IN THE POLISH MIRROR

IN THE POLISH MIRROR The victory of the incumbent, Andrzej Duda, in Poland’s presidential poll on 12 July 2020 confirms the continuing electoral hold of the conservative-nationalist Law and Justice Party (pis). ‘A blow to liberal hopes’, announced the Economist, as Duda saw off his challenger, the Civic Platform (po)’s Rafał Trzaskowski, a neoliberal ‘modernizer’ and currently mayor of Warsaw, by 51 to 49 per cent in the second round.footnote1 The Economist’s hope had been that a po president would be able to veto pis legislation; but despite a historically high turnout of 68 per cent, the West’s preferred party was still too tarnished and the hegemony of the pis, backed by the public broadcaster tvp, too strong. Indeed, since the pis landslide in 2015, followed by its further win in the 2019 parliamentary elections, Western liberals observing the country give the impression of staring into a distorting mirror: reflected back at them is a dystopian vision of the capitalist democracy they once laboured to create. These Cold War veterans had romanticized the Polish case, adopting Solidarność’s symbols as their own. Freed from the Communist yoke, the country would emerge as a beacon of economic liberalism, political democracy and Church-led social stability. Nowadays, Poland’s former friends look on in despair, searching for answers as to what has gone wrong. Two of Poland’s closest intellectual allies, the Guardian’s Timothy Garton Ash and Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic, may serve as examples. In 2011, Garton Ash had congratulated the country for ‘getting to grips with being normal at last’ under the pro-business Civic Platform government of Donald Tusk. A few years later, after Civic Platform had gone down to ignominious defeat in the 2015 elections amid a welter of corruption allegations, while Tusk was helicoptered off to head the European Council, Garton Ash declared himself shocked to see ‘how far the pillars of liberal, pluralist democracy in Poland have been battered and shaken.’ Resorting, apophatically, to the hoariest central-European stereotypes, he now chastized the 2017 pro-choice demonstrators: ‘I won’t go so far as the old quip that the Germans can make any system work and the Poles can destroy any system, but certainly we see a contrast between a German strength in making the state work and the Polish forte of society organizing itself against the state.’ The noxious populists of pis were infiltrating their people into the offices of state. Only a countervailing infusion of young Polish liberals into state institutions could ‘strengthen the immune system of a still alarmingly fragile democracy.’footnote2 Likewise, Applebaum mourns the ‘heady optimism’ of the early millennium when she and her high-flying husband, Radosław Sikorski, thought as one with their elite circles of Polish and Atlanticist friends. She recalls a 1999 New Year’s Eve party at their ‘small manor house’ between Poznan and Gdańsk, with journalists, diplomats, government ministers, ‘friends who flew over from New York’—anti-Communists, conservatives, classical liberals, free-market liberals, Thatcherites. ‘It felt as if we were all on the same team’, believing in ‘a Poland that was a member of nato and on its way to joining the European Union’; that was what ‘being on the right’ meant. Today, the Polish right is deeply divided and Applebaum is no longer on speaking terms with half her guests, now backers of the ‘nativist’, ‘xenophobic’, ‘paranoid’, ‘authoritarian’ pis, its discourse equally hostile towards Germany, Russia and the eu. What has caused the transformation? Like Garton Ash, Applebaum avoids any element of self-criticism—her husband resigned in disgrace as Polish Foreign Minister during the 2014 ‘Waitergate’ scandal at a swanky Warsaw restaurant, when he and the Interior Minister were caught comparing us–Polish relations to oral sex, over a $500 dinner of baby lobsters and Cuban cigars, on the taxpayer’s złoty; Sikorski still stands as a symbol of the corrupt and out-of-touch po elite. Instead, Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy offers weightless musings on the authoritarian personality, the trahison des clercs, the genealogy of one-party systems and decline into cultural conservatism of the Polish Church, once ‘an apolitical symbol of national unity’.footnote3 Poland’s liberal friends warn that a groundswell of authoritarian populism has arisen in the East, consolidating power in Budapest and Warsaw. Liberal thinkers in Poland propound similar ideas. Sławomir Sierakowski of the Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw argues that authoritarianism is both stronger and different in Central and Eastern Europe, due to a lack of post-materialist values and ‘a fundamental legacy from their Communist past: the absence of the concept of a loyal opposition’.footnote4 Such reasoning assumes that conservative authoritarianism is an external threat to the West, reversing the liberal-democratic transformation that had been exported eastward after 1990. To the extent that the conservative-nationalist pis and its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczyński, capitalizing on the sleaze and inequalities of the po’s