Poland's post-election political scene

That's a problem which can be stopped by requiring all persons who buy a morning-after pill to read and sign a declaration when buying the pill.

In front of a pill-pedlar (er, um, I mean chemist) who wants to sell as much of his wares as he can? That is not medical supervison. The average 15-year-old is not mature enough to make such health- and life-affecting choices without professional medical guidance and parental consent.

Please read about the concept of restricted sale medications.


Given the level of restrictions in Poland as to who can work in pharmacies and in which positions, it most certainly is. Things may be different in your country.


The RCC says that 15-year old girls are old enough to have sex, so are you wrong or is the RCC?

...Only if they're married. Anyway the Kosh... GW gazette naturally is opposed. They back their stand with i.a. remarks by a girl who "had an accident after a party when the condom burst...." Maybe the prescription route will serve as a derterrent to wanton orgiastic partying. That is not what any decent person would want to encourage or promote. But it is in the interests of whisky barons, the rubber industry, pharmaceutical sector and abortion mills. Are those the types you equate with?

So the RCC says that 15-year old girls are old enough to take life changing decisions which can have fatal side effects. Glad we've got that one sorted out. Now the question is why the PIS lovers think they know better than the RCC.

You'd be the first to rant and fume if any government tooks its cue directly from the Church, so you should praise PiS for not doing so.

I would say so.
100,000 signatures are needed to for the new bill to be examined by parliament, and it's in line with PiS values.
Coming on top of all the controversy surrounding reforms to the constitutional court, it's probably the last thing that Kaczyński wants to be embroiled in right now.

Doubt it will happen, but let's hope there aren't enough signatures.
The abortion law in Poland is one of the strictest in Europe, save for Ireland. I really don't think that it should be tightened any more than it already is.

It's a seriously difficult situation for him. Szydło has come out as saying that she supports an absolute ban, but PiS MP's will be allowed to vote according to their conscience. Some from PO are pro life as well, meaning that the legislation has a real chance of actually succeeding. PiS might be able to put it on the back burner for a little while, but it's clear that the Church now expects it to be brought up to the Sejm.

Polonius, do you have any idea why the Church is now bringing it up? It seems to be the worst possible time for PiS - from a political strategy point of view, it would be far better to keep the abortion debate under wraps until after the next election.

What punishments do you want for the women seeking abortions? If you want abortion restricted don't want to send women who seek or receive illegal abotions to prison then you don't think of women as moral agents.


Then she is objectively pro-rape if she thinks a woman who becomes pregnant as a result of rape shouldn't be able to abort the rapist's spawn...

In the words of the immortal Brian Clough (sic) " I couldn't possibly say what I think (of Beata Szydlo) because we'd be closed down".

You would say the same thing about someone throwing her newborn baby into a dumpster, now wouldn't you. "That's their regret, and their business", right Dougpol?


Also no woman in the world says " I'm bored - what shall I do today......I know! I'll go and throw my baby into a dumpster! That'll be a laugh".


When a man kills a passerby in order to get the contens of his wallet, he "is more often than not desperate and feels he has little alternative."

And it will come back to haunt her. There's plenty of members of PiS that won't vote in favour of the legislation, but if the Church comes out and threatens politicians again (like they did last time), it's going to be a very awkward situation indeed.

But the pro-choice lobby are not telling people how to run their lives. There's the difference.
It's called freedom of the individual, and that's the world I choose to live in.

PS As Poland is in the EU, Szydlo and her creepish coterie should be put bang to rights.

As always with those type of issues, it is the implication of the pro-abortion position that is the problem. Morality has always been relative depending on the situation. Killing is wrong, but killing in self-defense is permissible.

The same principle applies to abortion. In principle, aborting a child shouldn't be something anyone does on a whim. Like with killing, there may be situations where an abortion may be permissible, but that doesn't mean you can just abort fetuses with the same ease you would cut an appendix. There has to be an understanding or acknowledgement you are committing a transgression to prevent a worse evil.

Kondzior, nobody will ever win this argument. But the individual rules her own body, and within reasonable guidelines such as are in place in the free world, (and I absolutely include backward catholic diktat in that group) she should be left alone to exercise her human rights.

That is my view, and I don't wish to start a debate, but only that the church is not wanted by the majority in present day Poland in government and are hell bent on scoring a spectacular own-goal if they don't back-track.

Someone needs to drill it into the Polish clergy's thick skulls that this is not communism, and their day of omnipresence is past.
At the moment, Polish girls head off to the Netherlands in distress, akin to the sixties in Britain. It really is a disgrace, as are the huge numbers of unwanted babies. Not that I know anything of it, but it is yet another symptom of attempted government interference in people's lives.

