Greetings from Poland!

Sadly, there is no “Polish peace movement”. People are just afraid to speak up – the word “peace” became a dirty, indecent word.

Lately “Financial Times” wrote that “by buying weapons at a record pace, Poland has become a star member of NATO. Warsaw will spend 4.1 percent of Poland’s GDP on defence this year — just over twice the NATO target and ahead of the US”. But we are not done: in the 2025 budget, Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government allocated 4.7 percent of GDP – 43.5 billion euro – to armaments. For comparison, the entire Polish health care budget is 51.5 billion euro. And no one is opposing it.

There has just been a split in the Polish left. The party Razem (“Together”), considered to be the radical left (in fact it’s just a decent social democracy), left the parliamentary fraction of the united left, which is part of the ruling collation. Adrian Zandberg, de facto leader of Razem explained: “The government has brought to parliament a bad and anti-social budget, which hits public health care; which hits budget workers; which is very stingy when it comes to science, research, development housing, but very generous to millionaires, to banks and to developers”. He’s right. But – notice – not a word about arms spending. In Poland, if you question arms spending you automatically become a Russian agent. There is a special word for it: ruska onuca. Onuca is a piece of cloth used by the soviet army instead of socks.

The warmongering is working: in December last year, at the beginning of the new government, 64 per cent of Poles believed that it’s priority should be to improve the health system. 38 per cent indicated fighting inflation and mitigating its effects, 34 per cent. maintenance of social transfers. Only 36 per cent wanted investment in defence and security. In April, the survey, conducted by IBRiS and commissioned by “Rzeczpospolita”, serious daily, showed that 53.6 percent did not fear that the war in Ukraine will spill over into our country only; 27.3 percent had a different opinion, and as many as 19.1 percent had no opinion at all. But in July, after a few months of war rhetoric from Prime Minister, in the CBOS poll, 71 per cent of respondents strongly felt that Donald Tusk’s government should first and foremost be concerned with “improving the security of the state, strengthening defence”.

In October Donald Tusk, who is supposed to be a liberal European centrist, but wants to look like a strongman, announced that he will “temporarily suspend the right to seek asylum” in Poland. In the poll made for “Rzeczpospolita” by SW Research people was asked how they assessed Tusk’s announcement. 49.4 per cent of respondents answered “positively”. Tusk’s words were assessed negatively by 24.1 per cent of respondents. 26.6 per cent of respondents have no opinion on the matter.

When it comes to attitude toward Gaza, it’s even worst. Most Poles live in an “Eastern European cocoon”, where the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is the only problem in the world, so we don’t care very much about the other atrocity that we can observe in real time. In poll taken on April 19th – its worth noting that this day was 80th anniversary of Warsaw ghetto uprising, so there was some emotional blackmail going on – 66.7 percent of respondents said that Poland should not take a stand in the conflict. 6 percent would like to take the side of the Israelis, 10.9 percent indicated that Poland should support the Palestinians. A month later another poll showed that 66 percent of Poles think that Israel is committing war crimes by conducting operations in the Gaza Strip. So, we do know that there is a genocide going on – we just don’t care.

I don’t see any chance of changing this attitude anytime soon. Mainly, because officially, it’s not related to the social war: we supposedly have a lowest unemployment in EU – 2.9 percent. I am not sure this is accurate: group layoffs are everywhere, in state owned and private companies. We have quite symbolic unemployment benefit, so maybe people just do not bother to register. The situation of the public health service is dire, but it has been so for years. The raises for the budget zone planned for next year are symbolic – but employees are used to it. I fear that only a serious slump in the economy will change our attitude. And for this moment we must be prepared. Thanks to conferences like this one, it becomes a little more real.