Polexit? Almost half of the Poles believe that Poland would be better off outside of the EU

Not only mere unions but a whole countries used to split up in the past. It is not only possible but inevitable when there're such different aim and goals of an individual nantions.


Not if it was a marriage out of [misguided] love and the love is gone now. And there are no children to take care of either. Poland can remain a friends with [mutual] benefits with the EU ;-)

What aspects of Christianity is the EU against ? How many times has the EU commented on the teachings of Jesus ?

friends or (misguided) enemies, more often than not, @Spike31.

Face it, Poland needs the EU more than the EU does Poland.

Poland doesn't need the EU, which is a beaurocratic cancer with a leftist bias to put it mildly. What Poland needs is a European single market for trade to which access is granted to countries which aren't the EU members like Switzerland and Norway.

The wealth and economical progress comes from trading and from industrial innovation, exchange of services not from silly EU directives.

Not the Brexit arguments again....

And Britain had alot more going for it...being a net payer!

Just for your information:

"....From the perspective of the EU, the treaties contain largely the same content as the EEA treaties, making Switzerland a virtual member of the EEA. Most EU law applies universally throughout the EU, the EEA and Switzerland, providing most of the conditions of the free movement of people, goods, services and capital that apply to the member states. Switzerland pays into the EU budget...."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Union_relations

"...In 2008 Norway's contribution was €188 million. Throughout the programme period 2007-2013, the Norwegian contribution will increase substantially in parallel with the development of the EU programme budget, from €130 million in 2007 to €290 million in 2013. For the EEA and Norway Grants from 2004 to 2009, Norway provided almost €1.3 billion.[9][10]..."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway%E2%80%93European_Union_relations

They both pay dearly for all of it, after all being a member has it's privileges! Being "out" is just not the same...

Again....move out....and then buy your way back into the Single Market (after complicated and forever taking trade negotiations) but now without any vote at all and of course no more support funds...go on! Let's see how big the appetite for shooting itself in the foot is in the polish population!

Good luck!

PS: I'm not sure such a thoroughly capitalist success like the Single Market can be seen as something "leftist" at all....

At tremendous cost to them. Switzerland in particular has been obliged to accept all sorts of EU directives without having much of a say, all to retain free access to EU markets. If the Swiss with their economic power couldn't negotiate something better, Poland has no chance.

The EU countries have made it very clear that access to EU markets comes at a price. Poland is welcome to try and sell to the Eurasian Union, but they haven't been buying much for the last 30 years and they're not going to start now.


Remember, these people believe that Poland was an economic powerhouse prior to 2004. They have no real understanding of the fact that if Poland leaves the EU, so do European companies, just as they're leaving the UK. That leaves...what, exactly?

Of course, dear Spike will be along soon to tell us that actually, Polish state-owned companies were a great success before 2004, and that the heavy economic interventions were nothing but pure right wing economics.

Since they are still willingly participating in this deal it must be much more beneficial for them than the EU membership which I believe wouldn't be a problem for them to obtain in a short period of time. History teaches us that Swiss are a very reasonable people run by a smart elites.


Free Single market is not "leftist" idea at all. The EU bodies which regulate it are. If a farmer wants to sell a carrot to a customer who is willing to pay the asking price - that's a free market. If you put a beaurocrat between them who is going to check if the carrot has the right shape and length before he is able to buy it - you've got an EU single market.

To be honest, there is no anti-EU sentiment in Poland at all. The overwhelming majority of Poles, Our Dear Leader Chairman Jarosław Kaczyński included, do not want Poland to leave the EU. The opinions of the Polish expats here who were the first to leave Poland for the EU and have no intention whatsoever to come back to Poland even after a possible Polexit do not reflect the mood of the real Poles who have decided not to leave their Fatherland and still live in Poland.

