A fewer comments on the future of the right hand

At the threshold of 2024, I have a stronger feeling that for the Polish right it is crucial to return the issue of power. More specifically, the question is, after the events of the year 2023, does the right-wing camp not again face the hazard of structural inability to regain power in the time horizon of several, or even respective years? Eventually, this was the case at the beginning of independence, erstwhile the right had the negative strength to destruct the power that it did not want, but the fruits of its demolition were even greater enemies. This could be summarised at least in 1993.

Today this hazard to the right is due to the fact that on the Polish political horizon there is no more serious political group inclined in the future to even a hypothetical government alliance with the only large organization of the Polish right, which is the Law and Justice. At the same time, all signs in heaven and earth seem to indicate that the Polish strategy of power will be permanently coalition.

Whenever before the last election, in my talks with right-wing publicists, I pointed out that in all 2023 there was not a single period in which average polls would give the Law and Justice even the slightest chance to keep power, I always collided with my interlocutors with almost magical belief in the power of the d’Hondt system, which twice gave power to the right, so it would besides give it for the 3rd time. Not only was it an unauthorised reasoning, but at the same time it masked the long-standing apparent that the Law and Justice organization could not keep the power – let us stress this clearly – whatever would not have worked during the 2023 campaign.

The 2019 election consequence achieved by the Law and Justice Office (or 44%) established the permanent "glass ceiling" of this party, providing it with the "merely" absolute minimum essential to govern, or 51% of the parliamentary mandates. Each subsequent ex-definitione election consequence should so prove to be lower, due to the fact that it is absurd to anticipate that any organization will keep its “glass ceiling” in the elections over a decade. And so it did in October 2023.

Just as today, and in the future, there are, and there will be 2 possibilities. 1 on the far right – only nationalists are eligible here, who already have decent intellectual and human resources in Poland today, although to this day they have not found a good key to independent existence in democratic politics. In today's global realities, in which – what much to say – a war of powers seems to be possible at hand, however, this ally inactive poses a problem with defining Poland's function in Europe. Nationalist environments are not able to liberate themselves from the anachronistic superstitions of endetics, originating from the pre-World War I era, according to which long-term political enemies of Poland are Berlin and Kiev, and Moscow is only to any extent. After Lech Kaczyński's death, the PiS began an unwise flirt with this endecian superstition, moving clearly the mainstream of Polish right-wing thought in this direction. specified a concept was tactical and came from the intention to take over the nationalist electorate and destruct a possible partner on the right. Nothing more wrong, both from the position of maintaining coalition capacity for the future and from the Polish global interests. 1 was in agreement with the other, but PiS' political tactics went in a different direction.

I say I and my private friends are not a typical group of right - hand voters, and I take it with knowing that right - hand voters like me are not ordinary. Nevertheless, in the context of these PiS efforts to take over nationalist voters and global interests of the Polish state, it is worth openly admitting that propaganda anti-German fanaticism, in which he allowed his organization Jarosław Kaczyński, as well as efforts to change the latest past – is repelled by voters like me from PiS.

In a society in which half of the younger generation experienced student exchange with Germany during school years, the another half has a work incidental in Germany, the argument that the current Prime Minister is simply a “German agent” is boringly said to have a grin of pity before 40, alternatively than a fear of an enemy agent. Of course, but for the nationalist electorate, but here the tactical interest of the right is that it forms its own political camp for the future.

The same is actual of the efforts of rewriting Polish history. What the openly nationalist president appointed by Kaczyński has late done, proving that the criminal “Action of the Vistula” was an “evacuation” of the Ukrainian population in order to defend it, and it was carried out by communists at the request of a Catholic bishop, calling for vengeance to heaven, and unfortunately – it will stay impossible to overwhelm past due to nationalistic superstitions.

The second anticipation of raising a hypothetical partner to power is, of course, at the heart of Polish politics, but in erstwhile years the leadership of the Law and Justice Office has done everything to exclude it. All the more humiliating to the right was the equivalent of Prime Minister Morawiecki, who, after losing elections, in the period of pushing the alleged "two-week government" publically renounced everything – the function of the head of government as well as the right to form its policy, offering both to the PSL leader. specified shocking changes, made overnight, can sometimes be allowed by absolute rulers, but in democratic politics specified volts only origin grief.