two terms in power, have mobilized ‘good Christian Poles’ against the country’s corrupt political caste, seen as linked to the more powerful international elites in Brussels, Berlin and Moscow, the pis project is aptly described by contemporary usages of the term ‘populist’, meaning any political movement that challenges the liberal consensus.footnote5 The predominant approach, as developed by Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, treats populism as a ‘thin’ moralistic ideology, according to which the central political divide is that between a ‘pure people’ and ‘corrupt elite’. Populist opposition to globalization, or to the us–eu liberal consensus, also raises the problem theorized by Fareed Zakaria in the 1990s, with reference to Bosnia, Pakistan and the Philippines: that democracy and liberalism are not the same thing: ‘democracy is flourishing; constitutional liberalism is not’, Zakaria warned. Popularly elected governments might ignore the constitutional limits on power and diminish the independent institutions of the state, fostering ‘illiberal democracies’.footnote6 Applied to the Polish case, such an interpretation reveals some real and important features of pis rule. However, it also rests upon two presuppositions which need to be tested. First, that the political order accompanying the return to capitalism in Poland after 1989 itself operated upon liberal-democratic principles. Second, that pis rule is a regime of pure regression—and thus a rupture, not to say an aberration, from post-transition Polish politics. What follows will briefly examine each in turn. A democratic transition? The origins of Poland’s reintegration into international capital markets can be traced to the mid-1970s, when the Gierek government began taking cheap ‘petro-dollar’ loans from Western banks. By the end of the decade, these creditors were pressing Warsaw to expand exports and reduce subsidies on consumer goods—a contributing factor to the mass Solidarność strikes of 1980. The transition to capitalism in Poland can be dated to the crushing of the trade-union movement by martial law under Gen. Jaruzelski in 1981; henceforth, consumer prices rose and real wages fell. By the mid-80s, with a green light from Moscow given by Gorbachev’s perestroika, the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party was actively preparing for a transition, implementing a series of market reforms and taking the country into the World Bank and imf. The 1989 Round Table talks, negotiating the transfer of political power between the Jaruzelski regime and the Solidarność opposition, initially agreed on a ‘social-market economy’. Yet when a young Jerzy Sachs arrived in Warsaw in April 1989, the blueprint for liberal-economic shock therapy in his briefcase, he was wholeheartedly welcomed by the former left-wing Solidarność intellectuals as well as the modernizing nomenklatura. In December 1989, without any real debate or public consultation, Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz rammed a package of sixteen bills through the largely appointed Sejm—this was nearly two years before the first full parliamentary election—paving the way for the privatization of state-owned enterprises and elimination of price controls and subsidies. Poland’s large working class bore the brunt of a huge surge in unemployment, poverty and inequality.footnote7In contrast to Russia and Ukraine, the advent of capitalism in Poland did not involve a transfer of public wealth to a homegrown oligarchy. Instead, huge swathes of the productive and financial sectors were transferred to foreign capital.footnote8 Balcerowicz pushed through rapid sales of assets, in some instances for as little as 10 per cent of estimated value. By the end of the 1990s, foreign capital controlled 35 per cent of Poland’s industrial stock, 70 per cent of its banking assets and 80 per cent of its print media.footnote9 The transfer of ownership through successive privatization programmes took place through the courts and state bureaucracies, shielded from public view. This was especially fraught in the case of property privatizations: incoherent laws left it up to the courts to rule on the forcible removal of tenants from their homes and the transfer of public spaces and buildings to private investors.footnote10 A major beneficiary of this process was the Church, awarded generous subsidies and grants of land that enabled it to build an extensive network of Catholic schools, universities and media outlets, becoming once again the largest private landowner in the country. Religious instruction was restored in schools without consulting parliament and abortion was criminalized, ignoring a petition signed by 1.5 million citizens demanding a referendum on the issue. In 1993 the Church’s privileges were written into law via a Concordat with the Vatican, signed by the outgoing Suchocka administration without parliamentary scrutiny, and not ratified by the Sejm until 1998. The Church—an intrinsically secretive and authoritarian institution—thereby amassed huge wealth and political clout in the newly capitalist Poland. In other words, most of the major strategic decisions concerning the country’s post-communist course were taken without any