Polish politics. Too content by half

Despite the woes of their ethnic kin in Belarus, the prosperous Poles risk becoming too jaded - and apolitical - for their own good

POLAND'S eastern border is not only the frontier of the European Union. It also marks a divide between two political worlds. On one side, there is Belarus, whose rulers yearn for the Soviet era. On the other, there are the EU's new members, who saw the end of communism as a longed-for liberation of their human, political and economic potential, a liberation that is now in progress.

“All Poles are anti-Communist,” says a Polish politician, Roman Giertych, an outspoken critic of the Belarussian regime. “And just 20km from the border in the town of Grodno, you have a statue of Lenin, in a street named after Karl Marx.” Mr Giertych's views have been sharpened by recent events: Poland has just recalled its ambassador from Belarus, in protest at the authorities' repressive treatment of an ethnic Polish minority that numbers 400,000 or more. There have been pickets of the Belarussian embassy in Warsaw, and protest rallies elsewhere. Belarus has responded, with state-controlled television claiming that Polish politicians are American puppets and that “America wants to capture all of Russia, and Belarus is a gateway to Russia.”

For Polish citizens, the sight of their kin chafing under neo-Soviet rule recalls the cold war's bracing certainties. But in domestic politics, nobody is rushing back to the barricades. Even as many Poles reap the benefit of liberal economics, they find liberal democracy a yawn. Attitudes to the parliamentary elections due in September, and the presidential one the following month, are cynical and apathetic.

Radio RMF, one of the two big independent stations, has decided not to cover the elections at all. “Our listeners don't like politicians so we don't want to give them free advertising,” says Marek Dworak, a director. That's a startling retreat: RMF (full name: “Radio Music and Facts”) was the first independent station in the former Soviet empire, set up explicitly to promote free information and democracy.

It is easy to see why voters are fed up. Polish politicians are a mostly mediocre lot, keener on squabbling with each other than talking (let alone listening) to the voters. Campaigning in the mainstream of politics is lacklustre and patronising; in more radical backwaters, it is weird, verging on the mad. Even in parties that try to call themselves clean there is a whiff of corruption; in others there is an outright stench. The country's only world-class politician is the outgoing president, Aleksander Kwasniewski. He earned international recognition for brokering a peaceful transfer of power in neighbouring Ukraine during last year's revolution. No one else, least of all from the right-of-centre parties likely to win the elections in September, shows much sign of matching him.

Prosperity makes apathy an affordable self-indulgence. The country's middle class is thriving thanks to EU membership. Lynka, an American-owned firm in Cracow that makes promotional clothing, used to have export sales of only a few hundred thousand dollars, less than 5% of turnover. That was the effect of high tariffs, and - worse - the capricious and inefficient reign of the Polish customs office, which could take a fortnight to process a shipment. Joining the EU's single market has sent Lynka's exports soaring, up tenfold this year compared to 2002, to around €3m ($3.7m) or 15% of turnover. It has taken on 20 extra staff, tripling the size of its export department.

Yet even in the realm of economics, there is plenty for the public - and politicians - to worry about. Poland's growth, although likely to be nearly 4% this year, is tailing off; unemployment, at 17.9%, is the highest in the EU. Among the under-25s it is a startling 39.5%. That, says Pawel Dobrowolski, a reform-minded economist, is because mismanagement has privileged insiders over outsiders and stifled competition, making the economy less liberal and less open than it was when communism collapsed. “Fifteen years ago, a bright multilingual graduate could expect to be a director of a company,” he says. “These days a bright multilingual graduate is happy to get a job in a salad bar.”

Poland's other big problem is the expensive and inefficient public sector, which gobbles 45% of GDP. Even the high taxes won't raise enough to feed that, so the government plans to borrow a further 35 billion zlotys ($10.5 billion) this year, to plug a deficit of nearly 6% of GDP. That sucks resources from the private sector; worse, the state doesn't work well, destroying wealth and jobs with intrusive, time-consuming bureaucracy.

This is not a uniquely Polish problem - every post-communist country is wrestling with the difficulties of public-sector reform. But Poland seems particularly bad at controlling spending and standing up to special-interest groups. Last month, miners demanding the right to retire after 25 years at work besieged the parliament. That was an emotional echo of the Solidarity trade-union protests of 1980, which destroyed the credibility of a system where bureaucrats ruled in the name of the proletariat. But this time the case was much weaker: Poland already has too many pensioners on generous benefits and the lowest employment rate in the EU, at a mere 52% of the working-age population. The protest resulted in a dozen injuries and a score of arrests - and the government promptly caved in, which will cost the wobbly national budget up to 6 billion zlotys a year by 2015.

That reflects a lack of focus. Other countries, such as neighbouring Slovakia, have a cross-party consensus about the need to reform, involving simpler taxes, a better education system and eagerness to learn from abroad. Poland, by contrast, seems introverted and complacent, when its post-communist rivals are managing considerably faster growth rates. “The difference between 7% and 4% growth is the difference between catching up western Europe's standard of living in my lifetime, or my children's,” says one thoughtful Polish businessman. “We are the sleeping tiger of Europe, but it is time we woke up.”

For all that, Poland's problems are those of the victors, not the vanquished, Voter apathy, public-sector inefficiency and greedy protectionist lobbies are headaches shared by developed democracies the world over. Compared with ten years ago, let alone 15 or 20, Poland has done hugely well: government is better organised and more responsive, infrastructure (particularly telephones) far better. One simple sign of this: most Belarussians would love to have Poland's difficulties - and the reverse is far from true.

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