Anyone who wants to learn about the current economic situation in Poland will encounter curiously contradictory accounts. In the Polish mainstream media, only one image emerges: Poland has growth, has avoided the financial crisis and is up to its ears with new investment, of which the tacky skyscrapers rising up in Warsaw are proof.
Take a closer look – the investment was mostly in roads and stadiums for the Euro 2012 football championship which are now mostly unused and loss-making, while schools, libraries and school canteens are being closed. Health care is free only in theory – if you can’t pay the monthly insurance or are on benefits, it is restricted or has to be paid for. Donald Tusk and his neoliberal party, Civic Platform, have raised the pension age from 65 to 67 and recently, “to fight the crisis”, abolished the eight-hour working day. Last but not least, if it was a prospering country would two million of its people be economic emigrants?
It is true that so far Poland has introduced few overt austerity measures, benefiting from a strong industrial base closely connected to Germany, EU investment and less “financialisation” than, say, the Baltic states. However, if Poland were a land of milk and honey, the migrants would be returning after raising some money. They aren’t. So, instead, the Polish press runs frequent articles bemoaning how Spaniards, Portuguese and other citizens of crisis-ridden European countries are coming to the country to get a job – although the numbers are tiny compared to the volume of those emigrating.
While Poland loves to boast about westerners coming to earn money, it is less open about those from the eastern part of the continent: Roma, Chechens and Ukrainians are treated as second-class citizens. In Białystok, in north-eastern Poland, violent attacks on Roma camps and houses are common. A recent court case ruled that the swastika, written on the city walls and worn by neo-fascists, is legal because “it’s a famous Asian symbol of happiness”.
If the right has radicalised since the Smolensk plane crash, which killed 93 officials, including the president and many MPs, then the left is in a state of decrepitude. A “tenants’ movement” fights the evictions that blight the country and there was a very small Occupy movement. At a recent “congress of the left”, there was talk of “learning from the right” and an “alliance with the middle classes”. Yet the only large party of the left, the Democratic Left Alliance, formed by the ex-communist nomenklatura and the governing party in the 1990s and early 2000s, was reduced to 8.24 per cent of the vote in the last election. Even the recent self-immolation of a 56-year-old man in front of the prime minister’s office in protest against his and many others’ impoverishment didn’t especially shake the public. Nor did his subsequent death.
What has? When public transport fares in Warsaw went up by 60 per cent, there were protests and a petition demanding the resignation of the city’s Civic Platform mayor, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz. But Poland is not yet taking a cue from the Brazilian protests – which, with their focus on hikes in transport fares and the costs of hosting the World Cup, resemble the problems Poland had after Euro 2012.
Here in Poland, propaganda serves to justify almost anything Civic Platform does – especially as we are ritually menaced with the possible comeback of the Law and Justice party. Split between neoliberals and rightwing populists, the people of Poland are successfully kept from taking to the streets.
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