Two Parallel Polands

Poland's rightwing populists are finally out of power. But what happens now? This week, our producer Wojciech Oleksiak and Warsaw-based journalist Claudia Ciobanu join us to explain why restoring Polish democracy is easier said than done. We're also talking about Finland's elections and the EU's much-criticised migration plan.

Claudia is the Poland correspondent for the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. You can find her reporting here and she's on Twitter here.

Investigate Europe's reporting on how France and the Netherlands lobbied for child border detentions can be found here.

This week's Inspiration Station offerings: 'Bitch' by Lucy Cooke and Sanremo 2024. Bonus entry for Amsterdammers, via Producer Katz: Felipe Romero Beltrán's photography exhibition 'Dialect' at Foam, documenting the experiences of young Moroccan migrants in Spain.

Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/europeanspodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠leaving us a review⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or giving us five stars on Spotify.

Producers: Katz Laszlo and Wojciech Oleksiak

Mixing and mastering: Wojciech Oleksiak

Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

INTRODUCTION – 00’22”

KATY: Welcome back to The Europeans, the podcast about depressing things and less depressing things from all across this continent. One of the less depressing things, Dominic, being the fact that you had a birthday this week. 

DOMINIC Yeah!

K: How did you celebrate? 

D: I celebrated by wearing a paper hat. 

K: Oh.

D: Apparently it's a Dutch tradition. 

K: Really? Like, a specific type of paper hat? 

D: A very kind of lo-fi, simply-made paper hat with staples. 

K: Dangerous. 

D: And yeah, maybe I'll put a photo on our Instagram, @europeanspodcast. 

K: I was gonna say, this sounds like some great influencer content. 

D: It definitely is. I did discover, though, after happily wearing this hat for the whole morning, that usually it's only intended for Dutch people under the age of six, at nursery school.

But I think I looked great. So I had a great birthday. 

K: It's never too late to get behind a local tradition. Very happy for you. 

D: I wonder whether the paper hat tradition is exclusively Dutch or actually whether there are more paper hat birthday traditions across Europe. Listeners, write in, hello at europeans podcast.com, if you have any details on that.

K: Specific paper hat traditions?

D: Yes, please. 

K: Or birthday traditions would be quite nice, actually. 

D: Yeah, enough of the creepy children's songs, we’re onto birthday traditions. 

K: Let's do it. 

D: The one thing that's awful about having your birthday in the Netherlands is that when you go to work, people expect you to bring them sweets and cakes. 

K: I have heard about this. I find this policy outrageous. 

D: It's really bad. You should be treated on your birthday. And people really, like, expect you to bring something, and if you don't bring good enough things, people will like moan about it. 

K: What did you bring this year? 

D: I went to a British shop and bought some Cadbury's chocolates, some boxes of chocolate Heroes.

K: Nice. 

D: I thought, give people something that they're not quite expecting. 

K: I always find French people are very snooty when they talk about British chocolate, and then they eat it and they're like, ‘Oh, this is great.’ 

D: I mean, I'm a bit snooty about British chocolate too, to be honest.

K: I think it's not legally chocolate in the EU anymore because it doesn't have enough cocoa in it.

D: But still, it was very tasty and gave me a very nice sugar high. 

K: I'm very glad to hear it. So my birthday gift to you this week is this podcast. What are we talking about this week? 

D: Thank you so much. Well, this week we're going to be going to Poland where producer Wojciech Oleksiak is going to be joining us and helping us to unpick what's been happening there politically since the rather momentous election that took place last year. He will be joined by Claudia Ciobanu, the Poland correspondent for the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, for some extra context. That's coming up later on in the show. But first, it's time for…

GOOD WEEK - 03’03”

K: Who has had a good week? 

D: Well, in what I think is a Europeans podcast first, I'm giving Good Week to a former guest of this show.

K: Ta-da!

K: Good week goes to the new president-elect of Finland, Alexander Stubb, who won this week’s second round presidential election with 51.6% of the vote ahead of his Green Party rival Pekka Haavisto.

K: A former guest of this podcast is now the president of somewhere. That's mad!

D: It is mad. Now, if you've been listening to the show for a while, you may have heard our interview with Alexander Stubb back in September 2022. And it's worth going back and listening to it. Back then, when we spoke to him, he was working as a professor at the University of Florence, teaching the future European leaders and giving them lots of advice. But he's also held loads of different political jobs. He was foreign minister of Finland, he was also prime minister of Finland between 2014 and 2015. 

K: He also is a freakishly impressive athlete when he isn't doing all of that, right? 

D: He really is, he loves his triathlons and he actually studied in the US on a golfing scholarship. 

K: I didn't know that. 

D: And it seems like his athletic background helped him through this gruelling presidential campaign, and it will hopefully help him get through the job of president.

K: And we can broadly see him as a kind of centre-right president, right? 

D: Yeah, most people describe him as centre-right. He's from the liberal wing of the conservative liberal National Coalition Party and he is fiercely pro-European, but his party are currently in coalition with the euroskeptic and anti-immigrant far-right Finns Party, a coalition that's been described by analysts as being arguably the most right-wing government ever in Finland.

K: Woop woop. 

