Karol Nawrocki - the New President of Poland

The new president will be Mr. Nawrocki. Bravo Mr. President.

Alfons Narodowy! Banaś (były alfons narodowy) już przekazał pas i kielich alfonsowy.

Has the Soros Foundation sent you to Poland?

let the simpleton have his programmed three minutes of hate.

Is this Soros Foundation in the room with us now?

@CMS Neuf

You said Poland has been voting the same way since 1815. I did some Googling around right now - and history does not support your claim.

Let's forget about 1815, and look at things post 1991 (since these are election results we can all trust). Over this stretch of time, these election results represent the narrowest margin of victory for the winning candidate.

To me - this 50/50 result means Poland is entering a very "American" style of politics with maximum polarization and endless culture wars. The only winner from such a set-up is media companies - these work diligently to ensure that every subsequent election result is also decided by the thinnest of margins. This keeps the electorate's eyes glued to their phone screens, as they anxiously scroll for more arguments about why the other side is made up of irredeemable idiots.

PiS is obviously the Fox News crowd - to continue my American parallels. Their bread and butter is "Nationalism" and "Catholicism".

PO people watch CNN - because they are "Cosmopolitan" and "Pluralist".

Any time the people begin to lose interest and actually start paying attention to real problems - TVP (Fox News) and TVN (CNN) will begin pouring battery acid on people's brains with the same three subjects as in America:

1) LGBT
2) Abortion
3) Migration

People will go mad, and ready to claw each others throats out debating the difference between a 4 week and a 12 week fetus (if even this applies to only 0.1% of abortions). Alternatively, whether or not a man can go into a women's bathroom.

The end result is that you will be like America - where everybody hates everybody, and every election is 50/50. A perfect 50/50 hate ratio is needed to maximize advertising revenue for media companies. Otherwise, with a 60/40 or 30/70, people may begin to tune out and watch National Geographic instead.

Everyone has to be maintained in a state of perpetual psychosis. Poland A vs Poland B. Urban dandy vs Village idiot. Noble Catholic vs Dirty Jew.

Poland shouldn't feel alone. This Americanification of politics is also happening in France. They even found themselves a candidate with the name "Jordan", and discuss the same inane drivel that Americans discuss in their politics.

I didn't mean they had been voting that way - more than that fissure in the country has existed since 1815

You can see it in the maps of railways, roads, sanitation systems, levels of English achievement in schools, taxes paid, gdp per head and basically any other measure of well being, apart from number of trees.

I think there is a thread on that somewhere here. You can search for it. There are some interesting maps there.

The reasons are obvious and should be dear to your heart - the continued influence of North Nigerian colonial rule, 107 years after it finished. It's no wonder the Ukrainians want to break those chains for good

I wonder if there are any malign state actors who spend billions encouraging the same?

I don't know, but it is a good indicator of who has been brainwashed by progressivism.
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That division is not new. It has been there for a long time.
What you noticed is a reaction of a good old nationhood to the forceful implementation of progressivism.

I mean the 50/50 nature of things.

America used to go "all out" for certain candidates. You had genuine "landslides" in American politics.

Now, it doesn't matter who is contesting the elections. The Democrats could put forth a macaque and the Republicans a chimpanzee - and the results would still be 49/51 at best. People would begin to wear t-shirts with "I Was Macaque Before It Was Cool" and "Chimp for Life".

The same happened in the Byzantine Empire, where politics at one point largely boiled down to which team you supported at the chariot races.

Just think about it - how bizarre is it that America has so many elections decided by razor thin margins? Between Bush and Gore it went down to hundreds of votes, in a country of several hundred millions. It's statistically improbable, and logically broken. The only "good" answer is that the American system is so perfectly designed, that it yields the most optimized candidates every single time.

The "bad" answer is that Supreme Court decisions have made it so, that the American elections are just a wall-on-wall competition of tug of war. Any ammunition and any weapon is fair in this fight.

It doesn't matter that it literally splits American families in half. Americans don't realize how bizarre they look to outsiders. I have a colleague, who says that him and his wife "don't have any Republican people in their immediate family or circle of friends".

The story of someone dreading to go home for Thanksgiving, because they will see their Trumpist family is already a cliche. People think it's normal - but in reality it shows what an absolutely sick country it is.

This Americanification is what is coming your way - I think. Discussing bullshit problems all day, and being ready to kill each over it.

I feel I know what is coming next Bobko - that democracy is a fetish and a dictatorship will deliver better more efficient results and more national unity.

Save your keystrokes - however bad Nawrocki could be, he is still better than any unelected NN Nazi thief, and we have a good chance to get rid of him in 5 years.

Beyond just simple mimicking - Poland has itself been penetrated by the forces that made American politics into a circus.

