Fear and xenophobia poison Polish polls
Source: The Guardian UK
The country is thriving, but the rightwing Law and Justice partys anti-migrant and introspective campaign has won over many voters before Sundays election. Call it the Polish paradox. As voters head to the ballot box on Sunday to pick a new parliament, the mood is decidedly at odds with the facts. The country has taken in few refugees during Europes year of desperate migration yet the campaign is marked by introspection and xenophobia (migrants carry very dangerous diseases, said the head of the frontrunner rightwing party last week).
The Polish economy is one of Europes most robust but the talk is of mismanagement, tax avoidance and surrender to Germany. Poland should be a confident, big European player but it appears mired in fear, recrimination and an almost pathological antipathy to the idea of change.
They are not talking about the issues that matter, said one voter, Janina Zurowska-Filipek, a fruit and veg seller from Warsaw. They are promoting fear of immigrants when, in fact, migrants are not going to come to Poland. They want to go to rich countries.
We have reached the limit of our capacity to absorb changes, said Jacek Kucharczyk, director of the Institute of Public Affairs. We are about to give the country to a bunch of political extremists who have been smart enough to send consoling signals to people who are scared. We are going through a kind of counter-Reformation. By extremists he means the Law and Justice party of Andrzej Duda, who won a presidential vote five months ago. Law and Justice may need a partner to form a government but according to the latest surveys, his party will finish at least 10% ahead of the governing centrist Civic Platform.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/23/poland-election-law-and-justice-party
Sadly, this xenophobic streak runs thru many of the new eastern European members of the EU and NATO. Many have relatively small populations, all have no real history of immigration and assimilation like here in the US, and most still defensively protect their hard-won restored sovereignty and their national cultural identity.
Becoming a truly modern nation is a process. Yeah, I know, who are we to talk in light of the racist comments from leading Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, but still.
cprise
(8,445 posts)A case of collective "Do as I say, not as I do".
PatrickforO
(14,572 posts)We've had these idiots in power in the Congress for years, and we're sitting on centuries of xenophobic tradition here in the USA.
wobblie
(61 posts)As a result of the Nazi genocide and the shifting of Poland's borders following WWII, it is now one of the most ethnically homogeneous country's in the world. Prior to WWII Poland was one of the most heterogeneous, multi-ethnic nations in the world. As Poland has shifted from being a vassal state in the Soviet bloc, with its homage to internationalism, to being a vassal state in the EU, right wing politics have gained great traction.
Igel
(35,300 posts)subjugation, conquest, etc., etc., will also do that.
It wasn't just a vassal state to the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, it had been divided between the USSR and Germany, and before that gobbled up by the Russian Empire.
The USSR paid lip-service to internationalism, but Stalin's socialism in one country, it's projection not of socialist but Soviet policy and Cold War proxy wars and jockeying shouldn't be confused with internationalism, whatever the Soviet verbiage in translation may allow people to infer. (The inferences are often consciously chosen by some, and intentionally proposed by the Soviet propagandists. You read Pravda and Izvestiya for more than a few days, and what's meant vs what the words would seem to mean becomes very clear; now you do this for years, and add in the Literaturka, then read through the transition under glasnost'. It's not cynicism. It's non-pollyannaism.)