real democratic consultation or mandate. The political order that oversaw the installation of economic liberalism in Poland was itself a form of non-accountable authoritarianism, though supported by liberal democrats in Poland and the West. It can be described as a type of ‘undemocratic liberalism’, under which non-elected authorities—including the imf and European Commission, but also domestic players in the Central Bank and Finance Ministry—ensured that the range of issues available for democratic decision-making was sharply restricted, and responsibility for the most important political choices was handed over to financial institutions and other ‘independent’ authorities. Ironically, Poland’s ‘undemocratic liberalism’ was reinforced by its avowedly liberal-democratic political structures. In 1997, the country’s new constitution locked in ‘German’ macro-economic principles: public debt must not exceed 60 per cent of gdp, budget deficits cannot be financed by the Central Bank. The Constitution was put to a referendum, boycotted by the Solidarność trade union, that saw a turnout of only 43 per cent, of whom barely half approved it. There was no popular consultation on joining nato in 1999, and only a minority of the electorate, some 42 per cent, endorsed accession to the European Union in 2004.footnote11 The electoral system, based on multi-member constituencies and the D’Hondt method of vote allocation—designed to boost the seats of winning parties, thereby distorting the representation of the popular will in favour of a ‘stabilized’ two-party system—has ensured that large numbers of Poles go unrepresented.footnote12 Turnout in parliamentary elections has been consistently low, averaging less than 50 per cent until 2019. Fewer than 1 per cent of the Polish electorate are members of a political party, the lowest share in any European Union country after Latvia, and only one in ten workers belongs to a trade union.footnote13 This modus operandi had the support of the most important sections of the Polish intelligentsia, including the influential Gazeta Wyborcza, edited by former Solidarność theorist Adam Michnik, now extremely rich. Given the largely foreign ownership of Polish assets, and therefore the absence of a genuine business class, the Polish intelligentsia has stood in under the new capitalist order as a surrogate bourgeoisie. Its role during the Communist era had already equipped this stratum and its offspring with the cultural capital required to fill the upper ranks of a reconstituted class society, transmitting its understanding of Western values and lifestyles to those below; now it began to acquire real capital as well. The presiding outlook has been captured by Ivan Krastev as a ‘culture of imitation’: the West was simply the best. For Poland to become a ‘normal’ country, the residues of homo sovieticus would need to be replaced by the ‘civilizational competencies’ embodied in the European Union.footnote14 In 2007, a satisfied Michnik praised his fellow intellectuals for supporting the neoliberal reforms of the 90s and 2000s, resulting in the best period in Poland for more than three centuries, with a characteristic quip: ‘every nation has the intelligentsia that it deserves, however I believe that our nation has a better intelligentsia than it deserves.’footnote15 Even if ‘undemocratic’ in its installation, hasn’t economic liberalization proved itself in practice? Yes and no. For the West, Poland was the jewel in the Comecon crown and received unstinting support from the imf and eu, becoming the first cee country to recover its pre-transition level of gdp. It has since seen a prolonged period of economic growth, its gdp per capita increasing by almost 150 per cent since 1989.footnote16 Any visitor to Warsaw will find a country changed beyond recognition over the past thirty years: this is no longer a society gazing enviously over the Iron Curtain at the glistening goods, music and fashion out of reach. The population is now as integrated into the global economy as that of Western Europe. Yet foreign investment has overwhelmingly targeted the high-end service economy of the capital and the western regions. Poland’s eastern regions, dominated by small-scale agriculture and deindustrialized towns, are among the poorest in the eu; gdp per capita is 82 per cent of the eu average in Greater Warsaw, but less than 40 per cent of it in the east.footnote17 Across the country, public infrastructure is largely the legacy of the communist era. Unemployment has fallen from the high levels of the 1990s, partly due to mass emigration—over 2 million Poles have left to work abroad since eu accession in 2004—but precarity has increased: by 2012 over a quarter of the workforce was on temporary contracts, while the proportion of young Poles with higher education in casual jobs had risen to 39 per cent. Streams of Polish graduates continued to leave the country for menial jobs in London, Dublin or Berlin. All was not well. Preconditions How, in this context, should we understand the rise of the conservative-nationalist pis regime? Should its record be seen as a pure regression from post-transition Polish politics? Two developments paved the way for the rise of Kaczyński’s pis. The first