from each candle merges into a golden haze across the hillside – one's own sense of loss joining with a collective sense of national remembrance. The personal, national and celestial become intertwined: Poland's partition, restoration, and liberation as crucifixion, resurrection and ascension; loved ones and national heroes as saints.
By the afternoon of the day of the Smolensk catastrophe, the candles that were usually found in cemeteries on the margins of town had appeared en masse in public spaces in the heart of Warsaw. The politics of grief – never far from the surface – reasserted itself at the centre of Poland's public life.
Some spoke of the disaster in the language of messianism, the idea that God sanctioned Poland's suffering for a holy purpose. For 19th-century poets such as Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, lamenting the final partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, themes of loss were mixed with the mysticism of romanticism, Catholicism and suffering to produce an allegorical vocabulary of sacrifice and resistance, as in this verse by Kazimierz Brodziński:
Hail O Christ, Thou Lord of Men!
Poland in Thy footsteps treading
Like Thee suffers, at Thy bidding;
Like Thee, too, shall rise again
In the messianist mindset, history is not linear, but circular. Because it is Poland's destiny to suffer, Polish history is not "one damned thing after another" but the same damned thing, happening over and over again. In the aftermath of the crash that killed Lech Kaczyński, a viral text message circulated among Poles, declaring that "history has come full circle" and hailing the return of "Poland as the Christ of Nations".
The Katyn massacres had been part of a coordinated effort by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941 to eliminate Poland's educated classes so as to minimise resistance to the country's division between the two powers. In 2010, the descendants of the victims of the original massacres had died in the same remote forests alongside a new generation of senior military officers and other members of the governing elite. The resonance was so great that it could not have been an accident. Smolensk was the "new Katyn".
Though numerous investigations and reports have established that the crash was caused by pilot error amid adverse weather conditions, the Law and Justice party has continued to depict the accident as an assassination of its leader, with blame shared by the usual villainous alliance of liberals and communists. In 2012, Jarosław Kaczyński stood up in parliament to tell Donald Tusk – then Poland's prime minister – that "in a political sense, you bear 100% responsibility for the catastrophe".
As the heirs to the liberals who joined with the communists to construct the corrupt "power system" that the Kaczyński brothers had been railing against for two decades, Civic Platform was accused of conspiring with the heirs to the communists – the Russians – to prevent the investigation into the murder of a president who was on the brink of breaking up the "system". On the 10th of every month, Law and Justice supporters still gather for protests to demand "the truth". At a demonstration in Kraków last year, the 67th of its kind, a large banner bore a photo of a smiling Tusk greeting Vladimir Putin, bearing the words: ZDRADA ("betrayal") and ZBRODNIA ("crime"). The demonstration demanding justice for the victims of Smolensk was held at the monument to the victims of the Katyn massacres.
* * *
The Kaczyńskis' message that Poland's problems could be explained by the machinations of unseen forces resonated in a society subjected to rapid political, economic, and social upheaval, and which has a long memory of conspiracy and betrayal by Poles and foreigners alike. Offering Poles a comforting comic-book world in which true patriots do no wrong, the concept of the układ – of treacherous cooperation between the elite and foreign powers – allowed them to portray themselves as the sole heirs to Poland's heroic tradition of resistance.
It is a concept that has much deeper roots than Poland's transition from communism to liberal democracy. In the popular memory, it goes back at least as far as the 18th century, when unscrupulous Polish nobles betrayed the country by allying themselves with Catherine the Great. In the Law and Justice worldview, it is not just that Poland's liberals are the heirs to the treacherous Mazowiecki faction and the rulers of the Polish People's Republic. They represent Poland's enemies and traitors throughout history: the heirs to the Soviets, to the Nazis, to the Kaiser, to Catherine the Great.
It is an assertion that depends on the notion of Poland eternally under siege. There is no consensus as to precisely who or what poses a threat – it could be Russia or the European Union, it could be multiculturalism, it could be homosexuality, it could be western consumerism, it could be Jews or reds under the bed. What matters is the idea that Poland's liberals, with their commitment to the nation's existing institutions and nostalgia for its cosmopolitan past, are doing nothing about it. It is not "nationalism" in the traditional sense but something less coherent, more akin to a mood than an ideology – a narrative of righteousness, victimhood, and self-pity from which anyone can pick their prejudices as they see fit.
Law and Justice leaders and supporters make associations between their political opponents and Poland's historic enemies and traitors by drawing attention to "suspicious" aspects of their backgrounds. Just before parliamentary elections in 2005, a Law and Justice politician suggested that Donald Tusk's grandfather had supported the Nazis (as a citizen of the Free City of Danzig, he had been forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht, but deserted and joined with Polish troops under British command). Tusk is a Kaszub – a small ethno-linguistic minority centred in parts of north-western Poland historically contested by Poles and Germans; the spokesman was attempting to draw a line backwards from Tusk the Gdańsk liberal to Tusk the disloyal Danzig German. (In January, the Law and Justice politician who made these allegations was appointed director of state television).