The results of the poll quoted by the OP is very strange indeed as it is so much contradictory to another result telling that 70% of Poles would vote against leaving the EU. One reason may lie in the choice of people responding in the poll (it would be interesting to see the methodology of it), another may be attributed to the influence of the Goebbels-style propaganda that is continously served these days in the public TV and in other state-owned media in Poland.

Isn't it more accurate to say that the technocrats running Brussels have made it clear?


sounds hegemonic to me (who distrusts all hegemony....)


True, there's also no special emotional commitment to the EU. Polish attitudes toward the EU are extremely... utilitarian.

Ziemowit, I spend half of the year in the Fatherland, and half in the - soon to be out of the EU - UK. I also travel a lot around Europe, mostly to Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. This has helped me to develop a wider perspective on that matter.

Poland has made a huge economic progress and what's more important an awareness of a national interest has grown at the same time. I've got no doubt that a distrust to the EU political bodies will raise and a conservative right forces like Konfederacja will grow with young generation.

Poland right now represents more of a traditional European values than the Western European countries dipped in a leftist sause do. "Europe" is not only a geographical term but also a set of values which has shaped our continent for centuries. Let's not confuse an EU Gulag with traditional Europe.

Where was Poland before the EU? Economically speaking Nowheresville!!

Gulag? Seriously?

Too delicate?

You know what a Gulag is?

Do you? In Russian, gulag referred to the system of prison camps and not a specific prison camp (though English usage has evolved toward that)

....it is referred also to a lawless system to imprison political opponents (or what the mighty leader thought them to be), to a system of work till you drop, starvation, mass murder...

Really?

We can call it an EU Kolkhoz if you prefer @BratwurstBoy. What I'd like to do is to draw a pararell between the Soviet Union and the EU.

Both aim(ed) to deliver a "new man": the EU wants to create 'an European' (which would be a complete antithesis of a traditional meaning of what was considered to be an European) as opposed to Polish, French, Italian etc. who would be a citizen of the EU first and foremost. Soviet union wanted to develop a Homo Sovieticus.

And both systems also wanted to deliver a 'paradise on Earth' but by a different methods. The EU has chosen a soft Huxley-ian method based on deception instead of a hardcore Orwellian approach based on full frontal violence. It seems more bearable to most and that's the power of this approach. It's like boiling a frog. And yes, we are the frogs :-)

Why not call it Konzentrationslager? Why not Auschwitz?

It's all the same crap!

You know criticism is alright and often enough justified and necessary...but with those comparisons you only shoot yourself in the foot. Who should take you seriously after THAT?

After all it IS a fact that you can criticize and spout crap about the EU as much as you want...there will still be no Gulag or a mighty Secret Service knocking at your door deep in the night for you, you won't be kidnapped or jailed or murdered for what you say...think about that for a second!

That's what I'm calling it "boiling a frog" approach. The change is gradual but inevitable. And omnipresent. You can be deplatformed/demonitized from social media for sharing not 'politically correct' thoughts. Or you can loose your job for doing so on facebook. Or you can be ostracized for stating obvious facts which does't suit the official mainstream narrative.

So people often cope with it by auto-censoring themselves and not voicing any concerns. The falsely believe that by sitting quiet they will be safe. And the line of what is 'acceptable and inacceptable' what's to say and what's to do, is moving closer to them because there's no widespread resistance. I'm sure, being a German, you understand me more than anyone else may on this forum. You don't have to say nothing, it's enough for me that you know and that I know :-)

You know that "social media" is an US thing? Google...Facebook...Twitter....Insta....what about that is EU?

Okay...the Chinese are coming up...with their TikTok....and they are known to censor their internet quite heavily...Russia is developing their own "state net" too, that they can cut off at will if they want to...

Again, what about "social media" is owned and controlled be the EU?

Well, we have to deal with our local devils so let's start with Europe. The US was also penetrated by a cultural revolution.

Which "local devils" do you mean exactly?

Our social aka cultural revolution nearly ended up destroying the country, the effects of which may still be felt in the extent to which drugs, promiscuous sex and "free love" have left their sad remains on today's America!