was the elimination of a credible governing party on the left. The ‘post-communist’ Democratic Left Alliance (sld), incorporating the younger, more liberal currents of the old ruling party, enjoyed a relatively successful term in office in the mid-1990s, as Poland began to recover from shock therapy. In 1997 it lost to a coalition of Solidarność conservatives, then returned to power in 2001 on a promise to restore social spending, winning 41 per cent of the vote.footnote18 Once in office, however, the sld leadership, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Prime Minister Leszek Miller, deepened the neoliberal course to meet the accession criteria laid down by the eu, while the Central Bank and Monetary Policy Council kept interest rates high, strengthening the złoty while stunting economic growth. Miller and Kwaśniewski were eager recruits to the short-lived triumphalism of Blair’s Third Way, joining the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and hosting secret cia prisons on Polish soil. They cynically abandoned a pledge to liberalize the abortion law in order to get Church backing for the eu referendum. Increasingly unpopular, the sld’s ratings plunged as a series of corruption scandals came to light over the sale of state assets and media regulation. The political fallout was severe and long-lasting. In 2005, with turnout down to barely 41 per cent, the sld slumped to 11 per cent, with just 1.3 million votes, while the pis and po soared to 3.1 million and 2.8 million, respectively. Since then, a chastened and diminished sld has shrunk to the ranks of a minor political player, its fate reinforced by the D’Hondt electoral system; even in coalition with other left fractions, it has struggled to win more than 10 per cent of Sejm seats. The decimation of the sld left the field open to the right-wing parties that had emerged out of the post-Solidarność bloc: the contest between po and pis has dominated Polish politics ever since. po is historically derived from a Communist-era intellectual current known as the Gdańsk liberals, Hayekians who criticized the Solidarność movement for its overemphasis on democracy and socialist economics. One of their number, Donald Tusk, a former student leader at the University of Gdańsk, stated that he would prefer capitalism without democracy to socialism with democracy.footnote19 During the 1990s, the group participated in a number of post-Solidarność administrations, promulgating a Thatcherite mix of neoliberal economics and social conservatism. The pis founders, including Jarosław Kaczyński and his twin brother Lech, sprang mainly from another minority current within Solidarność. Fervently anti-Communist, they gained some influence within conservative sections of the intelligentsia through their close connections to the Catholic Church. In the early 1990s, both strands converged around the notion that a new elite, insufficiently purged of Communists, had usurped political power; both drew upon the tradition of the interwar strongman Józef Piłsudski and his Sanacja campaign to cleanse the Polish state. By the turn of the millennium, however, Tusk had repositioned himself and the newly founded po as firmly pro-eu and free-market, promising to take Poland to the heart of Europe. The 2005 presidential election, pitting Tusk against Lech Kaczyński, went to the pis candidate, while the 2007 parliamentary elections went to po. The second pre-condition for the rise of pis was thus the ignominious collapse of po. In office from 2007 to 2014, Tusk benefited from huge inflows of eu funds, producing the visible but highly uneven growth noted above, and in 2011 won an unprecedented second term. Yet the ‘Polish boom’ also raised social expectations: people could see the new wealth that was being created and expected to share in the success. When this was not forthcoming, frustration and hostility grew—exacerbated by Tusk’s second-term assault upon the public sector: over 150 public hospitals were shut down, along with a thousand primary schools; public-housing construction was halved; controversial changes to the state-pension system raised the retirement age to 67. Simultaneously, po ministers and their wealthy media friends were indulging in the ostentatious displays of wealth enjoyed by the jet-setting Sikorski and Applebaum. While attempting to court popularity with a hard-line conservative stance on abortion, lgbt rights and nationalist historiography, the po had become embroiled in corruption scandals and now rapidly lost popularity, even as it tried to push through a series of political appointments to the judiciary. Meanwhile the mood of the country had darkened after the tragedy of the 2010 Smolensk air crash; the 96 victims, among them many leading figures from the Polish state, included President Lech Kaczyński, en route to commemorate the wartime massacre of Polish officers by Stalin in the Katyń Forest. The symbolic parallels with 1940 opened up deep historical wounds in Polish society and provided fertile ground for elements of the conservative right to develop conspiracy theories of collusion between the Tusk, Putin and Merkel governments. It also consolidated a strong emotional bond between Jarosław Kaczyński and the core