Nah, it’s the New Left -> Neoliberal pipeline, except for some reason they refused to admit it for themselves unlike in most other countries.
Some still can be considered leftists in spite of questionable views on foreign policy, but the majority are r/neoliberal types. Then there’s the sizeable amount of racists and clash of civilization types.
In German right wing press.
The budget hole is actually not a big deal.
There was way less national debt before Covid-19 but the actual issue is that in 2011, the neoliberals pushed through a constitutional amendment requiring the country to have a balanced budget.
Then Covid comes and the war in Ukraine. The covid expenses are a given, but then the government pumps a lot of money into the military because the government sees itself as part of the western bloc and wants it to survive.
So they ran a deficit budget for two years as an arbitrary exemption, and now the constitutional court says “you can’t actually” - so the government is gonna do austerity now and throw people under the tank it just bought.
There’s no risk of collapse whatsoever. It’s just the new (old) form of the bourgeois state enforcing bourgeois interests.
But yeah.
Additional Context: The state government of Bavaria (and several others around that same period, with similar ideas) passed a controversial reform of police laws in 2017-2018 (It was polemically called “The strictest police law since 1945”).
It included changes such as:
increased allowance of use of personal data by the police forces.
allowing the police to openly film and photograph people participating in public gatherings.
allowing the police to infringe on postal secrecy and to confiscate mail without a person’s knowledge. (if given permission by the courts)
allowing the use of police spies. Including even entering people’s homes if given permission.
As well as making previous restrictions such as on “probable danger” way more lax.
Yeah, I know. The same map keeps popping out from time to time since about 2015. I think it originates from some LDPR guy.
After some digging, it originates from 2014:
TVP Info, 23 April 2014 “State Duma to the Polish MFA: Let’s Partition Ukraine” supposedly from a letter from Zhirinovsky. - He was unhinged enough to be seen making those claims and the west could be seen using those as proof Russia was out to get Ukraine from day 1. Genuine proposals or propaganda? Who knows. The war did indeed happen and claims that Poland is gonna march into Lviv are still showing up from time to time, in spite of them being frankly unlikely.
Additional context: Poland was ruled by libs back then… but very atlanticist ones that still had ambitions to for example overthrow the government of Belarus and indeed Ukraine (pre-Maidan), so while less reactionary, state media had still a heavy baggage of bias in foreign policy questions.
Yeah, it’s something I see popping up from time to time and it annoys me every time.
It almost feels like a losing battle, because “No, Poland isn’t going to reclaim its pre-1939 territories like it’s a cored province in a map game” never sticks, and a few weeks later someone goes and makes a reference to it again.
Support for such a thing isn’t even widespread among the far-right opposition, while the media, from lib to mainstream fash are all overwhelmingly positive towards Ukraine and eager to sabre-rattle against Russia.
What Poland does do however, is try to expand its regional influence. Especially in the Baltics the Belarusian opposition (with the hope of them getting into power eventually).
The only thing on foreign intervention in my reply is the reference to loans, which were taken by the Polish People’s Republic, and indeed the Romanian Socialist Republic - the 80s were a period of austerity to repay foreign debt to continue purchasing specialized goods from the west - that is undeniable.
“Stole a Piece of Land barely enough to Feed a Family”. Anecdotal evidence, one of which I have no evidence of being true or not, and is besides the point of “Communism bad, because they ‘stole’ my grandma’s land”.
“The State of Constant Fear” is also anecdotal reference, one which is even harder to verify and can be claimed just as easily as “a very large amount of people are supportive of revolution to overthrow the government because they don’t go and vote”
Aha, the classic. If “Russia” (you clearly mean the USSR, but probably think modern day Russia is the same thing) is so evil and despised across the former Warsaw Pact, why is it still popular in East Germany? In Bulgaria? In Serbia? Even, before 2014, in Ukraine? And besides, what does Russia matter? Does the viability of a political ideology depends on if a state is popular around the world or not? Were that the case, Kingdoms would have been abolished centuries before the French revolution and religion would be gone by now.
“context I avoided on Purpose” No, it’s nonsense you added, and a common tale told around these parts of the world. What do you think Donald Tusk, the Kaczyński brothers, Lech Wałęsa and Bronisław Komorowski, all major political figures of the post-1990 era in Poland all have in common? They were in the opposition to the PZPR. And nowadays the most common political ammunition between parties in Poland is to accuse each other of communism. This is moronic! “Oh he was in the communist party and that’s why he’s corrupt!” is fucking nonsense - and what’s communist about market reforms, joining the EU, befriending America, like the Alliance of the Democratic Left did in Poland in the early 2000s? (and lost 3/4 of their voters after that).
Blame all the problems on socialism all you want, and I know you will, but how long will this continue? 20 years? 50 years? And you want to dig further and uncover more and more “crimes”. All this’ll do is find out that to expand the “Crimes” of communism, you have to go “the fascists from WW2 are innocent victims, actually”
And I’m from Poland. The government reversed the decision to collectivize agricultural land in 1956, lowering the amount of state owned farms from 10000 to 1500 after Bierut died.
By 1996, when the last one was privatized, there were roughly 2000 of them at the start of the campaign in 1992 with a total of about 3750 thousands of hectares of a (current) total of 14630 - a quarter of farmland in the country.
Yet Poland, with its mostly private agriculture, was known for the worst supply situation in the Eastern Bloc. Gotta love the hand of the market, especially since the west imposed high interest rates on loans taken in the 70s (as countries do between each other). The government of the 90s, deciding that it was going to get richer faster with the market rather than a planned economy it was barely wanting to have it (as the “communists” of the PZPR were largely just nationalists), went through market reforms and what happened? Prices shot up, poverty increased to dramatic amounts, unemployment was over 20% for a part of the 90s (not even including those who had given up on looking for a job), organized crime started roaming the streets and doing stuff like killing mom’s childhood friends… and of course the farmlands themselves, since this is the topic, became desolate towns with antisemitic graffiti, a 60+ year old average age and nothing going on for them to this day.
But you probably think this is cool and good. After all, the people there can work their asses off at more than 40h/week at a workplace they have even less say in than in the west, to pay German prices for goods of a quality you’d find in the bargain bin here, a food that will kill you over time, and come back home to froth at the mouth about how the “LGBT Lobby” is trying to turn their kids gay while then going on rants against the oh so free government and opposition because they’re “all thieves” anyway… and against foreigners. After all, they’re only following the logic of the market and doing what the west wants of them (i.e. keep the wages low and profits high).
Wow that’s an old one. It reminds me of the glory days of r/fullcommunism
71,5% for staying in the USSR in the March '91 referendum (83,5% turnout) - 92% against in the December 1991 one (84% turnout)
The public opinion turned around very fast in one year. Then the Communist Party and other left wing parties were the strongest in the late 90s. It’s like Lenin’s quote about there being weeks where decades happen. There’s no reason why it could not happen again or elsewhere.