The ultra-Left have the US the middle finger, flaunting its wanton disrespect for convention, notable tradition and errantly equating discipline, structure, and organization automatically with faschism.

Do their names really matter? Just an EU beaurocrats who share a similar vision of 'federal Europe'. Nothing significant about them. They are perfectly replaceable by a beaurocratic machinery. Only the position and the power which comes with it matters. The whole system needs to be derailed, not some individuals.

What killed the USSR was an economic collapse. The EU is still too wealthy by a wealth accumulated by past generations to die like that. What will bring it down is a rebirth of a local national awakening movements and lack of faith in a 'brave new European socialist paradise'

OF COURSE!

Otherwise you are talking about foggy conspiration theories....everybody and their grandmom has them...but that is nothing REAL!

Not the best base for politics btw...


You know, "wealth" is not something that springs first to mind thinking about a "socialist paradise!

I wonder what these "local national awakenings" are truly after if it's not the wealth and the freedoms of modern Europe...I wonder why you wish this to die...

It was a pretty stupid analogy.... I am extremely positive about the EU until 2008-09 when it went all in on backing private capital (ie private German banks) over social solidarity and became just another enforcer of the neoliberalism that everybody is thoroughly sick of...

I would love to see it regain its footing but it's determined to remain an unwieldy super-bureaucracy that's doomed to be torn apart by its unresolved contradictions, not this year or next but within the next 5 to 20 years for sure. Poland should remain a member as long as the positives outweigh the negatives (which will be coming).

But its no gulag (except in the rhetoric of pro-russian trolls whose only goal is to sow dissent and chaos).

There is alot to criticize about the EU...especially it's Euro policies....agreed!

Somehow it get's surreal when one side blames the EU for being extremely capitalist/neo-liberal and the other sides sees a socialist dictatorship aka Gulag coming right up...

She can't do it right it seems! :)


Do you mean by that "as long it stay a net receiver"? Should Poland leave when it's economically able to become a "net payer"?

One side (moi, to be exact) wants clarity and looks at policies (including genuinely broken and dsyfunctional policies) and the other side (russian trolls) just uses barely understood catchphrases and slings mud.

Neoliberalism is term that can be defined (roughly: the belief that the primary role of governments is to facilitate the movement of capital) and it's possible to show how the EU does that

The other is just a hyperbolic metaphor that can't be proven...


I'm not a neoliberal and I think that while economic factors are important they're not the whole story.

I meant what I wrote. As long as the positives (economic and otherwise) outweigh the negatives (economic and otherwise) then Poland should stay in. For the time being there's no reason to leave. If that changes then Poland should leave (and do so level-headedly).

I think Neo-liberalism belongs to the globalist era...which startet at full thrusters after the end of the communist system. Capitalism won and had no rivals anymore. Nothing to keep it in check.

That comes to an end now, the anti-globalist movements are gaining strength and with that, so I believe, the social focus will come back stronger again...globalism should no longer prefer the rich, the industry or the liberal, well off urban elites.

The EU reflects all these tendencies....she is the sum of it's members....if the majority is following neo-liberal policies so is the EU...should a more protectionist, social movements get stronger, the EU will mirror that too...

What irks me is when people so lightly speak of the EU as some kind of dark overlord, some foreign, alien master....who alone decides and opresses and forces and what not, totally ignoring that it's the member states and it's democratically elected envoys who are making these policies in Brussels...not without bitching and fighting and negotiating and networking and all what comes with that daily political business...

Especially in an organization where every member has the same vote. Which makes the voice of an 80 million people like net payer Germany as exactly as important as the one of tiny Malta....


How would you define the positives? Not gaining money from the EU instead of paying into the common pot?

Wealth was created before 'socialist paradise' was even a thing. Even before Karl Marx who lived comfortably under his wealthy sponsor F.Engels and knew 'working class' people only from a pages of a books and newspapers wrote his "Capital"...