Letter from Warsaw

The recent victory of the Law and Justice Party in Poland’s presidential and parliamentary elections was widely commented on in the European media. The centre-Right party first ousted the President, who was considered to be unbeatable according to the opinion polls, and replaced him by the young and energetic Andrzej Duda, and then also managed to secure an absolute majority in the parliament. Civic Platform, the party that had ruled Poland for the last two terms, suffered a humiliating defeat.

This victory was not greeted enthusiastically throughout the European Union. Why? There are many reasons. Poland had been hailed in Europe as a successful country. So the news that Civic Platform had lost and that Law and Justice won was received with disbelief, even interpreted as a symptom of political irrationality.

But there was nothing irrational about the voters’ decision, and the rosy picture of Poland under the former government was far from accurate. True, we were not hit by the financial crisis that shattered the Eurozone, primarily because we had not joined the euro, despite the encouragement from the EU and the declaration of the Civic Platform government. Some of Poland’s economic indicators were better than those in many other European countries. But this is only a part of the story.

As many as three million people have left Poland in recent years in search of jobs and homes in Europe and outside it. Despite the boastful government propaganda, Polish doctors, engineers, nurses, craftsmen, university graduates as well as the unemployed were emigrating in large numbers, apparently seeing no future for themselves in their home country.

But that is not all. During the last eight years Poland had become a de facto one-party state. The public media were purged of journalists who did not take pro-government positions, especially  those who held themselves aloof from the opposition-bashing. Companies, institutions and public organisations fell under the control of people who were either close to Civic Platform or had their official blessing. After the elections the lame-duck parliament appointed five new judges of the Constitutional Tribunal so that Civic Platform could have, as their appointees, fourteen out of fifteen judges. The negative consequences of the uncontrolled rule of one party and the appallingly unfair treatment of the opposition were dismissed by the mainstream. “It is better to be ruled by thieves than by the Law and Justice Party,” a prominent university professor from Warsaw said in a moment of emotional outburst, and his opinion adequately illustrated the general attitude of the government and its supporters.

Since the opposition was presented as public enemy number one, naturally the worst invective and the wildest accusations became routine—with a predictably tragic result. Five years ago a former Civic Platform member stormed into a Law and Justice office and shot and killed one local Law and Justice politician and wounded another. His real target, as he admitted, was Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the party. The man, clearly emotionally unstable, was judged sane by the court, and it was obvious that he had simply succumbed to the Orwellian atmosphere of hatred for the opposition which was emanating from everywhere.

The country was shaken by a series of corruption scandals, some involving Civic Platform politicians. Parliament established its own investigating commissions to look into the scandals, but since the ruling parties not only chaired these commissions, but also had the majority of members, any serious investigation was easily evaded.

For many Poles it soon became clear that the political system was in bad shape, inefficient, hostage to interest groups and shamelessly partisan. Perhaps the most visible proof was the air-crash of the government plane in 2010 in which all ninety-six passengers were killed, including the President of Poland, his wife, the commanders in chief of army, air force and navy, the president of the national bank, and many other top people, most of them from the Law and Justice Party. The reaction of the government was shocking. They withdrew from the investigation, giving a free hand to the Putin government, which put all the blame on the Polish side. For a long time the Polish government covered up the Russian lies and produced their own. The most notorious one was a statement by the then minister of health and later the prime minister who said the site of the crash had been examined thoroughly and with utmost care “one metre deep”. A few of days later, visitors from Poland who went to the site found not only many objects belonging to the passengers but also human remains.

The victory of the Law and Justice Party could be interpreted as a typical democratic swing of the political pendulum. But it was more than that. The Poles demonstrated not only that they had had enough of living in a one-party state, but primarily that they wanted their political institutions to work. They had had enough of corruption and were tired of a government that was inefficient, demoralised and impotent as regards the basic interests of the society and the country.

This malaise—the government being at the same time intrusive, heavy-handed, corrupt and impotent—is characteristic of the countries with a communist past. Hungary and Poland are probably the only two countries in the region where major parties have embarked on the mission to make the state workable and independent of powerful pressure groups. This program sounds somewhat dissonant to the modern politically correct ear, but the fact is that the weakness of political institutions is the main problem of post-communist democracies. Torn between the old ideological bureaucracy of the communists and the new ideologies of the modern welfare state of social democrats and the chimera of the minimal state of the classical liberals, East European leaders have been unable to build stable structures relatively free from partisan politicking and responsive to the interests of the society.

The failure of the state can be seen on various levels. First, it sometimes happens that legislation is heavily influenced to satisfy the interests of powerful pressure groups. We had, for instance, a notorious case of a law that directly favoured the interest of a Polish oligarch, which everybody knew was introduced precisely for that purpose, and there was no majority to defeat it. And this was not an isolated case.

Then there is a weakness of state institutions to enforce the laws that have been made: big companies refusing to pay taxes and violating environmental and social regulations, asymmetry in treatment of enterprises, and so on. Finally, there is the impotence or bad will of the courts that pass absurd verdicts, giving grounds for suspicion of one-sidedness. In short, the impression the average citizen has is that no institution gives him protection against arbitrary power.