D: The government came into power last summer promising austerity and tougher immigration rules. So there are a lot of people on the left who are not happy about this presidential election result, because it can be seen at least in part as an endorsement from the public of the current rightwing government, who are seen by many as pandering to the whims of the far-right. And Stubb won with a lot of support from people who would have voted for the far-right candidate, had their candidate progressed to the second round. There was quite a depressing poll from pollsters Gallup that came out last week suggesting that a full 40% of Stubb’s voters were voting for him because his opponent Haavisto, the green candidate, is gay.

K: That's a lot of homophobes. 

D: It is a lot of homophobes. And even if just a fraction of those homophobes weren't homophobes, then Stubb probably wouldn't have won, because actually, his margin of victory was very thin. It was the closest second round presidential election in Finnish electoral history. And actually, it would have only taken 50,000 voters for Haavisto to win. 

K: Wow. And what kind of powers will Stubb actually have as president? Is he one of those presidents that, it's mostly just a ceremonial role, or does this job actually have some teeth? D: Actually, no, this president has a few more teeth than most presidents in Europe. It sounds weird.

K: Weird sentence. 

D: Their most important teeth are the foreign policy teeth. I'm gonna stop talking about teeth. And it's –  

K: Very odd. Especially because he is quite a toothy man, Alex Stubb. 

D: He's quite famous for his smile, his photogenic smile, it's true. It's actually because of foreign policy that Stubb decided to run for this job. He thought he was done with national politics. But following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he changed his mind. 

K: Yeah, it's actually quite a big moment for Finland internationally, right? They just joined NATO last year. 

D: Yeah, it really is a big moment of shifting foreign policy in Finland. Finland is a country with a large 1300-kilometre land border with Russia. And there has been quite a lot of trouble on that border in recent months. There have been accusations that Moscow is instigating a hybrid operation on Finland's border, deliberately funnelling thousands of migrants to the Finnish border. Stubb accused Putin of using humans as a weapon during the final televised debate. And Finland actually closed its border with Russia in November, and the Finnish PM announced last week that this closure would be extended for another two months. And the threat of Russia seems to be very present in Finland, a country where conscription of adult males is still in place. 80% of all adult males do military service before the age of 30. Stubb will be their commander-in-chief. And actually Stubb’s own son is currently doing his military service, which must make this foreign policy responsibility even more intense and momentous than it already is. Yeah, it really seems like the threat of Russia is very existential in Finland, and that's going to be something that Stubb is going to have to deal with from day one. He'll be leading the country as NATO's newest member. And he'll be able to also define what kind of a NATO country Finland becomes. 

K: Because it wasn't that long ago that Finland had an official policy of non-alignment, right? Like, they weren't that unfriendly with Russia before the invasion. 

D: Yeah, absolutely. That transformation is very stark. And it's interesting you use the word ‘friendly’, because Stubb himself even posted a photo back in 2018 with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, describing him as his friend and colleague. It's not aged very well. And it's incredible how drastically things have changed now that Russia is not only accused of deliberately directing large flows of migrants to Finland's borders, but it's also suspected of being behind cyber attacks in Finland. Stubb tried to paint himself in the campaign as more hawkish than his Green Party opponent. And he does seem to want to give NATO a very strong place in Finland, even mooting the idea of having some NATO officers permanently stationed in his country. But yeah, in this upside down world we live in, there's another election going on this year that may be even more significant for Finnish foreign policy than their own election. Can you guess which election I'm talking about, Katy?

K: Is it on the other side of the Atlantic somewhere? 

D: Yes, it is. I'm sorry to mention the T word, Trump, but yeah, the fact is that all the Finnish presidential candidates were in agreement of their opposition to Putin. That wasn't at stake at this election. But as we saw rhis week with comments that Trump made about NATO, the whole Western alliance and opposition to Russia may be in question after the next election in the USA. If you didn't hear what Trump said last week, he said that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO members who, in his perception, hadn't paid their financial obligations. Which is a statement that’s really shaken NATO and European defence.

K: It is an astonishing thing for a presidential candidate to say, isn't it, that you would like actively encourage Russia to attack your allies. 

D: Yeah, and it does feel like a bit of a wake-up moment for a lot of Europe realising, ‘Oh, maybe we can't depend on the US for our defence.’ 

K: Macron was right! 

D: So Stubb is gonna have quite a lot on his plate, starting his job when it begins in March. In a symbolic gesture that shows a sign of a very healthy democracy that Trump and Biden and everyone in the USA could really learn from, before heading to his own campaign victory event, Stubb made an appearance at his opponent’s event saying on the stage that his opponent Haavisto was one of the finest people he'd ever met. 

K: I like that. That's classy. 

D: It is classy. So, good week for President-Elect Alexander Stubb. Let's hope he listens to his own words that he said whilst on this podcast and takes care of his mind and body whilst he's working as president. And yeah, he had a lot of advice when he spoke to us about making sure you exercise enough and you manage your expectations. So let's see. 

K: I wonder how much time he's gonna dedicate to triathlons. Probably way more than I give to exercise in my usual week, and I am not president of anywhere. 

D: Apparently, he also had an ice bath before the television debates. 

K: Oh, invigorating. 

