Last week was the 15th anniversary of the death of the founder and leader of Self-defense, Andrzej Lepper. Occasional publications on the subject focused mainly on the sidelines of his activities and the effect he undoubtedly had on our public life.
However, it is worth to look a small deeper and effort to see the function of the Polish rebel against the neoliberal transformation against the background of the wider panorama of the Polish public debate. Firstly, Lepper was undoubtedly a supporter of the sovereignty of Polish politics. He knew that it was a condition for any policy. Without it, for example, there is no question of the revision of ownership relations created in our country after 1989. Lepper claimed that these ownership relationships could be greatly altered. He felt that his readiness for specified changes would be demonstrated by his coalition partners (it was guaranteed by Jarosław Kaczyński, who possibly the leader of Self-defense did not have adequate discernment, remaining deaf to warnings by more experienced politicians trying to make him aware that the president of the Law and Justice was and remains a notorious fraud and manipulative). Lepper demanded things at first glance: a revision of the privatization of the 1990s, i.e. an effort to recover at least part of Polish property and national property. The appropriate procedure was to be dealt with specifically for this committee, which would examine each case of privatisation separately. In cases where it would appear that the abroad purchaser of a given establishment did not comply with the obligations entered into (for example, appropriate investments, improvement studies or the maintenance of the level of employment), the privatisation act would be invalid and the entity would return to the State Treasury.
Lepper besides believed that the sovereign state could not let certain practices in its territory to be carried out by troops and abroad services. This active both the stationing of American soldiers in our country, as well as the operations of centres controlled by abroad interviews or peculiar services (such as those in Mazury, where third-country nationals were illegally and detained in our territory). So he spoke to the leader of Self-defense about the request to break Poland out of American curatela.
At the same time, he besides highlighted the problem of abroad debt in our country. Here again he advocated sovereignty, which is the maximum limitation of our dependence on international, most frequently simply Western financial institutions. He understood perfectly well that this dependence in practice prevented any action leading to an independent economical policy. The political dictatorship, known as the Washington Consensus, followed the credit lines. The planet Bank or the global Monetary Fund in exchange for the support given to us at the time demanded the beginning of, among another things, the already mentioned privatisation, but besides the deregulation or slow, real liquidation of public services.
So he spoke to Lepper all the years of his political way about 3 sovereigntys: 1) economic; 2) political-military; and 3) financial. Without each, there is no question of any policy being pursued due to the fact that it is limited to management, leaving only an highly narrow margin for modelling certain decisions and addressing them to individual interest groups. Policies turn into administration of not your resources.
Andrzej Lepper, calling for the sovereignty of these 3 areas, could not yet witness the highly far-reaching failure of the government of the Polish authorities associated with the increasingly voracious expansion of the competence of the European Union. Nor did he see the time erstwhile the Polish territory was utilized to transfer arms to another's war, or direct, public and unhidden interference of 1 of the diplomatic institutions in Warsaw into the law created in the Polish parliament. So after he died, it got worse.
However, he can be considered 1 of the precursors of Polish sovereignty. And that he was accused of populism? It's all right. Subsequent ruling teams represented and represented the interests of minorities (e.g. the wealthiest compradators and managers employed by abroad corporations, and on the another hand lobbyists of noisy cultural and moral minorities). This aspect of his achievements in Polish public life someway many of us escape. Wrong.
Mateusz Piskorski
Przemyśl Polska, nr 33-34 (16-23.08.2016)
