Life / Stereotypes about Polish people being stupid? [281]


Also known as "the approach followed in Poland by many Montessori places".

I visited a "Montessori" nursery once (that can remain nameless to protect the guilty) as part of the teacher training here. The place was a shambles, as it was clearly obvious that the owner had established it to make money and nothing else. They were clearly changing things to meet parental demands, the teachers were dreadful and very inexperienced, and you could see that they had no real idea beyond some books.

I went to a different one, owned and managed by a real Montessori teacher, and you could see the difference - she was very honest that financially, it was a struggle, and that to provide the kids with a great environment for learning, she had to spend most of her evenings applying for various grants and prizes. She was telling me how parents would come, argue with the philosophy and then take their kids out when she wouldn't bend and break to their demands. Her answer was always the same - it's a Montessori nursery, and if they want something different, they should go elsewhere.

It's the same with the democratic schools that are set up here. They don't work for various reasons, and that's speaking as someone who adores the lunatic that was A.S. Neill. Parents think they're some magic solution, but they panic as soon as they realise that their kid isn't actually attending all these lovely lessons, but instead prefers to sit around doing nothing.

Life / Stereotypes about Polish people being stupid? [281]


No, there's definitely some environmental factors there too. I had a lecturer at UAM in Poznań who showed me this article - aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/TheEarlyCatastrophe.pdf - if you're not familiar with it, it's well worth a read as it shows how early the differences start.

Life / Stereotypes about Polish people being stupid? [281]


Is it not also about being 'trained' to do the tests? When I was fooling around with them, my score went from around 122-124 to around 130, but that seemed to be rather a result of getting used to the testing format rather than anything else. A quick look on Google shows that Asian countries are scoring highest, but wouldn't this be rather a consequence of their ridiculously heavy test-based schooling? It seems hard to believe that Cuba would only have 85 on average, when Cuban schools are well regarded and they do an absolutely fantastic job with literacy.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

Final results: PiS won only 6 out of the 107 largest cities (which have a President of the City rather than a mayor/head of the commune). The largest place they won was in Zamość with 65,000 people - everything else went against them. They lost many places in their heartlands, including Sanok, Siedlce and Nowy Sącz.

Full results here: oko.press/krzyzyk-na-pis-na-107-miast-prezydenckich-rzadzic-beda-tylko-w-6-ko-w-28-triumf-niezaleznych

What's notable about these results is that PiS barely increased their votes in the second round. PiS lost nearly 3:1 in Przemyśl despite Kaczyński giving a fiery speech there, they lost in in Nowy Sącz despite Duda turning up in the graveyard to support their candidate, and they even lost in Biała Podlaska to KO, despite crushing PO there in 2014.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

Yeah, it's quite interesting how it evolved. There's some news about how attendance at religion classes in Łódź has dropped by half in just 3 years (from 80 to 40%), and this might just be further evidence of that.

The bad news for PiS in these results is that they seem to have completely failed at picking up voters from other parties. I'm also quite surprised, I expected Wassermann to get even as high as 45% of the vote, but she was a long way away from it.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

And so, the results of the second round in the mayoral elections.

PiS have been beaten badly in the two key races in Kraków and Gdańsk - almost 2/3rds went to Majchrowski and Adamowicz, while they've also lost in Kielce by a similar margin. They've also lost in Radom, meaning that PiS have lost 18:1 in the 19 biggest Polish cities. The only city where they "won" was in Katowice, where they supported the independent mayor.

Life / Stereotypes about Polish people being stupid? [281]

Competitive programming? The article makes it clear that it's not actually that popular, and that they have little real world application.

I suspect the real reason for Poles ranking highly in them is that the cash rewards are good by Polish standards, but poor by Western standards.

Off-Topic / Ukraine, Belarus, Russia in EU in 2030? [89]


Moldova, possibly. The rest, no chance. Ukraine might get a Turkey style agreement with the Customs union, but that's as far as it'll go.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Yet you seem to push their politics constantly. Are you like Jaki, who was so ashamed of the party that he represented that he claimed to be an independent candidate? Or like Wassermann, who is also claiming the same thing in Kraków?


There's nothing better about ex-Communists looking after judicial "reform".


Not that tired old "we send tons of money back!" line again. You'll spend more than $50 a head in a decent restaurant in Poland, so their pitiful contribution means nothing.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

Quite, Doug. I always find these people keenly pushing PiS from abroad to be clearly doing it for their own benefit.