D: Yeah, he's that kind of guy. And actually, he's sometimes teased for like posting about these things on social media and loving the limelight so much. And there's actually quite a cruel joke that I read about on Euronews, which I'm going to say because I find it funny. And it's that apparently the most dangerous place to be in Finland is between Alex Stubb and a television camera.

K: That’s quite funny and quite mean.

BAD WEEK - 12’14”

D: Who's had a bad week, Katy? 

K: Yeah, I wanted to talk about a story that has probably slipped under a lot of people's radars this week. And that is the new migration deal that was approved by EU national governments last Thursday. It's no great secret that migration policy on an EU level is a total mess. Like, for as long as we've been making this podcast, which is more than six years now, we've talked about the various problems in European migration policy that just never seem to get fixed. There is the fact that asylum seekers often get detained in horribly inhumane conditions at national borders. There's the very well-documented cases of border forces breaking international law by trying to beat asylum seekers back so that they can't claim asylum. And there's this very ingrained tendency to let the countries where people mostly arrive, so Greece and Italy and Spain, just kind of deal with things rather than seeing this as a collective European issue that we should really be sorting out together. None of these problems are new. And of course, these are problems that have been felt especially acutely since 2015, when people started arriving in much larger numbers from the Middle East and Africa, a lot of them making this incredibly dangerous crossing across the Mediterranean in boats that are often barely seaworthy. And so this big package of policies called the migration pact has been under discussion since 2020. And the European Parliament and the national governments came to a broad agreement over it in December. This week, it went a step closer to becoming official policy, when the national ambassadors to the EU said, ‘Yep, let's move this forward. We approve it.’ 

D: But I guess it still needs to be voted on by MEPs, right? 

K: Yeah, exactly. So it's not law yet. That vote will probably happen in April. 

D: And does this migration pact fix those problems you've just been talking about?

K: You will be shocked, Dominic, to hear that it doesn't, at least in the opinion of various human rights groups. So one of the things that I just mentioned was this idea of burden-sharing. The EU's previous attempts to share out asylum seekers across the bloc, to take pressure off Greece and Italy – that hasn't previously worked great. And Hungary especially, and Poland under the previous government and several other governments, they just flatly rejected this idea of sharing out people across the bloc. Their point of view was, ‘Well, you know, all of these people want to go to rich countries like Germany anyway; also, we don't want these people here.’ The new pact gives countries like Hungary the option to pay their way out of their obligation to resettle people who have fled war or persecution. 20,000 euros per refugee. So it's interesting, you could argue that this system is an improvement because at least it creates a mechanism for countries like Greece and Italy to get more money from countries like Hungary who refused to show solidarity on this. And Greece and Italy have apparently now come round to agreeing to the system, after initially expressing worry that they were still going to get left dealing with too much of the migration situation on their own. But yeah, I don't know. Should we be comfortable with the idea of governments being able to buy their way out of their legal and humanitarian obligations? I will leave you to decide that one. But the bit of the migration pact that is really attracting criticism is the part that deals with how kids are treated when they arrive in Europe, child asylum seekers. And that is because it is pretty clear that this policy is going to lead to more children being locked up, like potentially thousands of children. And these are kids who have fled their home countries in extremely difficult circumstances, and in many cases are traumatised by what's happened at home and on their journey to get here. 

D: So currently, children are not allowed to be detained when they arrive in Europe, right? 

K: They're not, no. So in reality, it does happen, it happens pretty often according to human rights groups. But legally in the EU, kids aged under 12 and their families cannot be legally detained. And neither can unaccompanied minors. They're supposed to be given some other kind of accommodation, which they can, you know, come and go from rather than being locked up. But the new migration pact will legalise the detention of kids of any age with their families for months while their asylum claims are being processed. And it will also legalise the detention of unaccompanied minors who are seen as a possible security risk. And this is despite a letter that the UN Special Rapporteur on Migration wrote to EU leaders in December, warning that this policy is contrary to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and that detaining children because they are migrants is a violation of their rights. But how did we end up with this policy? I want to draw your attention to some excellent reporting that was published by Investigate Europe on Tuesday, I'll share the link in the show notes so that people can have a read. But they managed to get access to the minutes of the negotiations between national governments. And it's really illuminating in showing just how much certain governments pushed for kids to no longer be exempt from being detained. I'm afraid that your government and mine Dominic, France and Netherlands, really led the way on this, Denmark and the Czech Republic too. Several governments did push back – Germany, Portugal, Ireland and Luxembourg. But in the end, they also went along with this. It's a rather ugly example of European compromise in action. Portugal's migration minister, Isabel Almeida Rodrigues, she was quoted as saying, ‘This is not the migration pact that we would like to have. It's what's possible.’ 

D: But the governments that have been pushing for this, like, why would they want kids to be locked up? 

K: Well, there has been this issue of some asylum seekers claiming to be underage, posing as unaccompanied 17-year-olds when they're actually you know, age 20 for example, in a bid to try and strengthen an asylum case or get better protection. People often arrive without documents, so it can be really difficult to prove someone's age. But of course, the vast, vast majority of children arriving in Europe as asylum seekers are actually children. Like, very visibly, a six-year-old is not going to be a 22-year-old posing as a six-year-old.

