Poland

Post Reply New Topic

I'm creating this thread to answer some questions asked in a place where answering them would be completely offtopic.
Most likely, I won't be able to moderate it.

so, viewtopic.php?t=416500&p=9368551#p9368541

Behemoth - not my cup of tea artistically. Popular Polish bands I like are e.g. Kult or Nocny Kochanek but they sing in Polish so they are unlikely to be recognised internationally. Tastes are not for discussion.
AFAIK, various crazy organisations sue Nergal and judges always aquit him. I think he's doing a lot of trolling in this area, scary face to p***s off old church ladies, but I don't really follow it.

Abortion laws - they were always quite restrictive but in 2020, the exception that allowed to abort damaged or incurably ill fetuses was crossed out.
It's important how it was done - there wasn't any debate nor vote. The Constitutional Tribunal was (some claim illegally, I'm not a lawyer to know this) staffed with puppets of current government and, without any debate or anything, decided this exception was against Polish Constitution because of "protection of every human life" written there.
All this in the middle of covid lockdowns.
Despite the lockdowns, mass protests erupted and held for several days. The government claimed these are... I don't remember exactly. Some awful divisive rhetorics.
The president started to work on legislation to allow abortions of non-viable fetuses at least but the party leader said no and the president was obedient (ha ha, that's the power system here).
As a result, popular support for liberating abortion laws in Poland rose by over 10 percent points. Organizations helping to get an abortion elsewhere in EU spawned, fiercely fought by the government. A couple of women died because doctors waited too long.

Elections in two weeks. We'll see what happens.

Recently I was shown this map from the last election:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... on_map.png

For reference, Duda is running as quite a hard right candidate with the backing of the ruling party, and Trzaskowski is from Donald Tusk's party, who are centre-right. The map is not an outlier, most Polish electoral maps look similarly.

There's the usual thing of people in urban areas being less right-wing which we see in most democracies, but there's also that distinctive pattern of people being more liberal in the west and north. Why? Well, it lines up closely with the area controlled by Prussia in the late 18th century...

I don't know how much of a simplification that is.

South east as well. Areas that were part of Germany until 1945.

Yes. If you look at pre 1939 maps of Europe you see how Germany extended farther east than today, and it had what look like a pair of canine jaws biting into Poland. The lower jaw was Silesia, and the upper jaw (along the Baltic coast) was Pomerania, there was the narrow "Polish Corrider" allowing Poland access to the sea, and still farther east was the German province of East Prussia. And the orange does mimic those pre war borders. The orange clumps in Pomerania and Prussia, and to a lesser extent in the southeast in Silesia. Millons of ethnic Germans were forced out of those regions at the end of the war, but maybe there are still ethnic Germans in those areas. Or maybe the ethnic Poles in those regions were more western oriented having been under German rule than the Poles in the east (who were under Czarist Russia most of that same time period in the last three centuries.

I don't think there's one single cause for this. A couple I can think of:
1. Partitions. Prussian partition was more industrialized and developed, with a local culture adapted to it. On the other hand, Russian partition was small agriculture and a cult of strong, uncurbed leaders. It still lingers in e.g. railroad system or land use.
2. The ruling party uses Germany as a scare, trying to keep the WWII trauma alive. Poles from the west are more likely to have seen today's Germany IRL and know exactly what kind of BS this scare is.
3. The areas incorporated after WWII experienced enormous demographic shift (Germans were expelled and Poles from the lands lost to USSR were brought there) and it was among rare places in Poland where state-run agriculture was tried on bigger scale. It was a disaster, rural populations from there were extremely poor and all the opportunities after 1989 were priceless to them.
4. The ruling party capitalizes on those discontent with the 1989-2004 reforms. These were mostly workers (today retired) and small farmers. East Poland has a lot more small farms than West Poland.

And, BTW, Tusk's party historically started as center-right but drifted since then. Trzaskowski is a regular lib-dem.

How does today's Poland compare with present-day Hungary with regard to political freedom? I can see how Hungary may have less political freedom however they may also be less religious (they aren't 100% Roman Catholic).

I enjoyed visiting Hungary a couple of times in the early 70s however I would be somewhat nervous there now, for example if somebody were to casually ask me how I feel about Putin. But most Americans don't seem to have a negative view of either Poland or Hungary. There's this one cruise line that advertises river cruises on American TV and always shows one of their boats sailing through Budapest, and they don't seem to fear that will have any adverse impact on their business.