Unwanted babiesIn the midst of a severe demographic crisis? There is a huge demand for babies on the part of married couples unable to procreate naturally and you want them chopped up to bits!?


I haven't the foggiest. This has laways been the Church's positon but I agree that from a Realpolitik point of view it migth not be the most judicious thing to raise it at this point in time.

Re rape, if there was mandatory chemical castration for every convicted rapist plus obligatory child maintenance garnished from his wages or pension, that should greatly reduce the problem.


Au contraire, in fact it behooves one to stop, listen and see all the good changes taking place under the PiS administration. Pro-Polishness is their hallmark.

Previous governments had which eagerly sold off Poland's industrial assets to outside capital for a song and provided excessive tax breaks and other incentives to foreign investors. By contrast, the current Law and Justice administration has launched a program to salvage and expand Poland's indsutry. Recently the Autosan bus factory in Sanok, which had once been Europe's largest, was purchased by a consortium belonging to the PGZ Polish Armaments Group. "Let us save the companies and plants that had been Poland's pride and develop news ones as well. Saving this enterprise will mahe it possible to develop this region and build a Polish brand," Prime minister Beata Szydło said at the signing ceremony.

Claiming that banks are like any other business and that capital is devoid of nationality, previous governments had sold them off to foreign investors and allowed foreign bankers to dominate Poland's lending market, but the current government hopes to reverse this trend. Recently, Poland's largest insurance company PZU purchased Alior Bank, originally set up by a group of Italian investors in 2008. Whether this marks the start of a new trend and whether more Polish investors enter the banking field remains to be seen.

In April, the government launched its landmark 500+ program designed to counteract Poland's ongoing demographic crisis. At present, Poland has an abysmally low birth rate of 1.3 children per family. Doomsday predictions claim Poland my drop from its current 38 to 25 million within this century. But in England and Wales, known for the generous child-care benefits, Polish women on average give birth to 2.13 children. Under 500+, a monthly allowance of 500 złotys ($127) is provided for a family's second and subsequent children. Extremely poor families are entitled to that benefit for their first-born as well.

The Polish Sejm (lower house) has passed a bill which will make it more difficult for foreigners to acquire Polish agricultural acreage. Under the measure, state-owned farmland can be bought solely by registered farmers or local residents personally able to farm 300 hectares (750 acres). "We want to protect Polish land and stand up for farmers' rights," Deputy Agriculture Minister Zbigniew Babalski told the Sejm prior to the vote. Although a 12-year moratorium banning the sale of farmland to foreigners had been in effect, non-Polish developers have bribed Polish "strawmen" to help them to acquire some 200,000 hectares (half a million acres) of land in recent years.

Complete madness. Poland already has very successful companies in the transport field - Autosan has been lying idle for years now, and it's going to cost a considerable amount of money to even produce a single bus now. It's an electoral bribe to Sanok and the surrounding area, nothing else.

It would've made much more sense to invest money into PESA, Solaris or NEWAG - all three are successful in their fields, and in particular, Solaris could have done with genuine government support to get their trams into more European cities. Their bus brand is successful, but the trams haven't been as successful despite being a fairly decent product.


This was a process started by the previous government. PiS really cannot claim the credit for this.


And yet allows religious groups to maintain large land holdings. I wonder how the Poles are going to feel about Saudi Arabia buying up huge parts of farmland under the name of the Polish Muslim community.

Why didn't PO assist Solaris more generously. But they are Polish Catholic holdings. That's why PiS can be called the most pro-Polish party in the Sejm. The others were leaning over backwards and constantly catering to foreign interest groups for the under-the-table kickbacks which you somehow never criticised.

Especially regions like Sanok that lost a single major employer should be focused on with a view to reanimatitng wherever feasible any potential industrial faclities that got Balcerised.

Except it's not feasible. All you're doing is creating a state-owned challenger to a privately owned Polish-owned company, thus hurting the prospects of the already-successful Polish company and burdening the Polish company that had to buy Autosan.

Experience shows us that in this case, Autosan will simply serve as a place for jobs for the boys and will lose astronomical amounts of money that could be spent on creating something far more modern and viable in the province. More to the point : how do you expect to attract the best people to Sanok? The only way it can work is for PiS controlled towns to buy Autosan buses, which represents the very worst in communist economics.

In related news, Poles are not impressed with the neo-Communist agenda being followed by PiS. The latest opinion poll shows that PiS are below 30%, while PO/Nowoczesna are now on a combined 37%.