D: No. 

K: But more generally, this policy around the kids, it seems to be linked to this broader goal of making the environment more hostile for asylum seekers in a bid to stop them coming in the first place. Which, of course, is a very popular approach on the political right, you know, this conviction that we have made Europe too nice and too welcoming for migrants. And we're therefore encouraging people to make the journey here. But you know, as we've talked about previously on the podcast, this idea of pull factors – migrants arriving here because they're attracted by the prospect of a generous European welfare state or whatever – it's a massive oversimplification bordering on a myth. You know, people make this journey for all kinds of reasons, often a mixture of different reasons. But ultimately, if you talk to the NGOs that work with them, they will tell you that people risk this incredibly dangerous journey because they feel like they haven't got anything to lose, and that what lies ahead can't possibly be worse than what they're leaving behind. And at that point, we have to ask ourselves: if this is supposed to be a deterrent, making our policy as inhumane as possible, but it doesn't even work as a deterrent, what is the point of making it that inhumane in the first place? So really, this policy is just attracting a huge amount of criticism and not just from the usual groups on the political left but also the United Nations and big international human rights groups. This is how Amnesty International have summarised this migration plan. They said: ‘Its likely outcome is a surge in suffering on every step of a person's journey to seek asylum in the EU. From the way they are treated by countries outside the EU, their access to asylum and legal support at Europe's border to their reception within the EU, this agreement is designed to make it harder for people to access safety.’ 

D: That’s depressing. And it's kind of interesting timing that this pretty right-wing immigration plan is coming out just before the European elections, maybe.

K: Yeah, I mean, you can't help but wonder whether we should maybe see this as an example of the political mainstream trying to neutralise the threat from the far-right by stealing its policies and its talking points.

D: But that doesn't work. 

K: It doesn't work. This is the thing. I mean, there is survey data suggesting that far-right parties are going to do really, really well in these elections across the continent. So this could be one of those examples of more mainstream parties saying, you know, ‘If we borrow their policies, people won't feel like they have to vote for the far-right.’ 

D: But all it does is it normalises their policies. 

K: Well, that's exactly yeah, it does normalise them, it makes them more acceptable. So if it is that, it's very frustrating. Anyway, I could go on. There are various other miserable elements of this policy that could be called out for criticism. But I think I'm gonna leave it there. I gave the EU Good Week, last week. This time, I think it qualifies for a really very, very bad week. We are supposed to be a beacon of human rights in the world. Honestly, this week, it doesn't feel like it.

* * * 

D: It's that time of the show when we'd like to thank the wonderful people who are bankrolling this show. No big business, just lovely individuals. So thank you to everyone who continues to donate each month, we are flabbergasted with your generosity. The world isn't such a bad place after all.

K: It isn't. And this week, a big, big thank you goes to our latest supporters, Serapheim, Luciana, Karina and Ellen.

D: Thank you. You can join them by heading to patreon.com/europeanspodcast and donating as little as two euros, dollars, pounds, whatever you want each month.

INTERVIEW WITH CLAUDIA CIOBANU – 22’03”

K: So, one European political situation we've been watching particularly closely over the past few months is Poland. As you probably know, there was a true political earthquake back in October, bringing to an end eight years of rule by the hard-right Law and Justice Party, otherwise known as PiS. It's not an overstatement to say that Law and Justice reshaped Poland according to the party's interests. And now we have a new government which has promised to undo a lot of what the rightwingers did, and take Poland in a much more progressive and pro-European direction. And we've been following what's been going on very closely, partly because it's crazy, but also because we have a personal interest in what's happening in Poland, because our producer is there. Hi, Wojciech!

WOJCIECH: Hi, hello. That's true, I'm here.

K: Cześć.

W: Cześć.

D: We've been trying to convince you for weeks to come on and fill us in about what's happening in Polish politics. And we're very pleased that you finally given in.

K: Yay! 

W: Yeah, it took me some time because I had these two contradictory voices in my head. One had to come and talk about it every week, because so much was going on. But the other was waiting until some signs of stability emerged from the chaos that followed the October election. And I think that now we kind of see how it's going to work for the next several months. 

K: I'm also especially glad that you're here to help explain everything, because in a previous life, you were a law student. And what's happening right now has a lot to do with the law, right? 

W: Yeah, big time. And I think that it's only now that we get to fully understand the gravity of the damage that Law and Justice did to the country's legal order, while they were in power for the last eight years. And what they attempted to do, and they were pretty successful in doing so, was to transform the very form of government in Poland.

D: Changing the very form of government. Why would anyone want to do that? 

W: Well, it all starts and finishes in the head of Mr. Jarosław Kaczyński.

K: And Kaczyński is this guy who is the leader of Law and Justice, but for most of their time in power, he wasn't in any kind of elected role, right? He was just kind of pulling the strings in the background. 