Jarosław has even suggested that Angela Merkel may have been brought to power by the Stasi, warning that German investment in Poland might be part of a plan to annex Polish territory: "We could wake up to a smaller Poland some day." Many Germans find this rhetoric distressing, and cannot understand how Poles cannot see that Germany has changed since the 1940s. But it is precisely because Germany has changed so much that these changes must be loudly denied: most Poles believe in the achievements of Polish-German reconciliation – but if some can be convinced that Germany never changed, then they can easily be convinced that nobody else has changed either. To regard a manifestly hostile Russia as a threat is one thing, but to see modern Germany in the same way is to pass through the looking-glass into a world where nobody can be trusted, where Poland stands vulnerable and alone.
If Germany remains a hostile power, then the European Union can also be regarded as a malign vehicle for German influence. When Günther Oettinger, Germany's representative on the European Commission, suggested in January 2016 that the Law and Justice government may have contravened EU regulations by taking control of appointments to state media positions, which would initiate EU "supervision" proceedings, the justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro issued an outraged response soaked in puffed-up patriotism: "You demanded that Poland be placed under supervision. Such words, spoken by a German politician, have the worst possible connotations for Poles. For me, too. I am the grandson of a Polish officer who during the second world war fought in [Poland's] underground Home Army against 'German supervision'."
In other words, just as Poland's enemies and traitors are eternal and ever-present, so must be its defenders and heroes. Law and Justice demonstrations are adorned not only with Solidarity-era symbols, but with those of the Home Army that fought the Nazis; their opponents denounced not only as closet communists, but as the successors to the nobles who betrayed the commonwealth in 1792. Law and Justice claim to be the successors not just to Solidarity, but to the Warsaw uprising in 1944, the officers murdered at Katyn in 1940, the Polish legions who restored statehood in 1918; the rebellions of 1863 and 1830 against Russian imperial rule; the 1794 uprising that sought to salvage the commonwealth from partition: You advocate Germany's interests because your grandfather was in the Wehrmacht; I advocate Poland's interests because my grandfather was in the Home Army.
When Lech Kaczyński was buried at the crypt at Wawel Castle in Kraków in 2010, it proved the perfect symbol for Law and Justice's claim to embody Polish patriotism at its purest. Wawel is Poland's heavenly boardroom, the resting place of kings, saints, and less than a dozen poets, rulers and resistance heroes of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, now joined by a 21st-century martyr in the struggle for Poland's freedom. Fittingly, the crypt contains the remains of the messianist poet Juliusz Słowacki, who begged that a restored Poland remember those who had struggled for it, but now lie in their graves:
Oh Poland mine! Remember us
When we can feel no longer; remember
How we framed and fashioned your cause
Both as a prayer of sorrow and as a flash of thunder
Jarosław has been wearing black ever since his brother was laid to rest almost six years ago. In doing so, he hopes to identify his private grief with the grief of all Poles – not just for Smolensk, but for all that has befallen the nation.
* * *
"Law and Justice" is a reference neither to law and order nor social justice, but to the idea that the Polish state itself is lawless and unjust. If the state is illegitimate, the normal rules of political behaviour no longer apply. When an MP from a party supportive of Law and Justice declared in parliament in November that "The good of the nation is above the law," he received a standing ovation from Law and Justice deputies, including Jarosław Kaczyński. In this way, the takeover of state institutions is presented as national liberation; contempt for the existing legal order as a desire for natural justice.
When demonstrators gathered outside the constitutional tribunal in December to oppose the government's efforts to paralyse the court, Jarosław depicted the protests as yet another attempt by the "system" to keep hold of its ill-gotten privileges: "This is about whether democracy is able to make decisions instead of a handful of people bought by foreigners and internal forces that don't serve Polish interests. They don't want us to disperse this gang of cronies that's sitting in the bureaucracy."
Like all good conspiracy theories, the "system" has a coherent internal logic that seeks to explain all things – and, when it fails to do so, explain away the failure to explain that which it cannot explain. The Smolensk catastrophe is a perfect example. The "system" offers a motive: the Russians killed Lech Kaczyński because he was fighting to expunge Poland (and other post-Soviet states) of Russo-communist influence; Civic Platform covered up Kaczyński's murder because it stood to gain both from the continuation of that Russo-communist influence and from Kaczyński's demise. It explains the failure to unearth evidence of assassination: because state-appointed aviation experts conducted the investigation, their conclusion that it had been an accident proves that the state remains in the hands of the perpetrators (Law and Justice defence minister Antoni Macierewicz described their investigation as the greatest cover-up "in the history of the world"). Finally, it provides grounds for revenge: in November, a Law and Justice spokeswoman suggested that Donald Tusk might be put before a state tribunal for his role in the cover-up once his term as president of the European Council is over. The existence of the "system" explains Smolensk; Smolensk proves the existence of the "system".