Precisely. That is what PM Szydło calls "economic patriotism". Support your own, create jobs and keep the money in Poland. Now if there were only chains of Polish-owned retail shops to spend ti at, supermarkets that could rival Auchan, Carrefour, Tesco, Leroy, Praktiker, Biedronka, Castorama, Leclerc, Kaufland, etc., etc. I trust Morawiecki will find a way to recitfy that deficiency. 60% of Poland's banks in foreign hands is totally unacceptable. Even the Czechs are better off. Capital DOES have a nationality! In case of an emergency, having little control over one's coutnry's fiannces is hardly a promsing prospect. The foreign banks not only fleeced the Polish public with their usurous loans but, to make matters worse, channelled most of their profits abroad.

The only losers are the agents of influence and other stooges of foreign interest groups who once got hefty kickbacks for their underhanded activities at Poland's expense. No wonder they're marching, chanting and ranting from fear of the PiS broom that is sweeping their perks and privileges away.


Leave your ivory tower. No more than a miniscule pergentage of Poles view PiS' agenda as neo-commuist. That may speak to embittered and resenrful left-winger eggheads but not to the bulk of the Polish nation who view the PiS government as being first and foremost pro-Polish to the core.


Jacek Nizinkiewicz writes in "Uważam rze" that no political formation has held onto power as long as PO/PSL and none has made as many unfulfilled promises. It's time to hold them to account, he urges.

Audits carried out to date have found serious irregularities in the coalition's wake, including the defence ministry and the Kormorowski chancellery.


PiS moves ahead cleaning up the mess left behind by PO/PSL including many legislative duds which need to be rescincded. Most recently President Duda signed into law a bill undoing the former government's 2015 judicial "reform". According to it, the judge was made an arbiter between the defence and prosecution. The new law reverts to the previous state, whereby the court bears the brunt of evidence and questions witnesses. Too bad PO/PSL never heard to good ol' American saying: If it ain't broken, don't fix it!


The PiS-led clean-up also involves vestiges of the PRL regime sullying Poland's public space. The Senate has adopted a draft amendment to the law prohibiting the promotion of communism and other totalitarian ideologies. The amendment would ban naming buildings, public facilities, roads, streets, bridges and squares in honor of people, organizations, events or dates symbolizing communism or any other totalitarian system naming. Local authorities would have 12 months to carry it out. Although 27 years have elapsed since the fall of communism, there are still plenty of streets honouring the People's Guard, communist heroes (Finder, Hibner, Kostrzewa, etc.) or July 22nd, the start of the 1944 Soviet take-over.

Why don't they just put everyone who ever worked for the PRL in jail?

All those traffic wardens! Plus of course most of the PIS 'leadership' and their families.


Naughty naughty, Po. Surely you don't really prefer the old PRL-style version with a lack of judicial independence and the scales of justice massively weighted in favour of the prosecution? Or perhaps you just don't care about the low acquittal rate...

So far, pretty well everything that Kaczynski's clowns have done is a retrograde step, designed to increase authoritarianism.

Yep, democracy and freedom of speech equals for you authoritarianism that is a typical progressive approach. Figures.

It's easy enough to mouth off with none-too-clever repartees, but would you like streets named after Himmler, Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin in your city? Would you like to live at 2346 Auschwitz Lane?

Actually, in Poland, the remaining streets with such names are normally heavily supported by the residents. There's a place in Poznań called os. 40-lecia PRL - and the residents there voted to keep the name rather than change it.

Since time immemorial the judicial scales have always favoured the rich and mighty as well as those currently in power. Machiavelli was the first to codify it. I don't beleive you're naive enough to think some poor bloke with a court-appointed defence councillor stands and equal chance with some influential VIP with a pricey big-city lawyer.


I always thought Poznań were a bunch of idiots. The 1956 Bread & Freedom protest was about the only thing they ever did right. OK, also the Wielkopolska Insurrection. All those who voted for PRL should get a one-way ticket to Belarus where they'll feel right at home.

Good idea. PiS supporters will feel right at home there, while Poland will be left to those of us who want Poland to prosper.

So precisely how does reverting from the system used in the U.K., the U.S. etc. to a less fair system used in Communist times help to counteract that?

I'm sure they return the favor. Admit it, you hate them because they've always been more economically and civically adroit than the Warschauer Volk.

The point is that justice is supposed to be administered by the government, in accordance with the PRL ideals. The concept of an independent legal system is entirely beyond their understanding.