POLAND'S HARD-RIGHT TURN -- a DIRELAND exclusive by David Ost

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THE FOLLOWING ANALYSIS OF THE POLISH ELECTIONS was written exclusively for DIRELAND by the distinguished scholar and expert on Poland DAVID OST (below left). David is professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and occasional visiting professor at Central European University. He has written extensively on democracy and political economy in Eastern Europe, with particular focus on the Solidarity movement in Poland. His most recent work is The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Cornell University Press, 2005). His articles have appeared in The Nation, Dissent, and Tikkun among other publications.

Much of the discussion so far of the current Polish elections has focused on whether the identical twins Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski (below right) are going  to take power, one as President and one as Prime Minister. The results of last Sunday’s first round presidential election make this more likely. The ‘liberal’ Donald Tusk (above left) of the Civic Platform party just barely edged out the ‘populist’ Lech Kaczynski of Law and Justice, gaining 36.3% to Kaczynski’s 33.1%. But with the other 30% of the votes going mostly for candidates hostile to liberal politics – the belligerent but charismatic leader of the Self-Defense party, Andrzej Lepper, a xenophobic ultra-nationalist demagogue who is nicknamed the "Iron Fist" of the peasantry  (lower left), came in third with 15% -- Kaczynski’s chances  in the second round of elections, to be held October 23, look pretty good. And with his brother Jaroslaw having led Law and Justice to victory in the parliamentary elections last month, the Kaczynskis are indeed on course to be the dominant figures in Polish politics for the next several years.

Poland is headed for a more right-wing government regardless of whether Kaczynski or Tusk prevail in the second round. Tusk and his Civic Platform party (logo left) propose to push through neoliberal policies without worrying about social consequences. He is a strong advocate of a flat tax and for liberalization of the labor law to make it even easier to lay off workers, which he sees as the solution for Poland’s intractable high-double digit unemployment rate. Kaczynski will likely promote many of the same policies, but will do so while offering moral crusades and the punishment and shaming of a few "red-capitalist crooks" as a salve to get people’s minds off their economic woes. The Kaczynskis have learned the lesson of the Republican Party quite well: you can best win support for pro-elite economic policies by offering economically frightened voters substitute moral satisfactions instead. Just as the poorest counties in the US went so strongly for Bush, as Thomas Frank showed us in What’s The Matter With Kansas?, so the most underprivileged in Poland are Kaczynski’s strongest base.

  The only glitch in this story is that Kaczynski (election billboard at left) has campaigned as the opponent of neoliberalism. He presents the presidential race as a contest between his vision of a "solidaristic" Poland and Tusk’s idea of a "liberal" one, the former word chosen to echo the great Solidarity movement of the early 1980s, in which both Kaczynskis played important roles. (The term "liberal," meanwhile, is used, as is normal in Europe, to refer to laissez-faire economic and a lax, tolerant attitude on moral values.) Some observers have taken these slogans seriously and begun referring to Kaczynski as the left-wing candidate. Indeed, Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party has promised to freeze the price of school textbooks, build three million apartments in the next eight years, and see to it that no Polish child go hungry.

The heart of Kaczynski’s campaign, however, is not the fight against economic liberalism but a fight for political illiberalism. He promises to purge the Polish polity of crooks, put more people in prison, write a new Constitution, and stigmatize gays. Indeed, one of Kaczynski’s best-known acts in recent years, as Mayor of Warsaw, has been his decision, two years in a row, to ban the Gay Pride Parade. Before that, as Minister of Justice in 2000, he presided over a big increase in the prison population. Policies such as these have won him the enthusiastic support of the extremist right-wing Catholic "Radio Maria" radio station and its influential, openly anti-Semitic leader, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk (left). With his lavish economic promises combined with his support for an active and repressive state, Kaczynski appears as a populist out of the past; many in the Polish press compare him to Argentina’s Peron.

