Polish election: voting begins as Eurosceptic party challenges for office

[uawchild]

Source: The Guardian UK

Rightwing Law and Justice party leads in polls going into parliamentary elections that could affect country’s role in Europe’s refugee crisis

Poles have begun voting in a general election that could result in victory for a rightwing Eurosceptic party at the expense of the ruling pro-EU party. Poland was the only EU nation to avoid recession and it remains one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies. If opinion polls are correct, the country could see its first change of government in eight years, with a clear lead for the rightwing Law and Justice party over the incumbent Civic Platform.

It is not clear if Law and Justice will win enough votes to govern alone or if it will need a coalition partner. The party’s Andrzej Duda won a presidential vote five months ago. The Roman Catholic church backs Law and Justice, which many analysts say will help it claim victory on Sunday. With the churchgoing and rural base apparently in its pocket, Law and Justice has departed from moral issues to run a populist campaign with broad appeal.

The party chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński, has warned of diseases from the 7,000 asylum seekers Poland has agreed to take in.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/25/polish-parliamentary-election-vote-2015

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"The party chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński, has warned of diseases from the 7,000 asylum seekers Poland has agreed to take in."

Nice. Real nice. Another eastern European relatively new EU and NATO nation reverts to xenophobia and lurches to the right. What has gone wrong with Poland?

[Demeter]

1. Polish Authorities have been xenophobic since the Nazi invasion, if not longer, not populations

Once the minority groups (Jews, Roma, atheists) had been eliminated, there wasn't any reason for tolerance. And the influx of Soviets didn't help.

When part of Poland was under rule by German Empire, the Polish population was discriminated by policies influenced by racist thought that gained populartiy among German nationalists such as Volkisch movement, leading for example to "Expulsion of Poles by Germany".

During World War II, Poland was under German and Soviet occupation. During this period Polish people were harshly discriminated against in their own country. The Nazi German regime had seen Poles as "subhumans" (untermenschen) that were fit only for slavery and extermination. Most of the Nazis considered Poles, like the majority of other Slavs, as non-Aryan and non-European "masses from the East" which should be either totally annihilated along with the Jews and Gypsies, or entirely expelled from the European continent. Poles were the victims of Nazi crimes against humanity, and also the main non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Approximately 2.5 million ethnic Poles were exterminated during the World War II. Polish slaves in Nazi Germany were forced to wear identifying red tags with "P"s sewn to their clothing; sexual relations with Germans (rassenschande or "racial defilement&quot were punishable by death. During the war, thousands of Polish men were executed for their relations with German women.

Poles were also the subject of ethnic cleansing during massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, then the territory of Poland.

Black Africans

The most common word in Polish for a black person is Murzyn. It is generally seen as a neutral word which was used for centuries to describe a person of Black African ancestry, but nowadays some consider it to have pejorative connotations.

One of the most high-profile events regarding blacks in Poland in recent years was the death of Maxwell Itoya in 2010. Itoya was a Nigerian killed in a police raid on a market in Warsaw. His death sparked a riot and mass arrests at the scene of Itoya's death. The event led to a widespread debate in the Polish media regarding policing and racism.

The Mława pogrom was a series of violent incidents in June 1991 when a rioting mob attacked Romani residents of the Polish town of Mława causing hundreds to flee in terror. The violence, described as motivated by racism and jealousy, was condemned by Polish and international media.

Attitudes towards minorities and level of tolerance

An analysis based on the European Values Survey (EVS) done in 2008 showed that compared to other European nations, Poland had very high levels of political tolerance (lack of extremist political attitudes), relatively high level of ethnic tolerance (based on attitudes towards Muslims, immigrants, people of another race, Roma, and Jews) and at the same time low levels of personal tolerance (based on attitudes towards people considered "deviant" or "threatening&quot . From 1998 to 2008, there was a marked increase in political and ethnic tolerance but a decrease in personal tolerance.

In terms of trends over time, at the beginning of the 1990s, due partly to the political euphoria accompanying the fall of Communism, Poland was the most tolerant nation in Central and Eastern Europe. Over the course of the nineties however, tolerance decreased so that by 1999 the country was recorded by the EVS as having one of the highest rates of xenophobia in Europe. Antisemitism increased during this time as well. The factors behind these decreases in tolerance and some of the radicalization in attitudes towards other ethnic groups during this time likely included the country's economic problems associated with a costly transition from communism (for example, high unemployment), ineffectual government, and possibly an increase in immigration from outside.

