https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/contra-populism
Gavin Rae
22 November 2024 Politics

‘A beacon of light in Europe.’ That was how Donald Tusk described the electoral victory of his new Civic Coalition (KO) in the Polish general elections at the end of 2023. The party came to power at the head of a coalition with the right-leaning Third Way and the diminished social-democratic alliance known as The Left. It beat the incumbent Law and Justice Party (PiS), in what was widely seen as an object-lesson in how the embattled liberal centre could stop the seemingly inevitable rise of hard-right ‘populism’. Yet, for all the fanfare, the first year of Tusk’s tenure has demonstrated that his administration will not break with the policies of the previous one.

The KO-led coalition was elected in large part through the mobilization of women and young voters, who had borne the brunt of PiS’s retrograde conservatism: restrictions on abortion, clampdowns on minorities (encouraging towns and cities to declare themselves ‘LGBT-free zones’), and a virulently Islamophobic war on migrants. Tusk won over the critics of this culture-war programme by pledging to return Poland to its rightful place at the heart of the European Union and touting no less than a hundred policies that he planned to introduce during the first hundred days of his administration: introducing same sex civic partnerships, making abortion legal during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, raising the salaries for public-sector employees by 20% and abolishing state subsidies to religious organizations.

Today, the vast majority of these pledges have been abandoned. This is partly because of parliamentary opposition: when the government introduced measures to loosen abortion laws, one of its coalition partners – the Polish People’s Party, which forms part of the Third Way – joined with PiS to block them, in a manner that will no doubt be repeated with any future attempts at liberal reform. But it is also a matter of political will and priorities. For it is increasingly clear that Tusk’s government wants to prove its European credentials not by safeguarding democracy or women’s rights, but by ramping up the campaign against refugees.

As relations between Belarus and Poland deteriorated in 2021, the Minsk government decided it would no longer prevent migrants from trying to cross into Poland. PiS responded by illegally pushing them back: deploying hundreds of soldiers, constructing a new fence along the border and imposing a ‘state of emergency’ in the region. Public opinion was polarized, with some deploring and others applauding PiS’s brutal approach. Tusk, who had not long ago finished his stint as President of the European Council, attacked the government from the right – chastising them for allowing a record number of ‘illegals’ to enter the country. Now in power, Tusk’s party has continued the policy of pushbacks and declared that the ‘survival of Western civilization’ depends on stopping ‘uncontrolled migration’. At the end of October, the government announced it would temporarily suspend the right to asylum. In trying to outflank PiS, Tusk has adopted a strategy that is increasingly common among Europe’s supposedly liberal political caste, from France to Germany to Denmark to Holland: ‘beating’ the far right by bringing its politics into the mainstream.

The Tusk administration has also launched a brute-force takeover of the public television station TVP, attempting to align the broadcaster with its political agenda, in a move that was condemned as a clear violation of the constitution. This was part of a broader struggle between KO and PiS for control over the different arms of the state. The latter still controls the presidency, with its ally Andrzej Duda in office, and it has used blunt tactics to get three of its fellow travellers appointed to the Constitutional Court. To roll back PiS influence, Tusk has openly stated that his government may have to take actions that are ‘not fully compliant with the law’ – continuing the process by which power is centralized in an unaccountable executive. The EU, for its part, is unconcerned. Having frozen €137 billion worth of funding for Poland because of PiS’s supposed disregard for the ‘rule of law’, it has now decided to unlock the money for Tusk – signalling its preference for political compliance over substantive change.

Tusk is not only consolidating Poland’s position as a bulwark against migration; he is also turning it into the EU’s leading military spender. While the PiS government hiked the military budget to 4.1% of GDP, KO intends to raise it further to 4.7% – roughly €44.23bn – next year, outpacing all other NATO members. When Tusk and Duda visited Washington this March, they returned with the promise of a $2bn loan to buy a vast range of armaments, adding to the $31bn that Poland had already funnelled into the US war economy in 2022-23. The goal is to become one of the largest militaries on the continent, doubling the size of the Polish army to 300,000 soldiers and spending an equivalent of 20% of its current GDP on defence by 2035, in the hope that this will upgrade Poland’s influence and win favour with the US hegemon. As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth year, Poland remains one of the most vocal supporters of escalation, championing the recent decision to allow Kyiv to fire long-range missiles into Russia.

Yet relations with Zelensky have become strained as the conflict has dragged on. In 2022, the Polish government unilaterally closed its borders with Ukraine after Polish farmers protested against the import of Ukrainian agricultural produce. Warsaw and Kyiv have also begun to clash over the historic massacres of hundreds of thousands of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army between 1943 and 1945 – with Poland threatening to block Ukraine’s potential accession to the EU if it does not take responsibility for the killings and allow the reburial of the victims. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski has, moreover, proposed that EU governments should suspend the social benefits of Ukrainian men of conscription age, suggesting that that this would be a useful way of reducing migration – by forcing them to return home and die in the trenches.

The economy is another point of continuity between PiS and KO. The former introduced a series of social welfare programmes – including universal child benefits and extra pension provisions – along with wage increases which the latter has retained, and in some cases extended. GDP growth has averaged 1% over the past four quarters, and the inflow of EU funds now looks set to boost public investment, while large numbers of (mainly Ukrainian) migrants will prop up the Polish labour market. Yet large increases in inflation mean that the living standards are also being squeezed. Property prices rose by 18% in 2023, the highest level in the EU. Millions are shut out of the housing market and trapped in precarious work. Around 2.5 million Poles could not meet their basic needs in 2023, up from 1.7 million in 2022, and many more are scraping by on the bare minimum.

In this context, the attempt to fund both ‘guns and butter’ looks increasingly untenable. The government estimates it will have a $10bn shortfall in this year’s budget, largely due to the burden of long-term military contracts that the previous government signed. This is set to rise further in 2025 (although some of the costs may be offset by the EU, which has announced that a third of the cohesion funds from the present budget can be used for military investments). The result is that pressure for austerity, coming primarily from large corporations and international finance, will increase.

A mere 20% of Poland’s military equipment is produced domestically, which means that more weapons purchases won’t have any multiplier effect on the domestic economy. Its main suppliers are based in the US, hence Sikorski remarking that up to 90% of the state’s spending in this area ‘goes directly to create American jobs on American soil’. Any hopes of Polish military Keynesianism are therefore misplaced. Nor is there a clear route to passing progressive social measures, given that conservative forces within the coalition have clearly stated their opposition to abortion rights and same-sex partnerships.

The Left, meanwhile, has nothing to show for its decision to participate in the current right-wing government. It is becoming an increasingly marginalized and irrelevant player on the political scene. The membership of the most left-wing party in the alliance, Razem, recently voted for its MPs to leave the Left parliamentary group in protest at the government’s direction – prompting the exodus of four MPs and one Senator. Yet even Razem does not dare challenge Tusk’s policy of hiking military spending, which makes its calls for economic redistribution ring hollow. Poland thus continues to drift to the right, no longer as a perceived rebel within the EU, but as a proponent of its political consensus, which is increasingly difficult to distinguish from the ‘populism’ to which it is juxtaposed.