pis electorate, providing a crucible for the fusion of Catholic conservatism, anti-Communism, and hostility to Russia and Germany, combined. It was in this context that Kaczyński promised to cleanse the state of a corrupt cosmopolitan elite on behalf of the people, the real Poles, those who had stood for generations against the country’s occupiers. The flimsiness of this historical myth was of little importance. What mattered was that pis offered to right the injustices of the previous quarter of a century. For the first time, a government in Warsaw would represent the interests of the ‘losers’ of the transition, stand up to the elites at home and abroad, and not treat the traditions of its nation as if they were something to be ashamed of. Kaczyński was strongly critical of Poland’s subservient position within the international economy. He pledged to raise taxes on large, mostly foreign-owned banks and corporations, increase welfare spending and restore the previous retirement age. This stance saw the pis candidate, Duda, win the presidential election in May 2015. The parliamentary elections of October 2015 came at the height of the hubbub over refugees in Europe, and Kaczyński promoted an Islamophobia which had not previously been openly expressed in mainstream public debate. On polling day, pis was the clear victor, with 38 per cent of the vote and 235 seats.footnote20 For the position of Prime Minister, Kaczyński initially selected the party’s deputy leader, Beata Szydło, who embodied the pro-family image that pis was trying to craft. Though Kaczyński is the undisputed leader of pis—standing at the head of a patrimonial structure whereby party and government are held together through personal fealty to the chief—he does not hold any formal governmental position, leaving him free to conduct affairs from the side-lines as an ordinary mp. He has constructed an unusual form of anti-charismatic leadership, appearing not to court public approval and presenting an image that is the antithesis of the polished post-political style of his liberal-conservative rivals. At the same time, he has constructed an effective personality cult around his twin brother, the former President, who lies buried in Kraków’s Wawel Castle, next to Piłsudski. Statues of Lech Kaczyński have been erected around the country, with another added recently in central Warsaw; the symbolism of Smolensk—of noble Polish suffering—remains strong. Record in office To what extent, then, does the Kaczyński regime’s record in office represent a rupture with what came before? In economic policy, the most significant change has been in welfare. Szydło introduced a number of social reforms, including lowering the pension age and implementing a new package of child benefits, known as 500+, targeting large families where child poverty was disproportionately high. It had an immediate positive effect, child poverty falling from 23 per cent to 11 per cent in just two years. The number of children with access to benefits nearly doubled, from 2 million to 3.8 million.footnote21 This provided a new source of income for a wide range of social groups, including many from the middle class, thus cementing support for pis across a broad spectrum of society. In its cultural conservatism, 500+ represented a continuity with the previous po regime: the policy aimed to promote a traditional role for women, who were encouraged to stay at home and have children. It has failed on its own terms, contributing to a fall in female labour-force participation without increasing the birth rate; it uses funds that could be better spent on developing public infrastructure such as nurseries. In purely redistributive terms, however, if 500+ represents a rupture with neoliberal orthodoxy, it was not clear that it was a regression. pis has shown that it is able to deliver on a social promise without succumbing to domestic and eu warnings that such profligacy would result in an economic catastrophe. The markets have largely priced the pis regime as one of continuity, after an initial blip in 2015 when Standard and Poor’s cut the country’s rating, citing concerns about the political situation. They needn’t have worried. Despite a tax on some assets of private banks, pis postponed a proposal to tax large supermarkets, and left the country’s regressive business and income tax rates well alone. Two years into pis’s first term, Kaczyński replaced Szydło with Mateusz Morawiecki, an economist and technocrat with over two decades’ experience in financial institutions in Poland and Germany. Financial capital gave its stamp of approval, Poland becoming the first post-Communist nation to be ranked as a developed country by the ftse Russell Index. Ironically, generous inflows of funds from the 2014–21 eu budget negotiated by Tusk have allowed pis to increase public spending. With annual gdp growth of 5 per cent in 2017 and 2018, and foreign investment expanding at its fastest rate since the global financial crisis, Poland won praise as ‘Europe’s growth champion’. The number of Poles with wealth worth over 1 million złoty rose by a fifth in a single year.footnote22 Meanwhile the only sector of the economy to see a significant expansion of state investment has been the arms