However, these attitudes began to change after 2000, possibly due to Poland's entry into the European Union, increased travel abroad and more frequent encounters with people of other races. By 2008 the EVS showed Poland as one of the least xenophobic countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The negative attitudes towards Jews have likewise returned to their lower 1990 level, although they do remain somewhat above the European average. During the same time period, ethnic tolerance and political tolerance increased in Southern Europe (Spain, Greece) and decreased in other parts of Northern Europe (Netherlands).

While the Roma were the group which was listed as most rejected, the level of exclusion was still lower than elsewhere in Europe, most likely due the long history of Roma (see Polska Roma) and their relatively low numbers in the country.

According to the European Jewish Congress while the number of anti-Semitic attacks and incidents of vandalism in Western Europe is on the rise, in Poland there has been a dramatic decrease in these...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Poland

lllFrom the founding of the Kingdom of Poland in 1025 through to the early years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created in 1569, Poland was the most tolerant country in Europe. Known as paradisus Iudaeorum (Latin for "Paradise for the Jews&quot , it became a shelter for persecuted and expelled European Jewish communities and the home to the world's largest Jewish community of the time. According to some sources, about three-quarters of all Jews lived in Poland by the middle of the 16th century. With the weakening of the Commonwealth and growing religious strife (due to the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation), Poland’s traditional tolerance began to wane from the 17th century onward. After the partitions of Poland in 1795 and the destruction of Poland as a sovereign state, Polish Jews were subject to the laws of the partitioning powers, the increasingly antisemitic Russian Empire, as well as Austro-Hungary and Kingdom of Prussia (later a part of the German Empire). Still, as Poland regained independence in the aftermath of World War I, it was the center of the European Jewish world with one of world's largest Jewish communities of over 3 million. Antisemitism was a growing problem throughout Europe in those years, from both the political establishment and the general population.

At the start of World War II, Poland was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (see Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact). The war resulted in the death of one-fifth of the Polish population, with 90% or about 3 million of Polish Jewry killed along with approximately 3 million Polish non-Jews. Although the Holocaust occurred largely in German-occupied Poland, there was little collaboration with the Nazis by its citizens. Collaboration by individual Poles has been described as smaller than in other occupied countries. Statistics of the Israeli War Crimes Commission indicate that less than 0.1% of Polish gentiles collaborated with the Nazis. Examples of Polish gentile attitudes to German atrocities varied widely, from actively risking death in order to save Jewish lives, and passive refusal to inform on them; to indifference, blackmail, and in extreme cases, participation in pogroms such as the Jedwabne pogrom. Grouped by nationality, Poles represent the largest number of people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland

[uawchild]

2. It's easy, I guess, to say you are tolerant...

in those past surveys when you live in one of the most homogeneous countries in the world, I suppose.

"Unlike many of its Central European neighbors, Poland is overwhelmingly homogeneous; no less than 98 per cent of its population is ethnically Polish. Though a scant two per cent of the country's citizens today, Poland's Ukrainians, Belarusians, Germans and Jews comprise a vital part of 20th-century Polish history."
http://www.ce-review.org/99/19/nieuwsma19.html

In any case, the election of the right wing xenophobic President 5 months ago, and now his party set to take power in parliament are both very very disconcerting. This lurch to the right as soon as a few thousand refugees show up puts the lie to any earlier surveys about tolerance, unfortunately. Its the general population that is electing these right wing xenophobes this year, Poland is, after all, a democracy. No one is forcing the Polish people to vote for these bums.

[Demeter]

3. No defensible borders

meant a lot of regime change from outside, as well as waves of refugees periodically passing through or settling. But not necessarily assimilating....

[840high]

4. From BBC

Prime Ministerial candidate Beata Szydlo said she was grateful for the support of the Polish people:

"We have won because we have been consistent in facing all the challenges ahead of us and we followed in the footsteps of the late President Lech Kaczynski," she said.

"We wouldn't have won had it not been for the Polish people who told us about their expectations and needs, and who in the end voted for us."

[Wabbajack_]

5. Poland sucks

The two largest parties are both right-wing.