It's very similar to the way that the "Polish-American Congress" was paid off in the US.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Yup, exactly that! ;)


So why are you promoting PiS, who put an ex-SB boss in charge of the biggest Polish company? Or the same party that put a Communist prosecutor in charge of the justice committee? Or indeed, the same party that has the child of a well known PZPR doctor as Justice Minister?

You don't despise communism at all.


It's rather about returning to that previous system. You mentioned it before, how PiS tend to strangle and humiliate any talent they have while promoting mediocrity way beyond their level. Misiewicz was the poster child with his fat bumpkin arrogance, but there's many more of them all over Poland.

Look at the WIG20 - it was at 2500 before the 2015 Presidential election, now it's down to 2100. Given that it's dominated by state-controlled companies, it's a clear sign that PiS are mishandling state assets.

As for Kaczyński, one simply didn't get into legal studies (and one certainly didn't get 5 in Marxism) without being up to their ears in the previous system.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Oh look, "anti-communist" PiS forming a coalition with actual post-communists.

Comrades of different colours, that's all.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


How much money did they inject into the Polish banking system? How about their experience and know-how that made Poland a stable place to invest?

You're such a lovely old commie Greggy, even down to your pathological hatred of foreign capital.

Life / Polish Wedding March & Funny Hat [37]


Oh, but it is. Tell us more.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

Because it simply didn't happen, and it's a classic Communist myth to claim that it did. The PZPR used to claim that the "elites" also "sold out Poland", too.

The truth is that PiS are only against privatization because it stops them packing companies with their cronies.

Genealogy / Mongolian the Golden Horde - do Poles have Mongolian ancestry? [256]


Pretty obvious really. Those morons pushing the idea of "pure Poles" clearly have no idea about Polish history, or how some Poles had no real sense of identity as Poles up until WW2 - particularly in the Kresy.

Genealogy / Mongolian the Golden Horde - do Poles have Mongolian ancestry? [256]


Given the way that the Soviets behaved on Polish territory between 1939-1956, one wonders why he's so keen to downplay the Soviet involvement in Poland. The claim that the Red Army were "instructed not to make local communities hostile to the USSR" is particularly laughable.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Hasn't worked though. Births are down according to the latest data, and the spike seen was just a spike and not a long term trend.


This is probably where you don't get the full picture by not being here (no offence intended, it's quite difficult to get the full picture even living here - took me ages to figure all this out), but basically - Kukiz originally came about because a group of very powerful local mayors wanted to protect themselves (and their kingdoms) against central government. PO had imposed some mining taxes, which had reduced the income of those cities (CIT taxes are partially given to the place of residence of he company, while the mining tax went to central government). In retaliation, those mayors supported Kukiz to try and gain influence in national politics. He did better than expected in the Presidential election, so they supported him in the 2015 national election too. It very nearly worked - had Nowoczesna not existed, PiS would have needed K'15 to form a government.

So, move forward, and Kukiz starts to behave very erratically. His 'party' (officially it isn't one, hence they don't get central funding) started to push in all sorts of directions that those mayors didn't agree with, and Kukiz found himself quite isolated. Winnicki, Morawiecki and others left the K'15 grouping in the Sejm, and those mayors also broke formal cooperation with him when it became obvious that he was unable to influence government policy.

In this election, you'll notice that there's a grouping called "Bezpartyni Samorządowcy" - that's the group of these mayors, who are now attempting to get into national politics by themselves rather than through the rather ad hoc way that K'15 was formed. They don't really have much of a platform beyond "give us money for our towns", but in fairness, Lubin (the home of the effective leader of BS) is a very nice place to live, including one of the biggest and best public parks in Poland.

So anyway, in this election, Kukiz'15 effectively found themselves not only without the support of those mayors, but also without Morawiecki senior and Robert Winnicki. He had no real platform, no local structures and the K'15 candidates were nobodies. The message that he pushed leading up to the 2015 election is more or less identical to the one of PiS today, so he had really nothing to differentiate himself. Kukiz is trying now to focus on economic issues (for instance, pointing out the absurdity of spending huge amounts of cash on independence celebrations and not on disabled people) and he's doing a good job of it, but voters are mostly economically illiterate and simply don't understand.

That's why K'15 did badly, Effectively, the supporters of the BS mayors abandoned him, while he simply had nothing new or interesting to offer voters. To hold onto 6% of the vote was quite a good result, all things considered. However, the almost complete lack of grass roots support cost him badly - for instance in 2015, he had both Kornel Morawiecki and Robert Winnicki to pick up 1% each, which he didn't have this time.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Except they've also clearly shown that PiS have lost popularity since the 2015 election when they won nearly 38% of the vote. You can twist it how you want, but for a party that was boasting about having "secret polling showing 45% support", they've lost rather badly.