That the Kaczynskis are already preparing to abandon their populist economic promises is made clear by their decision to name  Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz as prime minister. Marcinkiewicz (right) sits squarely in the neoliberal-but-religious-fundamentalist camp, so fashionable lately in this era of "there is no alternative" globalization. (Religion, in this view, is supposed to assuage citizens while social welfare is cut.) A radical Catholic activist in the early 1990s, militant in his condemnation of homosexuality as "unnatural" behavior that the state must stop from "infecting" others, Marcinkiewicz is on record supporting the introduction of a flat tax, and broke with his right-wing friends briefly last year to support the Social Democratic government’s own attempt to slash the budget, cut pensions, and liberalize employment law.

   Jaroslaw Kaczynski (left) will be the de facto leader of parliament, but he chose not to assume the premiership both in order to help his brother’s presidential campaign (on the supposition that voters don’t want identical twins running the two key branches of government) and to be able to blame someone else for messing things up once disillusionment with continued harsh economic policy sets in. And it will set in. Polish voters have used every election since 1989 as the moment to "throw out the bums" and replace them with a new group, who become the bums to be jettisoned at the next go-around.

Law and Justice’s strategy to avert this fate is to make good not on its economic  promises but its existential ones, chief of which is the call for the "moral cleansing" of the Polish polity. Stealing a page from de Gaulle in 1958, Law and Justice (logo at right) has called for the scrapping of the Constitution, promulgated less than ten years ago, and the creation of a new "fourth republic" to replace the present one that they describe as corrupt, scandal-ridden, and immoral.

The extremist right-wingers now flocking to Kaczynski’s presidential campaign are hoping to have a big influence in shaping a new republic and a new constitution, and the new parliament may well go along. In the parliamentary elections held in September, Law and Justice got 27% of the vote, just ahead of Civic Platform’s 24%. Third place went to Lepper’s radical illiberal Self-Defense (Samoobrona) movement (logo right), with 11.4% of the vote, while the League of Polish Families (LPR) -- the party, led by Roman Giertych (left), with the closest ties to the quasi-fascists of Radio Maria (logo upper left) -- won 8%. (The League has its fingers in every anti-gay activity in Poland, from skinhead violence to homophobic legislation; and the League's Eurodeputies accused the European parliament in Strasbourg of being under the influence of the "homosecual lobby.") Altogether, parties that call themselves right-wing won 77% of the parliamentary vote. Law and Justice is more on the political right and Civic Platform more on the economic right, while LPR and Self-Defense are extreme-right parties with fascist tendencies, hostile to democratic principles in total.

In these conditions, it falls to the Social Democrats (logo below left), the successors of the old communist party, to be the democratic opposition. The Social Democrats ended up with 11.3% of the vote – a stunning drop from the 44% they won in 2001 (which they squandered by a series of corruption scandals and their consistent promotion of neoliberalism), but better than they had been expected to win only a short time ago. Time will tell whether they can use their status as the only real opposition to gain new supporters in the years ahead.

As the second round of voting draws near, current polls have Tusk slightly ahead,   probably because voters are wary of the prospect of a government of two twins, and because left-wing voters, many of whom sat out the first round, are turning to Tusk out of their fear of Kaczynski’s demagogic politics. Regardless of who wins, however, the result will be two right-wing parties governing the country. On foreign policy, the country will maintain its pro-American position, and continue to fight for a bigger role in the European Union. Kaczynski is likely to be tougher on Russia than Tusk, however, which may end up driving him closer to America and further from the old EU-members. For Poles wondering whether the right-wing turn will be in economics, politics, or both, all that can be said right now is that the future will be interesting – albeit in the way of the old Chinese curse told to one’s enemy: May you live in interesting times! -- by DAVID OST ( ost@hws.edu )

AIDS IN LATIN AMERICA: When Tim Frasca, a sometime  journalist and longtime AIDS worker south of the border, asked me to write a blurb for the jacket of his new book from Palgrave, Aids in Latin America, after reading it I was more than happy to oblige. Here's what I wrote: "Tim Frasca, both a sharp-eared reporter and a veteran of the frontline fight against AIDS in Latin America, has produced a riveting, politically sophisticated, and heartbreakingly human account of why that fight is being lost. This country-by-country account of what works, and what doesn’t—filtered though Frasca’s smart compassion and his visceral sympathy for the huge underclass—makes AIDS in Latin America original and important, with implications for AIDS work everywhere."

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