This circular reasoning helps to make sense of Jarosław's success in building an electoral coalition around the notion of the układ. The identification of Poland's liberals with an anti-Polish conspiracy means that one can either begin by believing in the układ, and therefore be convinced of the need to purge the state of liberal influence, or begin by wishing to purge the state of liberal influence, and therefore have an interest in pretending to believe in the układ. The result is a peculiar alliance between the paranoid and the cynical that Poles and foreigners alike struggle to understand.
It is no coincidence that faith in communism depended on exactly the same kind of logic. Contempt for the rule of law; the identification of a minority faction with the interests of the nation; the separation of power from office by constructing extra-legal chains of command; the demonisation of opponents and purges of state structures; an ideological re-interpretation of history: these are all legacies of communist rule. A quarter of a century after the end of communism, the alleged hold of communists over the Polish state is still being used as a pretext to deploy communist-era methods to take hold of the Polish state.
Antithetical to pluralism of any kind, the authoritarian logic of communism demands total victory not just when it comes to politics, but over history as well. When Poles protest against Kaczyński's attempts to dismantle the independent institutions of the post-1989 republic, they are not just disputing his right to control the media, the civil service, and the judiciary. They are disputing his claim to ownership of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, to the victims of Smolensk and the Katyn massacres, to the national heroes buried at Wawel and the movements they represent; protesting for the right of all Poles to interpret their identity as they see fit and to share in the achievements and failures of their nation's past as equals.
It remains unclear whether Jarosław is himself a prisoner of the logic of the political system he grew up in, or has simply harnessed it so as to exact revenge on a constitutional order forged in his absence by an establishment that left him in the cold. What is clear is that his refusal to accept that Poland might now be free has made him the most powerful man in one of the largest countries in Europe.
And for German speakers, a link to an article in German written by a Pole, which attempts to explain where Kaczynski comes from:
http://www.zeit.de/2016/04/polen-pis-regierung-rechtspopulismus
QuoteIt is an assertion that depends on the notion of Poland eternally under siege. There is no consensus as to precisely who or what poses a threat – it could be Russia or the European Union, it could be multiculturalism, it could be homosexuality, it could be western consumerism, it could be Jews or reds under the bed. What matters is the idea that Poland's liberals, with their commitment to the nation's existing institutions and nostalgia for its cosmopolitan past, are doing nothing about it. It is not "nationalism" in the traditional sense but something less coherent, more akin to a mood than an ideology – a narrative of righteousness, victimhood, and self-pity from which anyone can pick their prejudices as they see fit.
Now see that is how you form a broad-based coalition.
Amazing you could go after Walesa so soon after his triumph and get away with it.
Quote from: Valmy on February 17, 2016, 11:56:03 AM
QuoteIt is an assertion that depends on the notion of Poland eternally under siege. There is no consensus as to precisely who or what poses a threat – it could be Russia or the European Union, it could be multiculturalism, it could be homosexuality, it could be western consumerism, it could be Jews or reds under the bed. What matters is the idea that Poland's liberals, with their commitment to the nation's existing institutions and nostalgia for its cosmopolitan past, are doing nothing about it. It is not "nationalism" in the traditional sense but something less coherent, more akin to a mood than an ideology – a narrative of righteousness, victimhood, and self-pity from which anyone can pick their prejudices as they see fit.
Now see that is how you form a broad-based coalition.
Amazing you could go after Walesa so soon after his triumph and get away with it.
It is a broad tent of a circus variety. :P
Quote from: Valmy on February 17, 2016, 11:56:03 AM
QuoteIt is an assertion that depends on the notion of Poland eternally under siege. There is no consensus as to precisely who or what poses a threat – it could be Russia or the European Union, it could be multiculturalism, it could be homosexuality, it could be western consumerism, it could be Jews or reds under the bed. What matters is the idea that Poland's liberals, with their commitment to the nation's existing institutions and nostalgia for its cosmopolitan past, are doing nothing about it. It is not "nationalism" in the traditional sense but something less coherent, more akin to a mood than an ideology – a narrative of righteousness, victimhood, and self-pity from which anyone can pick their prejudices as they see fit.
Now see that is how you form a broad-based coalition.
Amazing you could go after Walesa so soon after his triumph and get away with it.
That quote is the best summary of East Europaism I have read in quite a while.