On those results? Not likely. They needed the 20% of wasted votes to get the majority, and those results clearly show that the same thing won't happen again. There's no chance of winning a majority with 33% of the vote unless the percentage of wasted votes goes up to 25% or more.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Yeah, many of them got bored very quickly with Kukiz. You hardly saw any of them this time round, and I don't think I saw a single poster of theirs.

However, it's good to see that the youth vote is so diverse.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Kukiz'15 aren't projected to win a single seat in the Sejmiki. That's what you call a party on the rise?

The projected results right now:

PiS - 257
KO - 192
PSL - 70
SLD - 10
BS - 10
MN - 5

Or to put it into a left/right split (with the exception of BS, who rarely mention anything about social issues - any alliance with PiS will be based on economic, not social matters)

PiS: 257
KO/PSL/SLD/MN - 277

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


PiS are clearly the most left wing economically government since 1989. They even went as far as blocking up a mine rather than selling it to a foreign investor, which is left wing politics at the most insane.

In terms of economic policy, it's hard to see much difference between the 1997-2001 AWS government and the 2001-2005 SLD government.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Except it isn't. The election results show that clearly: conservatism has fallen since the 2015 election. Why are you persisting on pushing myths when we've just had an election to prove otherwise?


Except they came 4th among voters aged 18-29 in the election held two days ago. They only gained 13.6% of the youth vote.

It amazes me that people are still pushing a narrative that simply isn't true.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


People said the same about Spain and Ireland in the 1970's. It only took 40 years for them to collapse largely into irrelevance, and the same trends are seen in Poland since the 1990's too.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

They aren't and won't be. That's again a gross simplification and a wrong one.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


1st place doesn't mean anything in Polish politics, what matters is having over 50% of the available seats. Winning here is defined as whoever gets over the line, not who won the most votes. PiS had a lead of around 13% in 2015, now they're down to 7% and even less among young people, and they lost a huge amount of cities in the first round.

As it stands, PiS are a long way away from a majority next year.


They matter a lot. Regional governments are probably the most important source of decision making at a level people understand, such as hospitals and public transport. They're also responsible for distributing a lot of EU funds, which are hugely important in smaller towns as there's no way they can afford to make big investments by themselves.


Yet they didn't win a thing in these elections.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


They aren't. Most young people stayed away from the election (only 37% voted compared to a general turnout of 54%!), so right wing politics were supported by only 43% of 37% (of all voters aged 18-29) - what's that, about 16% of the youth electorate. It's really nothing at all to boast about, and you're massively exaggerating the influence of groups like Ruch Narodowy on young Polish people. The other key takeaway is that PiS only won narrowly over KO among people aged 18-29 - about 25% vs 21%, while Kukiz'15 was below even the PSL among young voters.

Most young people are simply apolitical in Poland and don't support anyone. Now, what *is* true is that young people have a far more diverse range of views than older people. KO+PiS were voted for by 70% of people that are 60 and over, but only by 45% of people 18-29. Those views are spread among many parties, and as I keep pointing out, the vote was split almost equally between left and right.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Combine KO with PSL and you've got the same. 1st place means nothing in a proportional representation system, it's about who has the most seats. Still in terms of percentage, left/centrist and right are all but equal and within the margin of error.


Latest news is that they've also lost control of the city council in Białystok. For the mayor and the city council there to be in the hands of the opposition is a clear sign that cities all over Poland have rejected PiS, not just rich cities. They really haven't won anything of note - I haven't checked for a couple of hours, but last time I checked, their biggest win was in Stalowa Wola.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]

Gaining popularity has nothing to do with the false claim that young Polish people are majority right wing.

News / Poland's post-election political scene [4080]


Quite so. They offer a validated view of what current politics show in Poland, and that the myth of Polish youth being right wing has been shattered. If there was any truth to it, we'd expect to see a strong majority in favour of right wing politics. As it stands, that simply isn't the case.


Not so interesting at all. In Lower Silesia, the Sejmik is divided between many different groups, more so than in other provinces. PiS winning a plurality doesn't mean much, because it's a five horse race. As for the rest of that map, what matters is who controls the provincial parliaments, not who won a plurality of votes.

Turnout was officially 54.24%, considerably higher than in 2014.