Eight years ago, when Law and Justice introduced the “500+” program to Poles, the great liberal political and commentary movement in Poland began to make predictions full of doom and gloom. The budget of the Republic of Poland would not be able to cope, this project would not be implemented at all, and its social effects were supposed to discourage people from working and amplify pathologies such as alcoholism or laziness. However, behind all this were dishonest economic calculations and simple disregard for those Poles who were not in the mainstream of financial prosperity. Because, you know, Sebastian Kulczyk made billions handing out pamphlets, and if someone doesn’t have billions, or at least millions, it means he’s lazy and half-hearted.
The “500+” program was introduced, thousands of children went on holiday for the first time in their lives, large families got some rest, the program was later extended to the first child and the whole procedure turned out to be surprisingly simple given the existing bureaucratic practices. This was followed by the opposition’s contemptuous narrative – that PiS buys the votes of the poor and idlers, and PO presents resourceful entrepreneurs and hard-working people. During the second term of PiS, the opposition softened a bit and in Tusk’s nonsense it turned out that “500+” was in fact Ewa Kopacz’s program, only the PO government failed to implement its revolution.
Two terms later we have deja vu, we have exactly the same error trail as two terms ago. Think-tank mathematicians have already multiplied the number of children by another 300 PLN and declared that the money will run out, it will be impossible, it will fail, the budget will burst, Poland will collapse. A new thread is the inflation forecast, which, however, is made with the obligatory omission of the Russian invasion by the German party, because discussing the war in Ukraine would mean talking about the government’s successes in supporting its eastern neighbor and point out that many of the problems, such as price hikes, are the result of Putin’s crimes, not PiS’s mistakes.
In the criticism of correcting “500+” to “800+”, liberal contempt appears again – Tomasz Lis again announced that this buys votes from Poland without ideology, which is in line with Donald Tusk’s view that pathology on PiS and PiS vote supports social pathologies. Despite PiS’s various weaknesses, they cannot be stripped of the status of a concrete party and it is difficult to assign other strategies to the opposition, such as intimidation, impossibility and contempt. But hey, if the opposition has come up with only eight stars for eight years, let them not feel sorry for themselves now that they will lose with eight hundred for the needs of every Polish child.
Source: wPolityce