Poland: The EU Strikes Back

Stay Calm, Remember Your Training

“Exciting news from Poland, where last Sunday a coalition of opposition parties delivered a robust election victory against a nativist-authoritarian government.” reads a gushing article in The Financial Times, the journalistic class hiding none of its glee as “Liberal democracy strikes back in Poland” is emblazoned as the headline. The Financial Times is not alone,“Poland’s Law and Justice party loses power after eight years of authoritarian rule” reads CNN, referring to the 2023 election results in the country, which saw the populist party lose its absolute majority for the first time since 2015. You would think from the media victory laps they had been electorally destroyed, but they are still the largest bloc in Poland’s Parliament with 194 seats as opposed to Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition with 157, a gain of just 23 seats.

The vision many on The Right have of Poland and Polish politics is of a semi-fictional “Based Poland,” a land bravely sticking it to the EU from the inside; but— internally—the factions and issues are very similar to other EU nations. The situation in politics between 2015 and 2023, where the populist right Law and Justice Party had a high degree of control of Poland’s institutions, was unique in its post soviet history. The shape of the news cycle is such that the election result took many by surprise, with recriminations of the “poor choices” of Polish voters abounding—but this assumes the choices the Polish electorate were presented with are genuine. What is happening is the same as what is happening all over Europe: The European Union and its hatchetmen inexorably grinding any national identity within the bloc to dust.

To understand what is going on in Poland fully, we must first understand its political system.

Poland’s Political & Electoral System

• Poland is a full member of the EU, but does not use the Euro.

• The Head of State is The Polish President, who has a veto which needs a 60% vote to overturn. He can serve a maximum of two five year terms.

• Poland has a Senate, elected in a first past the post system, and Lower House that is elected via proportional representation.

What western observers think of as “based Poland” has been a product of all elected, and therefore all appointed, positions within government being dominated by The Law and Justice Party.

Proportional Representation in a democracy is designed to create political paralysis via a rabble of bickering small political parties. The Law and Justice Party was hard to stop in 2015 due to having a large, viable ally to their right. In 2019, they gained a rare absolute majority in the lower house whilst still having smaller political allies, effectively giving them free reign. The normal functions of the Polish government, unbound from the paralysis of fragile coalition wrangling, meant that The Law and Justice Party appointed its own people into the institutions of state—as is their right as the ruling party. This is what the EU and global class have been framing as ‘Authoritarianism:’ the natural outgrowth of political hegemony over a system designed for messy compromise.

So where did it all go wrong?

The Law and Justice Party, is a great example that eventually, every single populist movement or party runs out of steam—especially if it faces stiff opposition from global forces. Their survival was contingent on maintaining this hegemony, which was impossible to do forever in an EU dominated system stacked against them. Asking why the Polish “voted for their own demise” is like asking people in 2024 “Why don’t you just vote for The Tory Party?” It buys into the myths of democracy and the validity of managerial political systems.

As a matter of course, The Regime will take up all the political space not occupied up by the insurgent populists, and as soon as they add up to 51%, they are cobbled together into “The Coalition” we see so often in European politics.

This is how, despite waning popularity, Angela Merkel’s old party has been able to maintain power in Germany, for example. The German voters would find that there would always be a blob formed that kept the ruling party in power, no matter what was said during the election or how much the votes waned. This is the process the EU had been waiting to make possible in Poland and their signal to do so was the return of arch Eurocrat Donald Tusk.

For the sake of simplicity, we can think of Donald Tusk as Poland’s Tony Blair: a controversial but ostensibly centrist managerial leader who was promoted to the upper echelons of global power in the form of being president of the European Council. He is the EU’s hatchet man, and he comes with the full weight of Brussels behind him.

The Law and Justice backed President, Andrzej Duda, on paper has a lot of power to temper the worst excesses of this new EU backed coalition: but like all constitutions, The Polish Constitution is simply a piece of paper. It has no bearing on the actions of Power.

The Law and Justice party needs complete hegemony, but its enemies need only the merest toe hold.

Money With Strings

The simple reason Poland eventually had to play ball with the EU is this: Poland is THE largest recipient of EU funds as compared to its contributions; larger than Romania, larger even than the much maligned Greece.

Poland, despite retaining the The Zloty as their independent national currency, is heavily beholden to the EU financially, $37.41 billion in funds hang in the balance. mostly in the form of withheld Covid recovery loans. To put that in perspective, 2023 Military spending—even in light of the ramping Ukraine conflict—was $24.0 billion, or around 3% of GDP, $13.4 billion less than what the EU is withholding from Poland. Lockdowns presented an opportunity for the EU to effectively switch off much of the EU economy, leaving all constituent nations reliant on the mechanisms of the ECB and on the handouts given via its printed money.