W: Yeah, he's a puppet master. And Kaczyński, he always had a very clear vision of what he wanted Poland to be. That is, you know, very conservative, very Polish, independent from any external influence, very Catholic, family and tradition-oriented. And also, he wanted the country to be ruled with a strong hand where decisions are made by the executive power rather than the parliament. And very quickly when Law and Justice got into power for the first time in 2005, he learned that the Constitution and the independent courts were his biggest obstacle. So when they came back to power in 2015, Law and Justice performed a major political takeover of the Constitutional Tribunal, and also the National Council of the Judiciary, that elects judges, the Public Prosecutor's Office. All these institutions became very heavily politicised. And even now, at least three judges of the Constitutional Tribunal are very vocal Law and Justice Party supporters. And they also partially incapacitated the Supreme Court. 

K: Okay, so a very thorough job. 

W: Yeah. And then once the judiciary was somewhat out of the way, Law and Justice started introducing unconstitutional laws and creating unconstitutional institutions, often superfluous to the ones that already existed. And this is the main source of the chaos that Poland is experiencing right now. It created two separate legal orders, pre-2015, and post-2015. And it seems to only depend on your political allegiance, when it comes to deciding what's legal for you and what's not. And that's also how courts are ruling right now. Some are using the old laws as a basis for their sentences, other chambers or adjudicating panels would rule according to the post-2015 laws, so in line with a very strong political agenda of Kaczyński and his party. It's mayhem.

D: It all sounds like the making of a great political TV show but something you don't necessarily want to live through in your own country. Maybe someone's writing Poland's answer to Borgen right now, although like with a lot of real-life politics these days, the reality would probably not be believable if it was in a script of a television programme. Can you talk us through a few of the crazier moments of the past few months? 

W: Yes, sure I can. It really feels like a TV show. And to be very honest, it's very engaging to watch and follow, even though it's not very pleasant if you're actually, you know, living in the country. So yeah, some of the best moments, highlights of the season. First, the new government was trying to put an end to the Law and Justice capture of state media. 

K: And when we talk about the capture of state media, we're talking about the way in which Law and Justice basically turned most of the country's media into propaganda, right? 

W: Oh, yeah. Again, I have to say big time, because that included spewing anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-EU shit around the clock.

K: You actually made a really good two-part special podcast about the media takeover for The Europeans last year. Check it out, listeners, if you haven't already, it's called ‘An Autocrat’s Guide to Destroying Local Media’. Plug over.

W: So the new prime minister, Donald Tusk, has been a victim of a nonstop smear campaign for the last few years. He really wanted to fix the media after he and his new government were sworn in. But any changes to the boards of national media outlets that could eventually fire propagandists and hire real journalists were blocked by an unconstitutional institution, the National Media Council.

D: Aha, I'm guessing this is one of those parallel institutions that were set up by the Law and Justice party when they were in office. 

W: Yeah, exactly. There was an institution like that, but they just couldn't cram it with their folks. So they decided to create a new one. So there was virtually no way to retake the media and make it more impartial again, other than through violating laws that were made by Law and Justice. It's like it's a classic Catch-22 situation. Now, the new justice minister is having similar problems wherever he goes, there are double legal standards. So whatever he's trying to do in his efforts to reinstate an independent judiciary is being questioned by courts and judges loyal to Law and Justice. 

D: And what was this story about two politicians who tried to hide in the presidential palace? 

W: Oh, man, to explain that properly would need a mini-series. 

K: Stop angling for more work, Wojciech!

W: It's so complicated. I spent hours trying to understand what's going on. But in a nutshell, there are these two Law and Justice politicians who were convicted of abuse of power more than 15 years ago. But before they were finally convicted, they were conveniently pardoned by President Duda, who is allied with Law and Justice, just after he took office in 2015. And there were a lot of concerns at the time over whether it was even legal for him to do that, but he did that anyway. The trial came back to court in December last year, and the court ruled that these two guys should go to jail. And then this huge shitshow followed, Duda hid them in his office for hours, people staged protests, calling them political prisoners. And then eventually after they went on hunger strike, President Duda stepped in again and said ‘No, no, no. All these guys are honest as day is long’, and re-pardoned them again. So right now, these two politicians are not in jail. And there's a huge debate about whether or not they should be allowed to do their jobs as elected members of parliament. One court says they are, the other says they aren't. They even actually tried to storm into the building recently, which was pretty pathetic. But generally, this has been a good example of how people from the new government and people from the old government are just referring to completely different rulebooks.

D: Wow, Wojciech, I'm finally getting a sense of why you sound so exhausted every time we try and make you talk about Polish politics. So I feel like we should give you a break now. And I know you have a guest that you really wanted us to talk to. 

W: Yeah, I'll be very happy to pass on the job of explaining the unexplainable to an exceptional reporter, Claudia Ciobanu. She was born in Romania, but has lived in Poland for the last 10 years and is BIRN’s Polish correspondent, this is the Balkan Investigative Reporters Network. I loved her recent pieces where in a very impartial way, with just the right dose of distance, she wrote about what's the meaning of all this chaos and what should we really pay attention to.

K: So Wojciech, you're gonna go and cross Warsaw now to meet Claudia in person. We'll see you in a minute.

W: Ciao!

* * *

K: Hi, Claudia. 

D: Hi, Claudia. 

CLAUDIA CIOBANU: Hi, guys. 

K: Thanks for joining us. 

C: Thanks for having me. 

D: We're here to talk today, because for the first time since 2015, the Law and Justice party are in opposition. Could you start by telling us what kind of opposition they are?

