Strengthening Social Democracy in the Visegrad Countries Poland ’ s Political Left : Is There Life Beyond Parliament ? (original) (raw)
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Social Democracy in the 21st Century (Comparative Social Research, Vol. 35), 2021
It is often said that we live in a time of crisis for social democracy. Many of the West European centre-left parties that seemed the natural parties of government in the second half of the twentieth century, are in decline. The most common long-term explanations centre on a shrinking working class, a widening gap between the party elite and their core voters, and the challenges from new populist parties and/or greens. Short-term policy factors include the failure to address the recent financial and refugee crises. None of these factors carry much explanatory weight for developments in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in the three decades since the transition from communism. We find that much of the explanation for the rise and the fall of the five social democratic parties in these countries lies in the dynamics of party competition and party system change. All parties face dilemmas of policy, electoral appeal and coalition-building. The Central European cases suggest that it is how social democrats handle such challenges, and make difficult choices about strategy and tactics, that ultimately shapes their long-term fate. Centre-left parties are stronger masters of their fortunes than much of the literature on the decline of social democracy suggests. Consequently, seeking a common structural explanation for the rise and decline of social democratic parties might be a double fallacy: both empirically misleading and a poor base for policy advice.
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It has been over a year since the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) took over complete governmental control in Poland. The presidential election won by Andrzej Duda in May 2015 and the victory of PiS five months later, gave party’s leader Jarosław Kaczyński almost total control of the state. Czesław Kulesza and Gavin Rae analyse the right’s rise to power and describe how the left must take on the difficult task of formulating a coherent alternative to this takeover
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Old and New Cleavages in Polish Society, ed. Guérot, Ulrike and Michael Hunklinger, published by Donau-Universität Krems, 2019
For many commentators of political affairs as well as citizens, the current crisis of democracy in Poland seems to have come as a surprise. This should not be the case, because the warning signs predicting this scenario have been visible for at least a decade. It is unclear whether the crisis over the judicial reform has revealed new divisions in Polish society, especially as the classical socio-political cleavages that political scientists have long analysed in Eastern Europe – such as centre–periphery and urban–rural (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) – overlap with new splits, as well as the effects of such processes as globalisation and economic, political and cultural transformation. The present situation in the European Union has an impact on moods in member states and is therefore certainly significant. This particularly concerns the continuing aftermath of the economic crisis, the ongoing – although less present in the media – migration crisis, and the uncertainty over the current Brexit negotiations. In order to understand what is going on in Poland today, we need to look backwards. From the collapse of communism in 1989, European integration and the “return to Europe” were perceived as the main source of stability guaranteeing irreversible pro-democracy changes both in Poland and in the entire region of post-communist Eastern Europe. Above all it was assumed that democracy was what Eastern European societies desired, and it seemed self-evident that they should aspire to such a system and to a free market. The entire process of integration with the European Union took place very fast, without sufficient debate either in the candidate countries or in the existing EU member states. Apart from the symbolic dimension of Europeanisation, the EU exerted on candidate countries, including Poland, mechanisms designed to hasten Europeanisation in all the areas of social, political and economic life. “Stick and carrot” methods were applied to prevent democracy backsliding, albeit not always with satisfactory results. The Europeanisation achieved was often very superficial; laws were implemented, but without any changes to behavioural models or customary rules. The best examples are perhaps the approach to environmental protection or minority rights. There may have been a lack of education promoting knowledge on the rules of democracy, but also its traps. It is telling that the checks and balances system and tripartite division of power were only debated broadly when the current Law and Justice party government sought to reform the judiciary. The fact that we are now seeing an illiberal turn, a decade and a half after accession to the European Union, also results from the tendency of most of society and the political elite to take European integration and EU membership for granted, while integration usually appears in the political debate when the economic dimension of Poland’s membership are being discussed (Styczyńska 2018). We are also increasingly often observing delayed transformation fatigue, which has two important facets. Firstly, fatigue “helps to capture the condition of the economy, society” and is based on “people’s normative disorientation, impatience, disappointment and general lack of sense, not necessarily related to the poor or declining economic performance” (Kubik 2018: 2). This type of fatigue should be understood as a “cultural syndrome”, a “form of political crisis” that is also somehow – and this is the second facet – delayed, as the economic situation in Poland has improved significantly since the 1990s, and yet strong right-wing populism appeared only when the situation stabilised (ibidem: 3).
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Liberal democracy is the fruit of many centuries of evolution based on conflict between various interest groups. This struggle, or conflict, is the source of stability in state institutions, the law and the courts. It is a strange pitfall in which numerous strong entities are capable of enforcing their rights. The condition for a liberal democracy to be stable is therefore the existence of sustainable social stratification, opposing interests and forces among social entities. The destruction of social strata in post-communist states has become entrenched and created a new type of uniformized or groupthink society. The elimination of private ownership perpetuated over several generations, mass resettlements and the degradation of higher strata have created a new type of society devoid of genuine stratification, interest groups capable of engaging in conflict with efficacy. Many generations of evolution, including battles, disputes, perhaps of a revolutionary nature, are required for a sustainable structure of liberal democracy to be instilled in states belonging to the former Soviet bloc.
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