Ownership of media - same people. AxelSpringer - whose most valuable asset was Politico. Politico.eu, is now incidentally spreading the same toxic venom it grew up on in Washington. Warner Bros owns TVN - and it's operated exactly like an American cable channel.

The way elections are covered - I could have sworn I was in America. Midnight updates with by the minute reports on demographic makeup, and millions of charts - and breathless hosts urging viewers to "stay in front of the TV as Poland goes to vote in the most important election in a generation."

All this is poison, and it leads to nowhere good.

Soon you'll be like America, where the only thing you can all agree on is that you urgently need to raise the debt ceiling to "pay for the mistakes of the previous administration". Nothing else will be possible to do, as it will be hopelessly mired in gridlock.

Most real growth will come from whatever free cash Brussels drops from the sky.

I thought about it....and I found that every election (at least in european countries as lately in Poland) show the main border lays mainly between city and country side!

This is a growing tension which seems to disrupt our societies if that is not somehow solved.

There is a majority living not in the big cities which just doesn't want to be ruled by the urban-minded folks, it seems. And there are people which describe themselves as "modern, open, progressive, educated" etc. which on the other hand dread to be ruled by "traditional, nationalist, conservatives".

Frankly, its Rainbow Flag against Country Flag!

Or...as we Germans call it: "Kulturkampf"....

Your USA-Poland analogy is almost perfect. Almost.

You are wrong in the part that I highlighted. The progressive and the conservative side may indeed consider each other "irredeemable idiots" but in Poland there is no real hatred between them.

Do you think Ironside hates me? Do you think I hate Korvinus? Think again. This is Poland. We can argue and fight between one another but should a foreigner raise his hand against one of us, 40 million will strike him back. Sure, Podkarpacie are a bunch of hillbilly rednecks but try to hurt them and Pomeranian troops will be all over you like a honey badger on a cobra. Deploy a landing force on the coast of Gdańsk, which those hillbillies consider a modern version of Babylon lol, and Podkarpacie riflemen will give you hell like in 1920. So, if Владимир Владимирович is counting on one day invading a divided Poland, he'll be sorely disappointed.

EDIT:

Why is the election thread closed? I wanted to brag about the results in my beloved city...



... Gdańsk forever! :)

Because you are still at Stage I or II of the cancer.

In America Republicans and Democrats also used to intermarry, have barbecues together, and even pass bipartisan legislation. It was not shameful, for a Republican Congressman to attend the wedding of his Democrat colleague. Nobody tried to hide the fact that they went to the same fraternity, at the same university.

In America people used to actually have to think before providing an answer to something, rather than picking the ready-made argument from a list of party approved talking points.

The cable news channels and social media ended all that. Now if they see you shaking your Democrat colleague's hand, they'll cancel you on Twitter. If you allowed 1% of nuance into your actions - like disagreeing with Trump on some issue important to your local voters - then the national party will put $25 million dollars behind a campaign to primary you out of existence.

So yes - Americans also used to not hate each other. Now it's like two parallel countries living side by side.

Wait, and give the hate time to grow. You have things like monoethnicism which will act for some time as a break on the hate, but eventually it won't be enough to hold back the demons of American style politics.

Americans are also teaching our guys the same tricks.

Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chief that went to jail for working for Viktor Yanukovych, had also consulted a Russian party on how to win elections the "American way".

Even corrupt-to-the-core Russian and Ukrainian cynics are just amateurs next to the crooks from Washington.

Poland is more nuanced as a rule, although yes, there are some disturbing trends and someone somewhere is paying to propagate them.

Those tacky long beards and 'manosphere' crapola. Someone is pushing that. Also the bound presentation volumes of 'Ayn Rand' that in Europe you only seem to see in Poland. Someone is pushing that.

Someone?

Geee, I wonder who that someone might be? Hmmmmm....

Is this "someone", somebody that sent their Homeland Security Secretary to stump for Nawrocki at a rally in Jasionka?

Did this "somebody", ensure that the second ever CPAC event in Europe happened in Poland? The first one was in Hungary in 2022, in support of Orban.

Did this mysterious entity send his Vice President to a European security conference, where he read them lectures about their rotten political systems?

Does this "someone", have an ideologue named Steve Bannon, that's now going around saying that Trumpism can only really succeed when it is exported worldwide?

Very concerning things you are reporting, Jon.

You have many good points, but if a person knows about the events of the Roman Republic, the horrors of dynastical feuds in Italy in it's renaissance period.

Then comparing nowadays politics in Poland to Poland's political climate in 17-hundreds (especially late part) it isn't all that dramatic and very unlikely to worsen cause of the invasion of Ukraine.

The media picture will be as it is, but people in Poland with ties to solidarity from 1980's know perfectly well that media can't be trusted and situation is also not the same as in 1920 politically.