This aspect of East Europe is overlooked by most outside observers. It is part of the reason why any move to reform the state is received with reluctance by outsiders and in particular by the European Union. It is not that the EU promotes or condones corruption. Far from it. The problem is that the EU dislikes, even fears, the rhetoric of strengthening the national state, because it sees in it a tendency to increase the political sovereignty of member states, which the EU regards as a mortal sin. As it happens, in both Hungary and in Poland, the policy of strengthening the state was accompanied by emphasising the importance of sovereign decisions of national government and by downplaying the role of European institutions.

The EU looks at the new member states with a thinly veiled superiority and is of the opinion that the best those countries can do is to keep silent and to accept unconditionally anything that comes from the European Commission and the European Council. The old member states—Germany, France, Britain, Italy and others—have their own problems and do not wish to add new ones by admitting the newcomers to the closed circle.

It is therefore not surprising that the EU—despite its declarations of fidelity to European values—never cares much what happens in the new member states as long as their governments are sufficiently docile. The EU did nothing while the socialist government ravaged Hungary for eight years, but the Orban government, which serves the interests of Hungarian society fairly well but has defied the sacred truths of the EU, has become an object of incessant attack. Similarly, Civic Platform quickly became a darling of the European institutions because it never questioned anything that came from the Commission and the Council, and in return it could do anything it wished at home.

It is therefore to be expected that the new Polish government will join its Hungarian counterpart as another villain to be scolded, bullied and intimidated. Poland is even more of a problem for the EU than Hungary, because it is bigger and politically more potent. There is a lot that Poland lost or failed to achieve during the last eight years and reclaiming those goals will surely provoke anger.

First, there is energy. Poland is a country of coal, and coal has become the main enemy in the European ideology, expressed by the slogan of the decarbonisation of Europe. Any attempt to sidestep the policy of decarbonisation will be fiercely undermined by Brussels. Previously Poland made an effort to develop shale gas energy, but it was blocked in the EU by countries which opposed a change in the energy market.

Similarly, Poland tried to prevent the energy entente cordiale between Germany and Russia, which built a gas pipeline circumventing Polish territory. The Germans simply refused to talk about the issue, and the former Polish government readily acquiesced. This German-Russian rapprochement is a sensitive issue because it has an obvious political and security dimension.

Germany, undoubtedly the most powerful country in continental Europe, has grown to play the role of special protector of the East European countries, particularly Poland. Whatever the advantages of this protection, it remains a fact that Germany never concedes anything of value that a weaker partner demands. This was the case with the pipeline, with the Polish community living in Germany (which does not have national minority status, as opposed to the Germans living in Poland, who always had this status), and the Russia policy.

Since the Ukrainian crisis Poland has felt particularly threatened by the growing Russian imperialism, and it is in its interest to be more involved in the negotiation process (as it had been before) and to become a part of the Nato system of security providing the same guarantees that the countries in Western Europe have. These are the objectives of the new government and it is very likely that the first answer of the German government will be the same as usual: Nein. The German priority is to have good relations with Russia, and Angela Merkel will be most unwilling to irritate Putin. The Germans know they can get away with more than anyone else. They have even learnt to minimise the critique of their Nein policy by saying that such a critique is nothing more than anti-German phobia.

The situation of the new Polish government is even more difficult since the outbreak of the migrant crisis. Chancellor Merkel—it will be recalled—unilaterally opened the European borders and invited all immigrants. After a few days, when the number of immigrants exceeded expectations, she closed the borders again. But the EU, supported by Germany, decided that whatever the number Europe must receive the immigrants and that the best way to solve the crisis would be a mandatory relocation of the immigrants among the EU states. This bizarre notion was hard to reconcile with EU treaties. The new Polish government and the leaders of other countries of the region oppose this policy for many reasons, but also because they do not wish to be dictated to by those who never bothered to consult them. The unofficial reaction of the EU Commission and German politicians to this disobedience was brutally straightforward: the countries that resist the mandatory relocation should be punished by being deprived of access to European funds.

But it is not only energy, security and the condescending way the EU and Germany treat the East European democracies that make the position of the new Polish government difficult. The EU is a highly ideologised organisation, politically correct to a degree that offends elementary intelligence. The new Polish government will certainly not join the EU’s ideological crusades, which is enough to make it an enemy of progress and of “European values” (a term which long ago lost any meaningful connection with European culture). These political correct crusades—obligatory gender ideology in education, same-sex marriage and so on—are a blatant violation of the EU treaties, which leave such matters to be decided by national governments. But the ideological zeal animating some EU institutions respects no rules and provisions even when they were written, signed and solemnly promised to be respected.

Despite these difficulties, the emergence of a new Polish government may have a sobering effect on European politics. Good international politics has always depended on a political balance. It is to be hoped that the Polish elections will trigger some political movement among the smaller states in Europe to form a more-or-less stable coalition to oppose the harmful policies of the big European players. It is badly needed.