C: The leader of this party used to criticise the previous opposition by saying they're a ‘total opposition’. And I think that label applies to them now, because what they actually do is they pretty much reject the legitimacy of the new government. So this Law and Justice p, you should be aware that they were the party to win the largest number of votes, so they're big and powerful. And they're sitting there in Parliament, as well as in the streets in different demonstrations and actions, and they're saying, ‘You know, actually, the new government, they don't really have a right to be there. They're doing this in an undemocratic way. And maybe we'll get rid of them through early elections.’ So instead of being a kind of like an opposition that engages with the policies, you know, submit some amendments in the parliament, they're pretty much rejecting everything that the new government does. 

K: And it's interesting, because you've written about how Law and Justice members have started presenting themselves as, like, the true defenders of Polish democracy, which is funny, because that's exactly the same kind of language that the opposition used to use when Law and Justice came to power themselves. Can you provide some examples of the kinds of ways in which Law and Justice are now using this kind of imagery, of being the saviours of democracy? 

C: You know, we are done with eight years of Law and Justice in government, where they have taken control, right, of the major state institutions. So now we have a new government, the ‘democrats’ in our understanding, that came to power and they're trying to restore the neutrality of these institutions. But we have low injustice all the time shouting that what actually the new government is doing is taking over those institutions. So they are indeed pretty much, like almost word by word, repeating the language that used to be used by the democrats back in 2015. So they are comparing the new government with the communist government, they're saying this is totalitarianism. This is a government that's trying to control the public media. It's like Orwellian language, you know – that truth is lie, darkness is light, it's almost the opposite of what is actually happening there. The reality that we have on the ground is that PiS is still in control of some of the courts, some of the prosecutor's office and so on. And the government is trying to free all of it to make it all neutral. It's making some decision, PiS is challenging those decisions in front of the courts it controls, the government then goes to the courts that are still free, or that it has maybe managed to free up. So we can have basically opposing rulings from different courts. Of course, some of these courts are illegal according to EU law, because they are politically controlled by PiS. But for the regular observer it’s getting very hard really to follow, you know? Who is right. Because you no longer have this last resort that you can turn to, a court, to explain to you who is actually doing the right thing here. It's getting really confusing. So I think at least one of the effects that is there is that, yeah, they create a sense of relativism. And I think, you know, the goal for Law and Justice is to kind of erode the credibility of the new government, you know, I think that's the most they can do. They don't have enough mandates in the parliament to stop them, but they can erode their credibility and create a sense of, ‘Well, are these really the democrats that came to power in Poland? Or, what's going on here?’

D: It sounds incredibly complicated. And it sounds like the country is almost fractured into two separate entities. Some people believe in one set of laws, others in another. Have you seen or heard anyone suggesting a way out of this division? 

C: One of the advice like everywhere, right, where we have illiberal or we have had illiberal regimes, it's to listen also to the voters of illiberals, right? To not ignore that part of society that Law and Justice in Poland or Trump in the States, they're brought to power by a section of society that felt disenfranchised for a really long time. So what sine qua non condition for the liberals coming back to power is not to forget about these people, to make them feel included somehow. And that's not obvious that's going to happen in Poland. I mean, the new prime minister, Donald Tusk, has been speaking about that, about unity, about getting everybody on board, in the electoral campaign. Let's see how it plays out in practice when they actually start making policy, if they make it really just, you know, for the middle class, or urban elites, as this party did before, when they were in power before 2015, or if they learned some lessons. and they're really gonna address also, you know, the people from the villages, the people from the smaller towns that are the typical electorate of Law and Justice. 

K: And just to be clear, Law and Justice’s supporters haven't disappeared, right? And they did stage this quite big march, I think, at the beginning of January in Warsaw. Can you tell us a bit about that protest? What was it about, who showed up? 

C: Yeah, these supporters haven't disappeared, and they're not going to disappear. I mean, that's something important to know about Poland, that Law and Justice has had pretty stable level of support for the past decade and more, right, at around 30%. Yeah, they've lost a bit in the polls now since the elections. But you know, a third of Poland is with them, more or less, yeah, plus minus 5%. They staged a pretty big demonstration. These were tens of thousands of people that came to the streets. It was in defence of the, what PiS called the independent public media, against the reforms of the new government, and also against the arrest of these two politicians. The mood was very resilient, very solid, very… I was quite startled with the mood. I was there, like marching with the people, speaking to people without saying I'm a journalist. And it reminded me of the mood in pro-democracy demonstrations in 2015. But the other observation I had was that this was definitely the core electorate of Law and Justice. So you know, unprompted, people would start talking about anti-LGBTQ negative feelings, expressing these nationalistic things without me asking about them, they were just coming naturally. Which means these are the core ultra-conservative, ultra-nationalist voters of PiS that stick to the party now, despite this very radical approach of the party. 

D: You talked earlier about the not totally uncontroversial reforms of the media by the new government. If I were to turn on Polish TV today, how different is the news right now, from what I would have seen if I turned on six months ago? Is it any more impartial than it was? 