I think both countries are safe for tourists, so no problem there.

Poland vs Hungary - our media freedom is in a much better shape, I think. Despite the ruling party entirely claiming the public television, two major private stations and countless other services still operate and provide content critical to the government. AFAIK, Orban monopolized media in Hungary.

I'm not very knowledgeable about Hungary, though. What is considered unacceptable here are suggestions of Hungarian territorial claims, so called "Great Hungary". That would be unimaginable here but Orban was seen in a scarf depicting it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63724710

And, of course:

After an election, I once Googled Hungarian newspapers to determine how their press reacted to Orban's landslide victory, and could only find material celebrating it. Perhaps I could have found more diversity of opinion had I been able to do this research in Hungarian.

AFAIK, that's a real problem of Hungary - and, luckily, so far we don't have this.

Elections in two weeks. March tomorrow.

I wonder what happens.

Vote early, vote often.

I always vote.

I also took part in yesterday's march and it gives me hope - not just because there were a lot of people* but because they were smiling - genuinely happy and hopeful. Finally good emotions entered the mainstream.
Tusk visibly catched the atmosphere and in his final speech, he didn't attack the government - he spoke about hope, diversity, solidarity and better future. I'm sometimes critical towards him but he can read emotions of the street.
I think it was some kind of a tipping point - exactly because of this bottom-up change of tone.

___________
* The city council estimates over a million took part in the demonstration at least at some point, the government media insist on 60-100 thousand - a number estimated to be gathered before the demonstration started, if you read the reports carefully. I don't know weather we hit a million or "only" 800 thousands but the whole 4.4km of broadest streets in the city center were filled for several hours.

https://twitter.com/donaldtusk/status/1 ... 6067350559 - on this, we wouldn't be visible because we chose a less crowded lane left to this junction...

The police refuses to give estimates of how many people were there but it shares the number of incidents: 5. One verbal attack on a police officer and 4 instances of flying drones despite a ban. Hundreds of thousands of people rallying, zero acts of vandalism, zero acts of physical violence, the space left in the same order as it was before, I looked at my return home a couple of hours later.
Come to Poland and learn how to demonstrate against the government

The election day.

Forgive me, it's extremely stressful. I will need significant recovery time.

The constitution of Poland says that all citizens can vote, even if they live abroad.

Poles living abroad tend to have negative views of PiS.

Solution? Make it very hard to vote abroad! They have massively reduced the number of polling places. I know people who are taking long train rides in order to vote, and making very tactical decisions about whom to vote for in order to reduce the PiS share of the seats.

^ Press photos from London:



There's risk some of the polling stations abroad won't meet the 24h deadline for counting votes, so their votes would be discarded - and the govt employee who publicly admitted it was instantly fired.

It's really bad.

Photos from big cities in Poland and abroad:
https://tvn24.pl/wybory-parlamentarne-2 ... ca-7391975

We went in the morning, just before a mass in the local church ended. It was a good idea, the queue grew behind us.

Exit poll:

• Prawo i Sprawiedliwość – 36,8 proc. // current ruling party, populist right-wing with authoritarian tendencies

• Koalicja Obywatelska – 31,6 proc. // biggest opposition party, democratic and pro EU

• Trzecia Droga – 13 proc. // ideologically centrist for Poland, declaring will to form a coalition with KO

• Lewica – 8,6 proc. // The Left, also declaring coalition with KO

• Konfederacja – 6,2 proc. // far right in various flavours

• Bezpartyjni Samorządowcy – 2,4 proc. // something formed this year, sponsored by the ruling party

• Polska Jest Jedna – 1,2 proc. // also formed this year, anti-vax weirdos

Frekwencja wyniosła 72,9 proc. // all-time record participation

With our rather complex system of votes translating to seats, the results would translate to KO+TD+L having absolute majority as a coalition (expected 248 seats of 460).
https://tvn24.pl/wybory-parlamentarne-2 ... tu-7389963
So now:
The president will offer PiS to form a government - both because it's his party and because they got most votes
But this government would require absolute majority in Sejm to accept them
So if other parties don't screw things up, it fails.
Now the Sejm has a chance to propose a government and vote it with absolute majority.
If they fail, the president takes another shot, with only usual majority required.

If the KO+TD+L do the right job, they would form a government. All other options would be unstable - PiS could not function the way they do as a minority govt.