You can also see on the chart above where Poland was financially punished after Donald Tusk’s party left office in 2015. This attempt somewhat backfired, as less money means less strings and it allowed the Law and Justice Party to rightly accuse Europe of playing political favourites in domestic Polish politics. What the EU did, instead of simply cutting budgeted money for Poland, was allocate the money to them and then hold it back contingent on ever more hoops being jumped through. That $37.4 Billion is so high because it is there as a giant carrot to either force the Law and Justice Party to give up on their nationalist policies all together, something which it could not do, or as an explicit bribe to the populus to elect a party that is a vassal of the EU.

Tusk has already unlocked 5 billion Euros simply for winning the election and making the correct noises, but the EU has made the rest contingent on the implementation of policies designed to quickly erase the legacy of eight years of the most popular political movement in post-soviet Polish history—a party that still holds the presidency and is still the largest single bloc in the lower house of parliament.

“Securing Polish Democracy”

The London School of economics lamented in 2019 that despite being “subject to intense criticism from much of the western opinion-forming media” The Law and Justice Party was still stubbornly popular, which is rather cynical managerial euphemism for “we flooded Poland with as much propaganda as humanly possible, but they still vote the wrong way.” Both before and after the election, a cavalcade of US and EU security state linked NGOs presented a united front that The Law and Justice Party are evil tyrants who will destroy Polish democracy:

“Poland’s Election Represents a Setback to Illiberalism” -Alliance for Securing Democracy

“The roster of figures who have signed onto the new project, called the Alliance for Securing Democracy, is a who’s who of former senior national security officials from both parties. The advisory council includes former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff; former acting CIA director Michael Morell; former House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers; Adm. James Stavridis, former NATO supreme Allied commander, Europe; Jake Sullivan, former national security adviser to Joe Biden; and former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves.” -The Washington Post

“Youth and civic activists in Poland see the upcoming election as a make-or-break moment. The country’s democratic institutions, women’s rights, and the future of the EU are at stake.” —Carnegie Europe

“The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is one of the oldest foreign policy discussion and coordinating organizations in the United States. Formed in 1910, it has throughout its history been closely connected with the State Department, successive presidents, numerous private foreign affairs groups and the leaders of the main political parties. Although the Council on Foreign Relations is more generally acknowledged to have been at the heart of ‘the American establishment.” -Powerbase

“Poland’s Democratic Resurgence: From Backsliding to Beacon” - Center for American Progress

Center for American Progress was founded in 2003, by John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. Yes, THAT Podesta. It was also wrapped up in the Clinton emails leak for censoring its own members on the subject of israel.

Those are just three of the most egregious examples of the US state interfering in Poland’s politics using the false independence of their pet NGOs to manufacture legitimacy. It is very clear that the will of the Polish people is secondary to the will of the international elite class and allows this powerful network to craft narratives and seize on scandals, both real and imaginary.

Lets handle the genuine scandal first: The Law and Justice Party has suffered embarrassment in the past at the hands of its coalition partners, but just before the election they had a very big and very real scandal of their own—cash for visas. “Polish media said some 250,000 visas had been granted since 2021, for thousands and even tens of thousands of euros each.” reads a report in Politico and whilst the scale is up for debate, the optics of an anti-immigration party in an anti-immigration country handing out thousands of visas for bribes cannot be understated.

Ukraine also looms large over Polish politics, and not merely the conflict. Poland is still a largely agrarian society outside of the cities. These agrarian heartlands are also a major voter base of The Law and Justice Party. Disputes over Ukrainian grain, which has been effectively being subsidised by both economic aid to the country and the lifting of duties paid from outside the EU, have been the biggest issue for farming communities as the cheap food undercuts their produce to the point of economic unviability. Polish farmers are demanding an end to this subsidised, untaxed grain entering the EU via Poland, and have been blocking border crossings on and off for months. The Law and Justice Party has been staunchly pro NATO and pro Ukraine, more so than its agrarian political rivals The Polish People's Party, who are part of a green coalition has vowed to mitigate the problems to Polish farming the support for the Ukraine conflict by the former ruling party has caused.

Here is a very crucial point: if you look at the granular details of where support was won and lost, you find that the agrarian parties gained more votes (5.8%) than Donald Tusk’s party (3.3%), and gained them in more staunch Law and Justice areas. Drops in support were biggest in farming communities, bigger even than in the cities, blowing apart the idea that this is a popular centrist revolt. In the countryside, 2023 was a single issue election for many.

It is ironic that the populist right wing in Poland has suffered at the polls primarily because of the one area they were in enthusiastic compliance with the global order, but the false narrative surrounding the supposed attack on Democracy is a much more useful one to those who wish to make true political opposition to the EU impossible. Their loyalty in “holding the line for Ukraine” was not rewarded, as any deviation from total hegemony with global power cannot be allowed.