C: It's better, it's better. So, it was very bad to begin with, so it's really difficult to make it worse. Before it was really propaganda on the level that people said that it was worse than in communist times, because it was, on the one thing, it is very blatant propaganda of the governing party. But on the other hand, also rabid attacks against the political opponents of the governing party, but also against social categories that the governing party didn't like, like, again, LGBTQ people, or teachers or doctors when they were striking. The attacks were really violent. So you know, the whole country pretty much was watching the first editions of the new evening news on the state media channel. And it's like, back to kind of normal news. They, for example, cover the demonstrations organised by Law and Justice. So seemingly impartial, although, as I understand, they haven't properly covered the criticisms of the reform of the media itself, right? So they are not 100% objective. But I think this is like the big stake here, actually – if they are able to really make the public media impartial, or like the BBC kind of model, which was not the case before Law and Justice came to power. This is why also some people say that's what made it possible for Law and Justice to take over the public television and public media so easily, because actually, Polish society was not that attached to it, because they never recognised it as such a public value as let's say, the UK audience might see in the BBC – with all the criticisms that probably are there too. So that's the stake here, not only to clean up the old propaganda, but also to really build up a public media from I think, like almost from scratch. 

K: Right now it feels like the whole country is focused still on this rivalry between the new government and the former government. But the new government does need to articulate a vision for Poland's future and start fulfilling its promises, its electoral promises, beyond simply saying, ‘Okay, we're going to hold the previous government accountable for what they did wrong.’ What do you see as the key problems that the new government needs to address? 

C: Really, when I look at all this conflictual atmosphere, I also really have this feeling, ‘Gosh, when are they really gonna get to the stage of making policy on other aspects that are not just about restoring neutrality of institutions and retribution against the old government?’ I mean, beyond their electoral promises, I think, you know, we are in Eastern Europe. In most of the countries and in Poland, also, we have had for a really long time, really weak public health and education systems. Then we've got the war in Ukraine nearby, we've got again, this week, Polish farmers starting a blockade on the Ukrainian border. We need advanced thinking on where the Polish economy is going to situate itself when Ukraine joins the European Union. Where is agriculture going? We need radical transformation of the energy sector that's lagging behind in Poland, Polish coal dependency is still very high. Regarding the housing sector, prices of housing in Poland have increased, like it's the second fastest growing rate of prices for apartments for housing in Europe. So they’ve got really these very basic areas of policy, plus global challenges. And I'm not sure if spending two, three months fighting about two politicians, whether they are in jail or not, is the most important thing for Poland at the moment. 

D: On the other hand, the new government under Tusk is a coalition of lots of different kinds of political parties and different voices. So they have to try and find a way to keep a unified voice. And it seems like so far they have been keeping that unified voice. Do you anticipate internal tensions arising anytime soon? 

C: Yeah, they're good at keeping a united front in, you know, when confronting Law and Justice. The cracks are starting to emerge on the topic of abortion and women’s rights. And this is very important for this government, because this was a government that was brought to power primarily because of the mobilisation of women and young people. These are the people who went out to vote more than before. And this is what this government wants. So it owes a debt to women. You know, women in Poland don't have a right to abortion, they can only perform abortion in very drastic, limited circumstances. This has to be fixed. But they don't have an agreement in the coalition, because the coalition is liberals plus the left plus conservatives. The conservatives, they so far don't agree on that. You know, until now the women are waiting. I think they're giving a chance to the new government, they are patient. But I think we can expect mass protests again if they don't do something about this. And then we'll see, you know, when they start fighting about who's the presidential candidate of this political camp in 2025, because that can cause problems, too. 

K: Yeah. And that's, I think, maybe a good place to close things – there is actually this other big election coming up in Poland next year, the election for the presidency, which is of course currently held by a Law and Justice ally. How much easier would things get for the current coalition if they were to win the presidency next year? 

C: Yeah, I mean, that would make it much easier. And the fact that Law and Justice controls the presidential office right now, because they do I mean, that's why we have actually a political crisis in Poland at the moment. Because the new government in trying to restore the neutrality of core democratic institutions. It cannot do that via legislation, which would be the normal way to do it. So you've got some issues with how various institution functions, you pass a law to fix that. But they can't do that at the moment, because if the parliament passes legislation, President Duda is going to veto it. And he's definitely going to veto it. He has said that, he has done it in some cases. So this is why this new government, they have to find creative ways that are not via the normal legislative process, which makes them open to all this criticism coming from Law and Justice that they are not doing things the democratic way. And sometimes this criticism is like onto something. So basically, if the new government also had like a friendly president, then they could pass laws and that would make a huge difference, that would make everything much smoother. But because of this dualism of the schism between parliament and president, we have really a blockage of legislative processes. So we are stuck until 2025.

K: Well, we look forward to welcoming you back in 2025 to discuss this whole thing again. 

C: Yeah, I really hope not! I mean, I really hope it's gonna be easier then. But let's see.

K: Thanks so much, Claudia. 

D: Yeah, thank you so much.

* * * 

K: Listening to Wojciech and Claudia, the thing that really strikes me as fascinating about what's happening in Poland right now is just how hard it is to remake a democracy once it's been unmade. And that is what we're watching happening right now. And it's really exhausting, but it is also inspiring. And I do think it's worth celebrating all of the things that already feel really different in Poland, like in the media and the way that the EU is being talked about. So yeah, it is really hard and in a lot of situations, progress is going to be really slow and chaotic. But we do also have to celebrate the things that are changing for the better in Poland right now. 

