Economist on Poland

[Langoogler]

once upon a time
an article appeared,
note the syntax;)

IF YOU listen to the chatter of the Warsaw media elite, you might think that Poland's centre-right government, in office as a minority administration since last November and as a majority coalition since last week, was the worst the country had ever seen. That is a demanding standard: since the collapse of communism, Poland has had strong governments and honest governments, but never both. …


POLAND
May 11th 2006

Poland's present rulers are very different from all their predecessors

IF YOU listen to the chatter of the Warsaw media elite, you might think
that Poland's centre-right government, in office as a minority
administration since last November and as a majority coalition since
last week, was the worst the country had ever seen. That is a demanding
standard: since the collapse of communism, Poland has had strong
governments and honest governments, but never both.

Polish political parties lack the deep roots and mass memberships of
their western European counterparts. They are fluid coalitions with
blurred profiles. Confusingly, the ex-communists are now the most
ardent capitalists and the ex-dissidents often sound authoritarian. A
new generation of bright, honest, ideas-driven politicians is coming
along, but as yet few of them are in power.

Although the communists were almost obliterated in the 1989 elections,
their successor party has held power for all but 30-odd months since
then, either as part of a coalition or in the form of Alexander
Kwasniewski, the communist-era sports chief who served as president
from 1995 until last year. But by last autumn the ex-communists'
lingering grip on power had been destroyed by scandals. In the
September elections to the 460-member lower house of parliament, the
SEJM, the Democratic Left Alliance lost 161 seats; its share of the
vote fell to just 11.3%.


However, the new government led by the centre-right Law and Justice
party, now in unwieldy alliance with two populist parties, Self-Defence
and the League of Polish Families, has also provoked plenty of
criticism. Law and Justice is full of ex-dissidents, tetchy, righteous
and unpredictable. The normally level-headed Wojciech Olejniczak, who
leads the ex-communist party, compares Law and Justice to the regime of
Alyaksandr Lukashenka in neighbouring Belarus. Donald Tusk, the leader
of the main opposition Civic Platform, says the government is trying to
"seize absolute power".

That does not seem to bother Poland's new bosses. Law and Justice, and
particularly its populist allies, delight in picking fights with gays,
feminists, secularists, liberals, the media, ex-communists, uppity
foreigners (especially in Brussels) and anyone else who crosses their
path. The new leadership is avowedly Catholic: most senior figures have
crucifixes in their office and appear frequently on Radio Maryja, an
ultra-Catholic station much disliked by more mainstream members of the
church hierarchy, not least for its anti-Semitism.

The man everybody likes to hate most is the leader of the Law and
Justice party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. If his twin brother, Lech, had not
won the presidential election, the party's victory in the parliamentary
election would have made Jaroslaw the prime minister. But he reckoned
that it might look odd for Poland's two top jobs to be held by
identical twins.

So now Lech occupies the presidential palace and his brother Jaroslaw
sits in the SEJM, keeping a beady eye on the government. When he
disapproves of a draft law, he produces his own. The government usually
gets the message. There is not much discussion at cabinet meetings.
"Instructions come out of a black box," says one participant. The
Kaczynski brothers are in the box. Most ministers are outside it. Top
appointments seem to be Jaroslaw Kaczynski's responsibility too. When
the treasury minister (responsible for privatisation) resigned, the
prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, wanted a liberal-minded
cross-party replacement. Instead he got a hardline economic nationalist.

The party chief makes frequent, vehement interventions in both
parliament and the media. He has denounced the head of the central
bank, Leszek Balcerowicz, demanding an investigation into his record,
and is setting up a powerful new body to oversee the banking system.
That has shocked those who see Mr Balcerowicz as a heroic figure in the
country's recent economic history. As finance minister in the early
1990s, he pioneered the monetary stringency and free prices that, his
fans say, kick-started Polish capitalism. The central bank is a bastion
of economic orthodoxy and has run a tight monetary policy to make up
for what it sees as the spendthrift habits of the politicians.

The media have also incurred Jaroslaw Kaczynski's displeasure. "There
are no free media in Poland," he controversially declared earlier this
year. He wanted a special commission to examine links between
journalists and the security services. His main target is what he calls
the "lying elite" or the "establishment"--a mixture of shady
businesspeople, semi-retired spies and their hangers-on in the media.

WEIRD AND WONDERFUL
His commitment to Poland's membership of the European Union has
sometimes been questioned, and the new government's handling of foreign
affairs has looked inept. Law and Justice, and particularly the
Kaczynski brothers, hold ardently pro-American views, matched by
loathing of both Russia and Germany. This goes back quite a while. In
the early 1990s, after a lengthy lecture by Jaroslaw Kaczynski on
German wickedness, an exasperated Helmut Kohl, then Germany's
chancellor, ordered him out of his office in Bonn and told an aide:
"Don't let that man within gunshot of this building again." Mr
Kaczynski says he was surprised at his treatment: he had just been
"speaking plainly".