industry, with the Ministry of Defence taking over the Polish Armaments Group in order to increase production: Kaczyński has pledged to raise military spending to 2.5 per cent of gdp, above the nato average. Otherwise, he has largely been content to fill the top positions of government companies with his own people. The main complaints from Western observers like Garton Ash and Applebaum have focused on pis interventions in the judiciary and media. On the first, it’s worth noting that, in contrast to Western Europe and the us, there is a high degree of scepticism about the judiciary in Poland. In one survey, only a fifth of Poles believed that the courts and prosecutor’s office were working well, with most stating that they were inefficient and corrupt.footnote23 The current battle over appointments began in 2015 under the outgoing po government, when pm Kopacz attempted to pack the Constitutional Court with new judges ahead of elections which she was clearly going to lose. Duda refused to swear them in, and when shortly afterwards pis took control of the Sejm it selected judges of its own and refused to publish Constitutional Court rulings countermanding the appointments. Since then, pis has taken the process further—a deepening of, rather than a rupture with, its predecessor’s practice. The Justice Minister, Zbigniew Ziobro—now also Prosecutor General—was given new powers over the common courts and fired one in five court presidents. Lowering the retirement age of Supreme Court justices from seventy to sixty-five, albeit in line with national policy, removed a third of its members, including the Chief Justice. Supposedly neutral, the public broadcaster tvp had been largely supine under Tusk, operating as an informal wing of the state—not unlike the bbc. Kaczyński and his circle expected no less for their own world outlook. Garton Ash cites an analysis in the run-up to this summer’s presidential election: for the period 3–16 June 2020, 97 per cent of tvp stories about Duda were positive; 87 per cent of stories about Trzaskowski were negative, earning it the nickname of tvpis; he concedes, however, that public tv has always been inclined to sway under pressure from the governing parties.footnote24 The nationalist discourse of the pis has continued a rightist historical revisionism that originated in previous po administrations—though again, it has been amplified. In place of liberal emulation of the West, Kaczyński sees Poland as one of the last bastions defending a Christian Europe against the ‘cultural Marxist’ policies of multiculturalism infecting the West. pis has intensified an existing campaign of de-communization, for example changing street names honouring left-wing historical figures, such as the Communist battalion that fought against Nazi occupation during the Warsaw Uprising.footnote25 New national heroes have been created to replace them. Yet the proposal for an annual National Remembrance Day to honour the ‘cursed’ soldiers who took up arms against Communist rule after World War Two, some of them responsible for mass civilian killings, actually originated from po-supported President Bronisław Komorowski in 2010 and passed through parliament while Tusk was in office. The pis is undoubtedly emboldening the small far-right parties, which up till now had negligible electoral support. The Independence Day march on 11 November used to be a tiny far-right affair, but its numbers have swelled. In 2018, the centenary of Polish independence, around 200,000 people joined the march after it effectively merged with the official celebrations addressed by President Duda. In many ways, pis has not so much reversed Poland’s political direction of travel as stepped down harder on the accelerator. Many of its more retrograde policies had already fermented in the national political culture before it came to power. The political and economic empowering of the Catholic Church in the 1990s had already provided the conservative right with significant institutional and ideological resources, while the anti-Communist rhetoric and historical revisionism of the po between 2007 and 2015 cleared the way for Kaczyński. A regressive taxation system, the fashion for combining business with politics, and a pro-American foreign policy have all been consistent features of the national scene for many years. Poland’s draconian anti-abortion laws were pushed through by the Solidarność right in the early 1990s. In 2016, Szydło’s government allowed the introduction of a bill to ban abortion even when the woman’s life is at risk or in cases of rape. This triggered a massive outpouring of anger against the government, with so-called ‘black protests’—demonstrators dressed in black clothing as a symbol of mourning—organized around the country, which eventually succeeded in getting the bill dropped.footnote26 Second, while many elements of pis’s programme are reactionary and anti-left, it also offers an expansion of social welfare and continued economic development. In this sense, to dismiss it as a regime of regression is to overlook the modernizing, mass-democratic appeal of its political project. This indicates one reason why the early mass mobilizations against the Kaczyński regime have not led to a