Making sense of Polish politics

In case my British and American readers have been puzzling over the recent descriptions in their media of the late President Kaczyński as being 'right wing', here's a simple graph above that I prepared ahead of the 2005 elections to show that the Anglo-Saxon concepts of 'left' and 'right' don't make too much sense in the context of Polish politics.

You need to operate in two axes. A social one, where 'right' means traditional, conservative, patriotic, religious, espousing traditional family values; while 'left' means modern, secular, tolerant, cosmopolitan, liberal. And an economic one, where 'right' means the free market, privatisation, laissez-faire, small government, low taxes, while 'left' means statism, dirigisme, big government, redistribution of wealth; tax and spend. You can argue about where exactly one should plot the position of the given parties on the graph, but essentially, the point is to put the parties into one of four quarters.

In the above graph, you will see the two biggest parties in Polish politics occupying quarters that neither of the main British or American parties occupy. Hence the problems with understanding Polish politics. Supporters of Poland's Law & Justice (PiS) might see eye-to-eye with American Republicans on Christianity, patriotic duty, abortion and gay rights, but would disagree on the primacy of free enterprise over the state.

The word 'liberal' in the US (and in the UK to a lesser degree) means 'social liberal'. In Poland, it means both economic and social liberal.

If anyone would occupy the same quarter as PiS, it would be - further to the right - Generalissimo Franco (God-fearing, patriotic, anti-communist, syndicalist, suspicious of enterprise) and, more moderately, the French Gaullists.

The forthcoming Polish presidential elections will be fought over an entirely different battleground than the UK parliamentary elections. What the respective media of both countries will make of the elections in the other will no doubt be sprinkled with much misunderstanding.

The post-communist Polish 'left' (the SLD) is more free market than PiS and more socially liberal than PO; but it is increasingly marginalised. Its place in the nation's debate is becoming irrelevant. A comparison with Irish politics (Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil) is apt; two parties that you'd be hard pressed to tell apart (one is Christian Democrat Centrist, the other Conservative Centrist). The fault line between the two is which side their grandfathers fought on in the Irish Civil War - the Pro-Treaty side, ready to accept the compromise that left the Six Counties British, or the Republican side, that would not give up the struggle to unify Ireland. 87 years ago.

The parallel with Poland is clear. PO is seen as the successor party to the wing of Solidarity that accepted the Round Table compromise which left the communists unpersecuted in return for giving up power, while PiS is the successor to the harder-line anti-communists that insisted on the heirs to the PZPR being brought to book for their crimes against the nation.

The Smolensk tragedy may lead to a mould being broken, a destiny to follow the Irish path for decades to come may not come to pass.