Anti-development interest groups in Poland, political obstruction and external influences have prevented Poland from implementing serious reforms and making major investments for decades. Why did Jarosław Kaczyński’s group manage to overcome so much? The answer to this question will help us understand this year’s election campaign, which is taking on increasingly primitive forms.
The Third Polish Republic was built in such a way that nothing serious could be done on the Vistula River. The constitution is inconsistent, local governments have the potential to antagonize the state, the third estate creates institutions outside democratic control, and finally the secret services that entered business and the media combine a disturbing amount of knowledge behind the scenes and informal influence, which also paralyzed community projects in favor of the specific interests of individual oligarchs or networks of connections.
Part of the political class has actually grown into this system and believed that the introduction of discounts at museums as part of the large family ticket is a revolutionary social policy, and that local sports fields such as Orlik are an investment opportunity for future generations. Some politicians, such as Paweł Kowal or Michał Kamiński, tried the path of independence and apparently simply decided that Polish aspirations were impossible to realize – they had to be content with the role of the Vistula state in the formula of a European empire.
Modernization in Poland could be paralyzed by so many social groups that some people would give up the fight against the VAT mafia or the influence of the former communist secret police. Investments in infrastructure (CPK, nuclear power plants, digging the sandbank) are enough for a group of environmental activists paid by foreign countries, for judicial reforms a few trips by the opposition to Brussels and a few dramatic editions of a news service are enough to the ownership structure of the media in Poland. Even things that are so obvious in a constitutional state such as defending the border and not letting in illegal immigrants caused social hysteria, the activation of active measures by Russian agents and the creation of films like “The Green Border” by Agnieszka Holland.
The image of a Poland that can do nothing is believed by a large part of Poles, guided by a sense of guilt for the fabricated crimes of anti-Semitism, racism, misogyny and homophobia; citizens with little stamina now prefer a country without independence and a strong army, but with calm praise for the puppet authorities from interviews with Gazeta Wyborcza or TVN24.
Overcoming powerlessness
The aspirations of Jarosław Kaczyński’s circle – following a course of sovereignty – caused the unanimous howls of both foreign agents and small-minded owners of Polish passports. And yet, the rule of two parliamentary terms, a possible third, two terms of Andrzej Duda, social programs, educational reforms, expansion of the army that free Poland could never dream of, the international Intermarium project, a dam on the border with Belarus, the excavation of the Vistula Spit, the tunnel under Świna, the terminal in Świnoujście and many other projects have been successful or are in progress. Something is really changing in the old Third Polish Republic.
However, the state created in 1989 and approved by the Constitution did not have the normal instruments to implement such a policy. The eagles and the chocolate eagle are said to be the national maximum of modern Poland. However, the PiS president did not want to be a painted leader, and because he received so little support from behind-the-scenes interest groups (German and Russian influences, the former security service and WSI, the Kulczyks and Walters), he had to perform tasks that directly favored him of voters would result.
Special actions
Already at the beginning of the government, the structure of the Third Polish Republic proved to be so inefficient that even obvious government tasks had to be carried out with the help of ‘special laws’, which shortened the procedures and made the performance of the tasks more transparent. and provided additional resources to carry them out. Even the World Youth Day or the NATO summit in Warsaw were organized on the basis of ‘special laws’ and not on the basis of normal government decision-making. The excavation of the Vistula Spit was also done on the basis of a ‘special act’, because ordinary parliamentary decisions would get bogged down in bureaucratic labyrinths.
But precise events and investments are not the only tasks of the government. Maintaining social cohesion, information security or dealing with obstruction in the country are ongoing processes, and it is not enough to pass a ‘special law’, for example ‘that the Constitutional Tribunal will not paralyze the country’ or that ‘opposition politicians will stop lying’. about the state of the country”. It was also a lesson learned from the first PiS government in 2005-2007, when wearing uniforms in schools or banning nurses reduced the chance to enter the Prime Minister’s Chancellery , was presented as an act of fascism. So how to deal with anti-development factors in the country?
Modified and parallel institutions
Jarosław Kaczyński decided to cut the Gordian knot where untangling it would be impossible. Instead of regular action he used “special actions”. The Sejm majority of the next term responded “in advance” to the selection of Constitutional Tribunal judges by the Sejm’s seventh term with laws reforming the Constitutional Tribunal. In response to the participation of the TVN channel in the permanent anti-state campaign, and later even in the hybrid war against Poland, TVP INFO took on a more decisive character (in the first two years of PiS rule, public television had a friendlier and ‘pluralistic’ character). It can be said that the independence right – again – did not have enough strength to clean up the existing institutions and created parallel institutions, free from anti-development influences. This is how the Institute of National Remembrance was founded twenty years ago, and the Central Anticorruption Bureau a decade and a half ago.
Faced with a Polish state built deliberately clumsily, the reformers’ response is to build, in parallel with these neutered and blunted instruments, instruments that are efficient and perform specific tasks (for example, TVP can withstand TVN’s total hatred and fend off mainstream disinformation off). After Bogdan Klich demolished the Polish army and abolished conscription, the answer was not (impossible in these conditions of public debate) the restoration of conscription, but the creation of the Territorial Defense Forces. The combination of the functions of the Prosecutor General and the Minister of Justice broke through another impossibilism (we remember Tusk’s feigned helplessness in the face of the “independence” of the prosecutor’s office regarding the Smolensk tragedy).
Election campaign: parties and institutions
‘Special promotions’ were also used in this election campaign. Poland has been struggling with foreign interference at multiple levels in Polish elections for decades, for example through ‘pro-turnout spots’. As the late once said In 2007, in the campaign “change the country, go to the elections” that brought Tusk to power, Jacek Maziarski contributed both financial and organizational resources (for example, the Adenauer Foundation, the same that today builds the Rafał campus Trzaskowski finances). This year, Fakty TVN is also producing “pro-turnout” materials, which could theoretically be shown during the election lull, although they are worded in such a way as to mobilize the opposition electorate. And here, for example, PiS responds with an information campaign about the referendum. Similarly, the government responded to the ease of mobilizing the metropolitan electorate (proximity to the polls) by increasing the number of electoral commissions in the provinces.
All these actions are alarmistly condemned by the opposition media as ‘undemocratic’. Moreover, the Third Polish Republic sanctified all pathologies and diseases of the Polish system as ‘democratic’ and the restoration of state control as ‘authoritarian’. This is such a faithful repetition of calling the ‘Liberm Veto’ ‘golden freedom’ that we can feel the situation of the 18th century reformers being attacked for pushing through the Government Act of May 3, 1791.
Therefore, not only ambitions, but also effectiveness (still insufficient) are the reason for the anger of political opponents of PiS. And for this reason, the election manifestos of other lists have no chance of being implemented, because in the cardboard Third Polish Republic it is simply impossible to play according to the rules written in 1989, and In the meantime, the Platform, PSL and Links promise to follow all these rules consistently.
Both visions of Poland resemble two parallel, mutually exclusive realities. On the one hand, we have the Third Polish Republic, with its constitutional limitations, political obstacles and external influences that paralyze efforts at reform and investment. On the other hand, there is the Poland of the independence camp, which focuses on sovereignty and creates parallel institutions and special actions to counter anti-development forces. There are only two electoral lists in these elections: number 4 (PiS) and the rest of the numbers. Tertium non datur.
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Source: wPolityce