Things do not seem to have changed much, judging by a recent interview
given by Lech Kaczynski to one of France's best-known television
journalists, Vincent Hervouet, at the Polish embassy in Paris. To start
with, Mr Kaczynski kept his interviewer waiting for four hours. When he
did surface, he took offence at Mr Hervouet's failure to rise from his
seat, and answered the questions while staring at his shoes. Next, Mr
Hervouet snapped at an aide who tried to hurry the interview along--at
which point Mr Kaczynski ejected his guests from what he said was
Polish territory. The interview, mercifully, was not broadcast.

Oddly, such behaviour goes down well with some Poles, who like to see
their leaders putting snooty foreigners in their place. But outsiders
are less charmed. Diplomats and foreign business representatives in
Warsaw trade stories of spectacular scheduling mishaps and outbreaks of
pomposity over protocol. A dinner for foreign ambassadors is cancelled
at short notice, rescheduled, cancelled again at even shorter notice
and suddenly switched to a different venue. Senior figures promise to
appear but never show up; requests for meetings go unanswered. "There's
a limit to the number of times I can remind them that they are meant to
be visiting us soon," says a sympathetic but exasperated ambassador to
Warsaw of another post-communist country. Another foreigner, with many
years' experience of dealing with Poland, is blunter: "They are
amazingly arrogant and amazingly ignorant."

Some of this does no real harm: a diplomatic dinner here or there or
nowhere is not the end of the world. But sometimes lack of co-operation
costs real money. Poland's agriculture minister, Krzysztof Jurgiel,
simply refused to take part in a recent round of European negotiations
over sugar beet. When he learnt what his European colleagues had
decided in his absence, he tried to invoke his country's veto, only to
discover that the decision was subject to majority voting. Many of the
civil servants who would have known better have been booted out.

All this confusion reflects a big difference between the current and
the previous political elite. Poland's present rulers are remarkably
insular. Only two senior ministers speak fluent English. A top
government adviser admits: "These people are mostly not very interested
in foreign affairs. They don't speak languages, they don't travel
abroad. They just don't care."

In fact, they do care about some things. For instance, the government
had an ambitious plan for European energy security: an "energy NATO" in
which each member country would guarantee the energy supplies of the
others in an emergency. But the idea was poorly launched and got
nowhere: a pity, because Poland's dependence on Russian energy,
particularly gas, is a big long-term problem.

According to the critics, the government is either sinister or
pathetic. It understands nothing of foreign policy or economics, is
obsessed with the grudges of the past and pursues only its own bizarre,
confrontational agenda. But have the critics got it right?

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT?
In trying to understand what is going on, it is worth recalling that
nobody, least of all its own members, expected this government to gain
power last autumn. In the run-up to the elections, the polls suggested
that the Kaczynskis' Law and Justice party would be the minority
partner in a coalition government led by the more liberal-minded
conservatives of Civic Platform. This is a party that oozes familiarity
with both foreign affairs and economics and appeals to the winners of
the post-communist era: the Europhile, pro-business middle classes who
think that the country is on the right course and just needs tweaking.
By contrast, Law and Justice's populism attracts the poor but patriotic
who feel that the past 15 years have been grubby, harsh and
disappointing.

That promised the best possible outcome: Poland's first strong,
sensible government in its post-communist history. But post-election
talks between the two parties ultimately failed. Law and Justice
governed first on its own, and now with populist parties of right and
left.

One reason for the controversy over Law and Justice may be that the
party has got some bad people rattled. Polish politics is dirty, and
Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his government are, for the first time in the
country's democratic history, making a real effort to clean it up. For
all the criticism levelled against the government, there is no evidence
of any personal greed or corruption on the part of Law and Justice.
"These people are living in the same grotty flats with the same grotty
wives and drive the same grotty cars as they were 15 years ago," says
one acute observer of Polish politics. "Compare that with the mansions,
Mercedes and mistresses that their political opponents manage to afford
on their official salaries."

Raw honesty is a refreshing change in Polish politics; and it is
arguable that neither Jaroslaw Kaczynski nor his government deserve the
ridicule heaped on them. For a start, Poland is a strongly Roman
Catholic country, where polls show clear support for socially
conservative values. Regarding homosexuality, abortion and euthanasia
as sinful may strike liberal-minded city-dwellers (and many foreigners)
as wrong-headed. But it is not scandalous in itself that conservative
Catholic politicians should represent their voters' values. Despite its
dire image abroad, the government is well liked at home.

