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Has Poland Lost Its Mind?

By Slawomir Majman
From Warsaw Voice

Things are going well.
The Polish economy has shot forward. Industrial production growth is breaking records. Exports are growing even faster. Shipyards, car manufacturers, machinery and electrical equipment factories are experiencing a boom. Corporations are doubling their profits, and domestic demand is growing because employees are receiving higher wages.

The predictions spoke of a good 12-percent growth, but in fact industrial production grew by over 18 percent—a result worthy of the world’s most vigorous economies.

Things are going well in Poland.
Meanwhile, climbing to the top of popularity ranking lists is Andrzej Lepper’s Samoobrona—a party of frustration and populist negation. The creators of economic success—Leszek Miller’s ministers, on the other hand, are reaching rock bottom in voter opinion polls. The disintegrating camp of the ruling left is quite rightly concerned whether the socialists will make it into the new parliament at all, and Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) leaders have flushed Prime Minister Miller—the least liked head of government in the history of Polish democracy—down the toilet.

There’s an absolutely shocking discrepancy between the joyous objective economic data and the mood of millions of Poles who are sure their country is sinking into crisis, and who are prepared to follow the demagogues offering primitive populism and radically leftist, simple recipes.

What’s happened? Have the Poles gone blind? Have the Poles completely lost their minds?
■ Things are going well in Poland. Only, the Poles just don’t see it.
What most Poles see every day is unemployment, backwardness in rural areas, no place in society for every fourth citizen including young people, more modest household income than a few years ago.

Economic revival of itself does not create new jobs. On the contrary—it is often achieved by way of cost rationalization. After the bitter lesson of a long recession, companies are holding back investments. Revival does not yet mean growing affluence. The average Pole learns that things are going better only from his morning paper.

Moreover, the corruption scandals large and small that erupted during Miller’s term, usually blown out of all proportion by media hostile to the left, have convinced most Poles that they live in a country rotten to the core and on the brink of political catastrophe.

It is the stinking fumes of corruption scandals that have completely overshadowed the unquestioned economic success, Poland’s strengthened position in the international arena, and the decent terms of European Union accession obtained in the negotiations. It is the fog of corruption and disastrous personnel decisions that wrecked the Miller government’s reputation, destroying what for years was Poland’s most cohesive party—the SLD, and causing its electorate to drift away to the populists.

■ Have the Poles completely lost their minds? Have their politicians lost their minds?
At the very moment the sword of Damocles was hanging over the left and its government, when it was clear that the 18 months till the end of the term should be spent on undoing the damage, and rational political forces should be mobilizing to defend the bold government program for public finance rescue, the leftist leaders have been overcome by a frenzy of self-destruction.

This was the moment they chose to do a spectacular hara-kiri, ripping their bellies according to the samurai code: first from left to right, then deeper from right to left.

A group of SLD leaders pushed relentlessly for a breakup and created a new leftist party. Yes, the ranking lists give the SLD 8 percent, but 8 percent divided by two doesn’t yield 16, but at best 4 per head. Clearly this calculation doesn’t convince Sejm Speaker Marek Borowski, whose madness can’t even be stopped by appeals from President Aleksander Kwaśniewski. The dissenters’ leaders—Borowski, ex-SLD deputy chief Andrzej Celiński and their friend from coalition partner Labor Union (UP), Deputy Sejm Speaker Tomasz Nałęcz—are typical old-school Eastern European intellectuals who it’s nice to talk to over coffee but who certainly aren’t new left-wing leader material.

There are a few other factions jiggling around within the SLD. Some want a united party, others want to abandon it altogether. All are united by the will to get rid of the recent leader and strong man of Polish politics, Miller. They all have about as much charisma between them as a smoked mackerel.

Unexpectedly the SLD is in the situation of a man sinking in a swamp. The more they struggle, the deeper they are pulled down. Hysteria prevents them from being able to stop struggling.

Overcome by hysterical madness, the left’s leaders are going straight in one direction: towards the political margin.

■ In Poland, people win the elections first, and only then look around for something they should do.
For the SLD, this Polish rule meant a wasted first half of their term. When, belatedly, the government started doing a decent job, it had lost its electorate.
Some drifted towards the conservative Civic Platform (PO), having failed to find the efficient governing they’d expected from the left.

But most of the left’s supporters went over to Lepper’s populists, because when electing the SLD, these voters had been seeking the traditional leftist values, such as protection of the poor and those unable to cope in a free-market economy. They had been seeking a leftist alternative—and haven’t found it. The SLD became a machine for appointing people to civil-service posts, ignoring the aspirations of the poorer part of society. Visitors to party headquarters were seldom indigent young people, but rather businessmen searching for support in tenders.

So, have the Poles lost their minds because close to one-third of them support Lepper’s Samoobrona?

Despite his caricature-like image, Lepper is an unquestioned ambassador of social needs and anger. He expresses the views of the lower middle class whose flirt with capitalism has been a failure. The Poles have been let down by socialism and capitalism? “We choose the third way,” cries Lepper. Not enough money for the jobless and the sick? Lepper finds it in the parasitic banking system. The country rocks from corruption? Eradicate all politicians, from left and right, and give power to those who haven’t governed yet—Samoobrona.

In their chase after power and technocratic fixing of the economy, the socialists lost a large chunk of Poland. This chunk has been taken under the wings of Andrzej Lepper—a liberty-cap-wearing sans-culotte.

So, have the Poles lost their minds?
■ The Poles have lost their minds. Their politicians have been overcome by a suicidal mania.
The split in the SLD, the fight over European policy between PO leaders: Jan Rokita, who wants to die for Nice and wade in a sweet nationalist sauce, and Andrzej Olechowski, who speaks of compromise; the constant personnel pushing and shoving among the rightist leaders—this is a picture of the madness that affects the political elite this spring.

To make matters worse, there is the belief of over three-quarters of the Poles that the economy is collapsing, when in fact it’s the opposite.

Decent people have a problem this spring: who is it worth voting for in Poland?
In the face of this whole mess, Lepper—the refuge of the disaffected—stands like the Rock of Gibraltar.

The trouble is, Poland isn’t in danger of one government or another falling, or one prime minister or another.

Poland is in danger of eradicating the leftist-liberal political option for many years to come.

posted by: Oborski at 12:26 | link | comments |