The Functions of Power

Knowing as we do now, that this was largely an election decided by pro-Ukraine and anti-Polish farming policy, we can examine the reasoning behind the withholding of $37.4 billion as a cynical pretext for the swift realignment of Poland with its EU masters.

The first of these narratives surrounds ‘Judicial Reform’—an often nebulous concept but one utilised very often when global power wants to create a fifth column within your nation. The European Commission, through its rule of law practices, places very narrow limits on the shape a countries’ judicial system can take. Their overarching stated goal is “Judicial Independence,” but in reality this means you will always have a judiciary that is activist for the EU and therefore, if you are a eurosceptic party, your political enemies. Both Poland and Hungary have been put under immense pressure to stop their attempts to rein in activist judiciary who were the only lever the global regime could pull in a Poland dominated by a highly popular right wing party. The mere fact that, since it was in power for eight years, the Law and Justice Party had appointed many of Poland’s judges is often cited as a form of subversion, much as Donald Trump’s judiciary appointments have been in the past.

Despite having a tenuous coalition and not holding the presidency, Tusk and his allies have vowed to reshape in a matter of months what a majority government managed to build in eight years—but as we shall see the “rules of democracy” only go one way.

Poland’s state broadcaster has also been a target of EU ire, in a struggle that is portrayed as an existential fight against The Far Right: “Polish media conflict pits government against far right” is the rather on the nose headline Germany’s DW went with. Elsewhere this political act is sold as a moment of depoliticisation: “Tusk takes state broadcaster off air in effort to depoliticise public media” reads Euractiv, clearly trying to paint Tusk in particular as the neutral hand of safe managerialism.

This escalated dramatically with armed police forcibly closing down the broadcaster and some Law and Justice activists staging a sit in.

In response to this impasse, the broadcaster was put into financial “Liquidation” by Tusk’s new government, but they lack the constitutional power to initiate the reforms they are already pressing ahead with:

The PiS appointed its allies to a number of posts during its rule. Many are either constitutionally protected or legislation is required to dismiss or replace them.

That includes nearly 3,000 judges who were appointed since 2018.

Tusk’s government is, nevertheless, trying to change this.

President Duda and PiS ally wants Polish state TV to be managed by a body called the National Media Council, where there is a majority of Law and Justice appointees,” Szczerbiak tells Euronews.

He suggests legislation is needed to dissolve this body, but that could be veoted by Duda and Tusk's government doesn't have the three-fifths majority to overturn his veto.

As a result, Szczerbiak says Tusk is trying to find a workaround that doesn't involve legislation, though the politics professor added "even some critics of Law and Justice feel [this] is legally and ethically dubious.”

-EuroNews

LSE proudly stating that Poland has been “subject to intense criticism from much of the western opinion-forming media” does not factor into the analysis, once again ironically entitled “Can Tusk disentangle Poland from its last 'authoritarian' rulers?” Poland cannot have a public broadcaster that is a counterbalance, it must repeat the framing and propaganda of the global elite or else it will be liquidated in an extralegal way that left wing intellectuals are already uncomfortably squirming at.

Tusk’s government is flexing its muscles in public demonstrations of power in other ways: two ex-MPs—who president Duda had been sheltering in the presidential palace and who have already pardoned—have been arrested in a move widely signalling a further shift to the kind of hard power approach used on the state broadcaster.

A Familiar Taste

“PiS may indeed require new strategies for a “new Poland” if it is to return to power.” -Notes From Poland

This New Poland is being formed despite the Law and Justice Party attempting its own version of the long march through Poland’s institutions. What they found in attempting this is that—without the full backing of the EU or other global power centres—this process is impossible. In a democracy, the house always wins. Law and Justice had no real plan for when they were inevitably cycled out, and as such they have been utterly routed despite still being the biggest political party. The voting is merely a ceremony for manufacturing the illusion of consent. Ireland being told “vote again,” and the Greek experience demonstrate this also.

Immigration is not an issue Tusk can yet defy his own people on, but in bringing Poland into alignment with the EU the groundwork is obviously being laid for mass migration to be put back on the table. We may find all kinds of previously unpopular or unthinkable policy is simply “the right thing to do” in New Poland, as we found in Tony Blair’s New Britain. The window dressing of party politics means little against the march of the international order, time and again.

Hungary now is the next frontier for Europe, their last real problem child. We shall soon see if the planning horizons of the Hungarian nationalist elite extend beyond the point when Viktor Orban is inevitably cycled out—possibly even by someone akin to Meloni, who is merely an EU stooge with a swastika painted on her forehead for style points. The EU is somewhat occupied mopping up political resistance in Poland, but if their plans can fully come to fruition there, then it is Hungary who may provide us with the next example of The Populist Delusion in action.

I hope for their sake I am wrong.