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Europe

Youth and Ursula von der Leyen won in Poland

2023-10-26

Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Dmitry Bavyrin

[RIA] Former head of the European Council Donald Tusk has been nominated as a candidate for Prime Minister of Poland from the opposition. This already happened to him in 2007, when his “Civic Platform” won the parliamentary elections, launching into the blogosphere the call “Hide Grandma’s Passport!”

Then, as now, Tusk’s main opponent was the ruling party “Law and Justice” - nationalist, Russophobic and clerical, they are also called “obscurantists”. She relies on an older electorate than Tusk's supporters.

But this time the liberals did not cause discord in Polish families, offering voters what is usually called a “positive program”: solving specific problems through specific reforms. As a result, the conservative government received 2.5 million, or a third, more votes than in 2007. That is, the Poles did not hide the passports of their elderly. Instead, young people themselves came to the polls, which they usually do reluctantly, and against the backdrop of a historically record turnout for Poland, Tusk will again become prime minister. Three opposition blocs managed to gain a controlling stake of votes, so that power will pass to the left-liberal coalition with him at its head.

Most likely, this is the last defeat for the leader of Polish conservatives, 74-year-old Jaroslaw Kaczynski. We will hear nothing more significant about our old enemy.

It would seem that this is good news when youth defeats mossy Russophobic old age. In the entire European Union it was impossible to find a party more violent and xenophobic in its attitude towards Russia than Law and Justice, if you do not pay attention to the zigging dwarfs of the Baltic states.

But, alas, based on Russia’s foreign policy interests, the youth won at the wrong time: it would be better if clinical Russophobes continued to rule Poland. There are at least three reasons for this.

Firstly, Kaczynski’s conservatives, in addition to Russia, also hated the European Commission, which was mutual. In Brussels, the Polish government was presented as a gathering of provincial retrogrades, an “enfant terrible” and a source of inescapable problems. Now the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will have fewer headaches: with the arrival of Tusk, Warsaw will turn into a political branch of Brussels, and one of the main lines of division within the EU will be healed.

Our enemies closed their ranks more tightly, knocking out the unhealthy Polish grandfather from them. Tusk is also a Russophobe, but not a clinical one, but a political one, which in the proposed circumstances is even worse. For Russia, one adversary simply replaced another, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has lost an important ally.

Secondly, a change of power in Poland will reduce the severity of the conflict growing between Warsaw and Kiev. The interests of Polish farmers will not change because of this, that is, the issue of the embargo on the supply of Ukrainian grain will not leave the agenda. However, between Tusk and Vladimir Zelensky there is no accumulated “personal”, as there is between Zelensky and the still Prime Minister of Poland, Kaczynski’s “minion” Mateusz Morawiecki.

In addition, Tusk takes the trauma of the common Polish-Ukrainian past more easily than Kaczynski and co. Of course, he doesn’t like Stepan Bandera, but to shout “Glory to Ukraine!” (and with this slogan, one must think, Poles were slaughtered in Volyn) is normal for him, which he demonstrated in Kyiv in 2019.

Three years later, Tusk said that those who do not support Ukraine “are not democrats, not Christians and not Europeans.” So in this sense, Polish anti-Russian obscurantism will not go away, it will just be a little easier for Zelensky, like Ursula von der Leyen, to live on.

Thirdly, the victory of the pro-European coalition deprived us of the chance to look at the curious cadaver one of those stitched together by Dr. Frankenstein.

The fact is that Kaczynski’s people managed to do so much and make so many enemies that they are simply afraid to give up power. This opened the way for the creation of an unthinkable coalition of Law and Justice and the Confederation party if the two of them bypassed Tusk’s left-liberal “troika.”

“Confederates” are also nationalists and Eurosceptics, but slightly different from Kaczynski’s. This is one of the “youngest” parties in Poland in terms of electorate and at the same time the least Russophobic: they tend to view Moscow as a possible ally in the fight against common enemies - Ukraine, the European Union, globalism and liberalism. In general, a misalliance between Russophobes and “Russophiles” could have turned out to be interesting, but the Poles preferred the boring Tusk.

This seems to go against the pan-European trend towards strengthening Eurosceptics, because even in Germany - the main beneficiary of the creation of the European Union - the most popular party now is the "Alternative for Germany" (though only if we consider the components of the CDU/CSU bloc as two different parties).

But in fact, Poland, provincial by European standards, seems to anticipate the political trends of the EU. Eurosceptics (the same “Law and Justice”) were in power there when the European Commission’s opposition was no longer in fashion anywhere. And now the wheel of history is grinding in such a way that voters are pointing the door to the forces under which their country entered into the adventure of “isolating Russia” and supporting the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

In a vast and ever-expanding area from Spain to Slovakia, people vote for the opposition because the policies of the current government (regardless of its party affiliation) have led to well-known costs - inflation, recession and energy crisis.

So the Poles are following the pan-European course towards a change of leadership, under which heating becomes more expensive, prices rise and the prospect of a third world war is revealed. The nationalist Kaczynski, purely because of his position in time and space, had to answer for the same thing that Ursula von der Leyin’s favorites are responsible for in other countries: anti-national policies.

However, neither these elections nor the next ones, whether they will be held in Poland or even in Germany, are ways to change this policy. Theoretically, voting in only one country in the world can influence it - the United States.

This is the price for lack of sovereignty. As the plumber said in a Soviet joke, “here the whole system needs to be changed.”

Posted by:badanov

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