News / Poland's PiS government falls into its own trap on the issue of disabled children [12]

The recent actions of the Polish government seem to become more and more chaotic. After the Minister of Family, Labour and Social Policy, Elżbieta Rafalska, failed to quench the fire caused by the protest of parents of disabled children in the buildings of Parliament, President Andrzej Duda has decided to intervene into the conflict, unexpectedly and much to the surprise of the government.

In reply, the parents have instantly shown him his promises from his electoral campaign which have not been kept to.

These promises were to immediately increase benefits for the families in care of their disabled children, benefits that have been scandalously low in Poland for many years.

As soon as Mr Duda had taken over as President, he gladly forgot about these promises of his.

Instead, the Minister of Social Policy in the new PiS government has readily embarked on the 500+ programme, a program of financial help for families having more than one child. The programme does not discriminate between families which are poor and those families which are financially well-off.

Mr Duda has then promised money to the disabled children and their families, but he risks nothing saying that since the money has to be found by Minister Elżbieta Rafalska and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

The latter has thus been forced, so to speak, to arrive in the Sejm to meet the families in question, but has not managed to quench the fire, too. On the contrary, he added fuel to the fire by declaring a necessity to increase tax for the more affluent people in order to get the money to cover the costs of the benefits the parents of the disabled children demand.

And here we come to the core of the problem: several months ago when good economic conditions in the world resulted in increased income to the state budget in Poland, the then Prime Minister Beata Szydło pompuously declared that it was enough not to steal and there would be money for everything in the state budget.

And we did not have to wait long - the so called practitioners-residents went on strike and called on the state budget to pay them more causing a crisis in the result of which the Minister of Health resigned.

And when at a PiS convention last Saturday PM Morawiecki announced an intention to pay 300 zloties to the parents of each pupil who starts a school-year in September (shortly before the local elections in November) and also promised billions for pensioniers, he gave a clue to the voters that the state budget is botomless. It was only a matter of time for other social groups to say "we check". And thus the PiS government has fallen into its own trap: it discovered that making the method of giving away budget money the main weapon to gain popularity (recently broken by the "rewards scandal" in which the ministers of that government paid out generously to themselves) may have its serious restrictions. It is not enough just not to steal, as Beata Szydło said, - one has to take other people's money to finance someone's endless populist promises!

(post based on the commentary of Michał Sułdrzyński in the RZECZPOSPOLITA daily)