For years, the fight against the peasant organization and the open preaching of necessity forbidding its electorate was the very core of the political tactics of the PiS. This thought was not abandoned even after the 2019 election, thus urging president Kosiniak Kamysz to search rescue in a bizarre alliance with the large-town and liberal Holownian movement. All of this could only make sense if the PiS could be a certain coalition partner on the far right. However, this could not be certain, and, rightly, no specified illusions were made in the leadership of the party.

Unfortunately, another large dilemma looks more complex, which the Polish right is facing. This is the setting of the boundaries of the field on which the inevitable “war of culture” will be carried out for the future. Political participation in this war, the essence of which is in fact metapolitical, is in the first place the ideological work of the right. But – nevertheless crucial – in Polish conditions it will besides be for a long time, for a large number of voters, a decisive motive for election decisions. I myself do not hide the fact that for any time this motive has been superior to political matters in my own decisions about the choice of the organization for which I vote; and in this respect, I have the impression, I am an electorate in a typical way. The point is that nobody truly has yet to have a reliable diagnosis of the transformation that Polish society is subject to. Is it that, like Spain or Ireland, we have just entered a steep way of "progress", which in the close future will make Poles an avant-garde of the fresh postmodern darkness that has already taken over a large part of the democratic world? Or on the contrary, the cultural aggression of this neo-darkness becomes oppressive adequate that in Poland it will origin a wave of counter-revolution? And these are not only questions about the future of culture, but besides about the very essence of future politics.

The fact is that wherever the cultural right has been gaining a crucial political influence these days, it is the right which has gone to far-reaching concessions to the force of the camp of progress. This is the evolution that the Marine Le Pen organization has undergone in France, and now it is passing in Italy – the Giorgia Meloni party. In Poland, the Law and Justice organization has spread, symbolically speaking, between the cultural faction of dogmatics, symbolized by specified figures as Minister Czarnek and curator Nowak, and pragmatists – under the leadership of Morawiecki himself. If we look from the position of the power dispute, the first is the charge that they have an unconscious contribution to mobilization against the right of the young generation in October 2023, and towards others – that their wobblyness is the responsibility of the accelerated seduction of the minds of the younger part of society by the wave of neo-darkness, which, however, has the unusual power of prompting people to irrational belief that it is progress. The point is that both of these allegations, although seemingly contradictory, accurately describe different aspects of the same reality.

Makiawel's prudent lesson of "Contemplations" would propose that politics "must always take care of their times and adapt to them"; otherwise, policy takes the form of a fight against windmills. So if you draw any conclusion from this lesson, at least for the next fewer years it seems alternatively clear. Since it can no longer be doubted that the fresh centre-left authority, which is only for longer governments, is going to follow the sharp course of "progress" in specified delicate policy areas as school, education, religion and customs, the request of "adaptation to time" requires giving primacy to cultural hawks, as the opposition of pigeons will naturally be soft, poorly heard, and as a consequence politically unfit. Even if it is not a settlement of the long-term dilemma that cultural change brings to politics, it may in any case be a temporary modus operandi, allowing a coherent policy to be pursued today.

However, while in the substance of the dispute over culture, despite interior tensions, the right has already developed a language of describing facts, and so – besides a certain reliability of this description, it is simply a completely fresh reality for it to collide with the practice of limited state of emergency which has not yet been known in free Poland. It consists of a point suspension de facto (but not de jure) by the authorities for a period of any existing law, in order to facilitate the acquisition of uncontrollable institutions. This is simply a practice that should rapidly and effectively strike the most delicate interests of the right in the intention of power, after which, as shortly as possible, the aim should be to reconstruct the average regulation of law.

At the minute erstwhile I compose this text, that is, in the last days of 2023, it is not yet known whether it is simply a one-time concept of the ruling centreleft, motivated by overvalue by the ruling meanings of control over television? Or is it a developmental concept that will lead to a broad change of the arrangement of forces in Polish politics?

But quite a few further, yet unknown dilemmas will require reflection and resolution, depending on real circumstances. How can we make a political language describing specified events erstwhile the classical language "lawless vs. regulation of law" has been acquired in erstwhile years by Tusk camp? From what point of practice can opposition beyond the laws besides justify a limited state of emergency? What can we do to guarantee that specified a crucial escalation of political conflict does not endanger the safety of the country in the event of an expanding hazard of a war of powers? It can be said without a shadow of exaggeration that in general Polish politics are facing dilemmas that have not been faced in the last 2 generations. But especially for the power removed, weakened and violently attacked right hand, it will prove to be a time of large trial.