In particular, Mr Marcinkiewicz is one of the most popular politicians
the country has had for years. One of his government's big
achievements, he thinks, is its progress on breaking with the sleaze
and cronyism of the past. "We have been very tough on bad behaviour,"
he says. The government's first treasury minister was fired soon after
his appointment for a financial peccadillo that in former times would
have attracted little notice.

The best illustration, though, was the government's response to a
newspaper stunt. The daily tabloid FAKT telephoned the agriculture
minister, Mr Jurgiel, with a message supposedly from a close friend,
Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, the head of Radio Maryja, claiming that his car
had broken down. Could the minister send his official car? Eager to
oblige his influential media ally, Mr Jurgiel ordered his driver to
pick up the stranded cleric. Waiting photographers gleefully took
pictures of the official limousine on its abortive mission. Mr
Marcinkiewicz (though himself close to Radio Maryja) publicly rebuked
Mr Jurgiel and ordered him to pay compensation for misusing state
property.

 The biggest clouds over that squeaky-clean image come from the new
coalition partners. Self-Defence has murky business and other
connections; the League of Polish Families' youth wing is anti-Semitic
and homophobic. The League's leader, Roman Giertych, is now a deputy
prime minister with responsibility for education. Andrzej Lepper, the
leader of Self-Defence, has also been made a deputy prime minister,
with overall responsibility for agriculture and rural development.
Though he now sounds more moderate, his past statements on economic
policy and Europe have been outlandish.

Still, on some issues of substance, Law and Justice has had good reason
to behave as it did. For example, Mr Balcerowicz, the embattled
central-bank governor, appeared to be provoking a confrontation. Where
the government has tripped up so far, it seems to have been mainly from
inexperience rather than malevolence. The double act of Jaroslaw
Kaczynski and Mr Marcinkiewicz arguably works quite well: one stirs
things up and plays politics, the other calms them down so that the
business of government can go on.

The Kaczynskis' robust and sometimes ill-informed approach to European
institutions is strikingly different from that of their ex-communist
predecessors, who seemed intuitively to understand how things worked
and how to make themselves look good in the eyes of powerful outsiders.
Asked about EU competition policy, Jaroslaw Kaczynski makes a
straightforward case for protectionism: "I would rather have the EU
rules paying more attention to the situation of people who for 50 years
didn't have a chance of normal development and should have some
privileges now."

But Mr Marcinkiewicz, in his only big international test so far, at the
EU's summit in Brussels last December, proved a canny negotiator,
winning Poland a deal worth about EURO90 billion ($109 billion) over
the next seven years. He is also making progress on reforming the
remarkably incompetent way in which Poland spends that money. Polish
foreign policy may be crudely cast, but it is not as mad as some make
out.

THE OLD ENEMY
Lastly, it is not surprising that Poland's new rulers are twitchy about
the people who dominated the country's politics for so long. Jaroslaw
Kaczynski uses the image of a bridge table, where the four players are
businesspeople, spooks/bureaucrats, gangsters and politicians, all
engaged in games against the public interest. That, at least in the
mind of Mr Kaczynski and his advisers, is pretty much the way things
are in Poland. He likes to talk of the UKLAD--a sinister,
all-encompassing structure which has, in effect, stolen the country
during the past 15 years. Where outsiders see the triumph of capitalism
and democracy, Poland's current government sees a calamitous surrender
to the former communists and their collaborators, and moral bankruptcy.
What the communists lost in 1989, they have regained since. Every
institution is contaminated: the judicial system, the civil service,
the banks, the state-owned industries and particularly the intelligence
services (see article[1]). This government's job is to clean house.

Sometimes that mission justifies a bit of hyperbole. Mr Kaczynski's
notorious remark about "no free media in Poland", he says mildly, was
an exaggeration to make a point. "If I had said that some media are not
always fully free, nobody would have noticed. But the mass media are
very one-sided." He brushes off the suggestion that Poland should be
proud of its press. "It is the product of a crippled economy and a
crippled democracy."

Critics say that Mr Kaczynski and his party colleagues may believe in
democracy and tolerance in theory, but in practice they are deeply,
perhaps even obsessively, convinced of their own rightness and the
wickedness of others. That is a big disadvantage if you are trying to
build strong, clean, independent institutions. There is certainly
plenty of tidying up to do in Poland's public administration; the
danger is that dysfunctional old institutions will give way to
dysfunctional new ones as sleazy old communists are replaced by new
zealots and coalition kooks.

-----
[1] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=6875707


See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_GRSVSVP

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week.

-       SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2007 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm

The Economist, Economist.com and CFO Europe are trading names of:

The Economist Newspaper Limited
Registered in England and Wales. No.236383
VAT no: GB 340 436 876
Registered office: 25 St James's Street, London, SW1A 1HG

--
"If they did brain transplants, would you be a donor or a recipient?"
(quoted from The Economist)
-------------------------------