Seeing that the feud between Kaczyński's and Tusk isn't as "hardcore" as it was in early 1990's I see mostly improvement. Not worsenening

There were no "politics" in Poland in the "late" 17-hundreds. Just annexations.

What had led Poland to that series of annexations, was precisely the kind of political gridlock which you see now.

Instead of Liberum Veto, you have a PO Prime Minister and PiS President.

One group of magnates, stopping the other group of magnates from achieving anything worth note.

As other states that neighbored Poland centralized and modernized, Poland was busy mediating internal political squabbles. Once they had become overwhelmingly stronger than Poland, the neighbors played its politicians off against each other - and they sold the country to the highest bidder.

Extreme political polarization precedes system collapse.

They do, your lot do (and spend even more in it) and probably China too.

Destabilising and polarising societies. Or online comments anyway.


Their government are cüntish however yours are worse.

This whole phenomenon will grow and grow until it ceases to work. We've seen peak gammon in the more developed parts of Western Europe. It's less effective in France.

For Poland, the Polish-Polish war is nothing new. It's part of the culture and that of course helps to foster a more nuanced attitude. Decades of authoritarian and laughably unrealistic propaganda helps to foster cynicism and scepticism. Nuance and scepticism are the propagandists's worst enemy.

We don't possess even a fraction of the resources they possess. We don't have Hollywood. We don't have Taylor Swift. Neither do we have Youtube or X.

Whatever China does is always comical. Their ability to read Western and Russian audiences is abysmal. The type of propaganda they put out makes me embarrassed on their behalf.

One of the things that will truly limit China's "superpowerdom" - their inability to speak to other people in a compelling way.

You spend twice as much per year on it as the entire budget of NHS England. Slightly more than twice.


I've always felt the same. But wonder nowadays if their AIs (their best and most super secret one, better than the best that your country and mine and the U.S. have, even the ones we don't know about) also have the same Chinese mentality. That would be a dangerous thing.

Now they just seem to sit and wait, and undercut and sell.

China doesn't know how to talk to the rest of the world, because it is fundamentally uncurious about the lives of the rest. America suffers from the same, but still to a lesser extent because of its international makeup.

China doesn't know what it wants from other people - beyond buying its goods.

Contrast that with Russia, that has a long list for how it would like everyone and their mother to live.

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China has an imperial tributary system. If you need something from China, come to Beijing, kowtow before the emperor, enjoy your gifts and f*ck off.

It literally showers Pakistan and Africa with money, and gets squat in return (despite everyone's apocalyptic concerns).

If Russia sent somebody the type of money that China sends, it would have a military base, insist on everyone being sent to Moscow to study, and forbid any kind of interaction with America.

To make it easier to understand. That election was a plebiscite of those who support the current government and those who think it is incompetent.
To a large extent.
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It is, you are right, it is a part of it.
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The organization of the political system in Poland is faulty, I know that, and I have a solution.

You'd barely believe the speed of it in Africa. Roads appearing in days. Huge limos of unknown make with Chinese writing on appearing in the car parks of ministries.

I get about in that region from the top to more than halfway down the continent and the sheer speed and scale of what they're doing is a wonder to see.

In return? They're playing the long game. What isn't strategically important now may well bee important in three or four generation's time. They look that far ahead.

I was laughing last night. The way the goo Mayor was smiling, and Tusk was off to the side hiding. He knew it was too close to celbrate. Well at least now, Warsaw wont be the center of attention, and all the western crazy ideas will be shot down pretty quickly.

Well, yeah, Bobby. Nothing but complete dictatorship will save the world or the world capitulate to the knowledge and wisdom of PF bloviators, the cream of
political geniuses concentrated in a room with no keys and rubberized walls. Will you descend from the clouds, please, and reclaim your God-given brains, and start talking normally? You've already used all the available oxygen. With advancing hypoxia, who knows, you might be responsible for starting the storm in the teacup.
I vote for Marco Rubio; he seems to be a good substitute for homegrown experts.

Yes. He should have said "It looks good but it's too soon for a full celebration"


Trzaskowski convincingly won Warsaw with just over 68 % of the vote.... Varsovians are going to what? Because of block-voting by the Southeast?

One percentage vote difference does not signal any big changes in the country, just more division.

And the presidential dummy is stuck in Rudy's spokes and we can sleep easier. Now we just have to wait until the next parliamentary elections and... ehh let's be honest, there will still be POPiS, although at least a reduced one. There probably won't be any real changes until Tusk and Kaczor leave this world, then we can only have a small hope that without their leaders their parties will sort themselves out in internal civil wars. I guess that then new people will start popping up like mushrooms after the rain to sort it all out, probably only accidentally funded from abroad..