political movement that could seriously challenge it. Dissent has largely been confined to a relatively privileged urban milieu, some of whose representatives publicly disparage the poorer social layers that sustain pis in power. A well-known liberal professor alleged that in the district where she lives, there are families who keep small children in drawers because they do not own a bed, and that when they receive social help, they would rather spend the money on alcohol. One of Poland’s most famous actresses has compared pis voters to prostitutes who have sold themselves for social-welfare handouts.footnote27 The October 2019 parliamentary election put this to the test. Kaczyński launched the campaign pledging to extend 500+ benefits to all children and raise the minimum wage. He also rekindled the pis’s culture war, claiming that the traditional Polish way of life was under threat from ‘lgbt ideology’.footnote28 On a record turnout of 62 per cent, the pis vote rose to 8 million, or 44 per cent of the vote—six points higher than in 2015. The party’s position in the Sejm (235 seats) was unchanged. It won the largest share of the vote amongst all age groups and in all but two of the country’s 16 voivodeships. The opposition coalition (ko), led by the po, trailed behind on 27 per cent. The July 2020 presidential election confirms the pis lead, albeit by a smaller margin. What of the Polish left? With the political field polarized between conservative nationalists and liberal conservatives, it has been weakened by the logic of lesser evilism: in 2019 some sections, including the Greens and the current around United Left leader Barbara Nowacka, were absorbed into the po’s electoral coalition. Other figures argued for an even-handed opposition to the two major conservative parties: the writer Rafał Woś gave a positive assessment of the social policies of the government and urged the left to maintain its independence from po, while his critics countered that ‘symmetrism’ downplays the dangers of pis’s authoritarian project.footnote29 In the event, two smaller groups—the radical-left Razem (Together) and Wiosna (Spring), a new social-liberal network—formed an electoral bloc, Lewica (The Left), with the sld. Lewica took 13 per cent of the vote and 49 seats. Amongst its new mps are some genuine left-wing activists from a younger generation that has helped to rebuild small political communities over the past decade and a half. These new currents had adopted a hostile attitude towards the sld, seeing it as the major obstacle to building a strong left in Poland. But this position became increasingly unsustainable in conditions where the right has almost total political control. The sld has, at least for the time being, adopted a more social-democratic programme and retains an electoral base, accounting for half of Lewica’s new mps. Yet despite some pockets of support, it is almost entirely absent in rural and eastern regions of the country; instead, it competes with the po for urban professionals’ support in the big cities. The challenge it faces is to oppose the government’s authoritarian agenda without being consumed by the liberal right. This is not to say that pis will remain invincible. Perhaps the most significant threat lies in the rumbling corruption scandals involving property and business dealings connected to leading pis politicians—and, in the case of one development, Kaczyński himself.footnote30 The Health Minister, Lukasz Szumowski, is tangled up in accusations of over-spending on masks for the covid pandemic, involving a crony of his brother. In addition, Poland’s economic performance has been heavily dependent on eu expenditure, of which the country is the largest net beneficiary. Europe’s capitals are still haggling over the Commission’s Budget for 2021–27, and steep cuts to the cohesion and agriculture funds haven’t been ruled out. In relative terms the coronavirus has not hit Poland particularly badly, with just over 1,000 confirmed deaths by early June, although coal production in Silesia has recently been hampered by a spike in infections in the mines. The country is forecast to record the shallowest recession of any eu member state this year. Morawiecki produced a 300 billion złoty (€66 billion) coronavirus support package in April and is lobbying for a generous allocation of the Commission’s recovery fund. All this, however, entails hostages to fortune. For now, pis’s hold is secure. That there would be a reaction from the right to the way in which Poland was integrated into Western economic structures as a source of cheap labour and destination for foreign capital, as well as to the prevailing liberal culture of Western imitation, was predictable.footnote31 pis is certainly more nationalist and conservative than most of its governing counterparts in Western Europe. Up to now, however, it has been less brutal in its actions than either Macron against the gilets jaunes or the Spanish state in Catalonia; any damage it has done to the ‘European ideal’ pales before what the Troika inflicted upon Greece. As the realities of twenty-first-century capitalism become increasingly harsh, perhaps what Poland mirrors back at its Cold War demiurges is indeed a ‘normal’ European country.