Ed West is one of my favorite journalists in the world. Ahead of the elections in Poland, he’s been visiting the country, and he has issued a really useful dispatch about how, despite the pretensions of its populist-right government, Poland is heading down the same road that Western Europe has traveled before it.
His coverage also serves as the only moderate, nuanced dispatch in English that I’ve read, getting at the paradoxes of Polish politics:
Despite the praise it has received for its treatment of refugees, Poland also finds itself isolated in Europe, out of favour with the Franco–German core, and with few allies outside. In April, Emmanuel Macron called Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki ‘an extreme-right anti-Semite who bans LGBT people’, after the Polish leader had criticised his efforts to negotiate with Putin (even though Morawiecki has Jewish roots).
Relations with Germany are even worse, in particular spurred by the EU’s migration pact. In June, ‘the EU reached a consensus on key asylum and migration laws in the bloc’ which means countries would either have to take migrants or pay into a joint fund, something strongly opposed by Warsaw and Budapest. More troubling is that the German government is actively assisting people crossing into Europe, something which troubles both the Hungarians and Poles.
PiS presents itself as hardline on migration. It has successfully built a wall along the border with Belarus at a cost of around £300 million. And early in the year, the prime minister used footage of riots in France to illustrate his opposition to the EU’s migration pact.
The government will probably be helped by recent footage from Lampedusa, which has been shared widely, and which provoke widespread anxiety. Fans of Legia Warsaw recently held banners up at a game declaring that: ‘We don’t want Berlin, Lampedusa or France here – zero tolerance for migrants.’
But, like the Tories in Britain, PiS is also pro-migration in practice. By trying to fix that labour-profit-productivity problem through the easiest route, numbers have shot up, with 200,000 extra arrivals in two years – and that’s excluding Ukrainians. These include five-figure totals from India, Uzbekistan, Turkey, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Turkmenistan, among others. The country is also reeling from revelations that several hundred visas were sold to migrants, which opposition leader Donald Tusk called ‘probably the biggest scandal in Poland in the 21st century’.
Go and read the whole thing, if Substack will let you.