D: Yeah. And it's really good also to like, keep learning about it, because Poland is probably not the only place that's going to need to try and rebuild democracy and make it stronger in the next few decades, woop woop. 

K: Yay.

THE INSPIRATION STATION - 45’26”

K: What have you been enjoying this week? 

D: This week I've got some European culture recommended by Erika, a listener in California who says she followed your recommendation a while back, Katy. Well done, you influencer you.

K: Great life choice, Erika.

D: She read Adam Rutherford, ‘A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived.’

K: Great book.

D: And she said that that book opened the thematic door of biology and evolution. And she's gone on to read another book with a similar theme called ‘Bitch: on the Female of the Species’. And it's by British sociologist Lucy Cook. Erika says, ‘In her light and funny writing style, Ms. Cook shares fascinating information from research into the females of numerous animal species that have been either ignored or completely misunderstood by the androcentric evolutionary biology community. A great example of ways in which our biases shape what information we gather and how we make sense of it, even in the purportedly neutral world of scientific research.’ Sounds so interesting. 

K: So interesting. That’s going straight on my list, thanks, Erika. 

D: What have you been enjoying, Katy? 

K: I've been enjoying the weirdness that was this year's Sanremo Festival. Sanremo, for those of you who don't know, is an annual song contest held in the northern Italian city of Sanremo, very close to the border with France. Sanremo was of course the original inspiration for the Eurovision Song Contest, and it remains similarly camp and mad. I've been enjoying some of the highlights that have been floating around on YouTube and Twitter. Particularly this moment when John Travolta, the actor, was forcibly made to dance ‘Il Ballo del Qua Qua’, which is a song that you probably know, regardless of what language you speak. It’s that song that goes, ‘Nana nana nanana, nana nana nanana…

[SOUND CLIP]

D: Nana nana. 

K: And then you have to dance like a duck.

D: Like a chicken! 

K: It's a duck, no?

D: It's called the chicken dance, no?

K: I thought it was ‘qua qua’ because it’s ‘qua qua’ like a duck. 

D: Oh, yeah. Oh…

K: This needs fact-checking. Anyway, John Travolta looked incredibly uncomfortable doing this dance. And there is now no trace of this performance anywhere on RAI, the national Italian broadcaster. John Travolta has reportedly denied them permission to ever air it again because it was so embarrassing. And in general, our Italian listeners seem to have found the entire event excruciatingly embarrassing. Having said that, I actually quite like some of the songs from this year's contest, including the winner Angelina Mango. She won with a song called ‘La Noia’, or ‘Boredom’. And that will be Italy's Eurovision entry for this year. I think it's actually in with a not bad chance of winning. So yeah, if you fancy some Italian pop, our listener Francesca kindly shared a playlist of songs from this year's festival. She describes it as ‘not so bad’ this year. Even if she also said that she thought the organisers must be drunk because, quote, ‘I can't for the life of me believe they would do such things otherwise.’ 

D: ‘Not so bad this year’ is really damning with faint praise.

K: So enjoyable. Grazie, Francesca!

HAPPY ENDING - 49’04”

D: I've decided to stay in Poland this week for my happy ending, where as we heard, undoing the anti-democratic and discriminatory policies of the Law and Justice Party is a tricky job. But there was one bit of moving symbolic progress at the Polish national broadcaster TVP this week, where a TV journalist opened an interview with two LGBT+ activists by first looking into the camera and making a statement. I'll just read you what he said.

[SOUND CLIP]

D: Before we start, the conversation, it seems to me that there should be three sentences. For many years in Poland, shameful words have been directed at numerous individuals simply because they chose to determine for themselves who they are and whom they love.

LGBT+ people are not an ideology, but people, specific names, faces, relatives, friends. All these people should hear the word ‘sorry’, somewhere. This is where I apologise. I found it really moving watching this video, and I think it's a real watershed moment for LGBT+ people living in Poland to hear this very public apology for the vitriol and hate that's been thrown at them for years by the Polish national broadcaster under the influence of an anti-LGBT ideology. Now, I was talking to Wojciech, our producer about this, and he pointed out that of course, this journalist who said this was not someone who was working at the national broadcaster before it got revamped after the election, to rid the broadcaster of its Law and Justice propaganda elements. But still, I found it very moving to watch. Bart Staszewski, one of the LGBT activists who was interviewed after the statement, said on Twitter: ‘This is the Poland I want to fight for.’ 

K: That made me cry, that video.

D: Yeah, me too.

* * * 

K: Next week, we're gonna be trying to figure out what the hell is going on in Hungary right now. I for one would like to know, so come and join me in that quest. In the meantime, you can come and find us on what is left of social media. We're on Instagram and Threads under @europeanspodcast, and the other one, Twitter @europeanspod. 

D: This week's episode was produced by Katz Laszlo and Wojciech Oleksiak thank you both so much. We love working with you both. 

K: We do! See you next week everyone.

D: Do widzenia!