Shortly after Poland’s October election saw the Law and Justice party (PiS) come to power, European Union flags disappeared from government press briefings. This and other gestures, such as the xenophobic rhetoric of party leader Jarosław Kaczyński, signaled to many that potentially dramatic changes were coming to Polish and European politics.
Critics of the PiS party may be right about the international implications of that election. Domestically, however, the policies of Prime Minister Beata Szydło’s administration hardly represent a tectonic shift. That’s because the forces of statism and economic nationalism had already been unleashed by previous governments. Only back then they were promoted as reformist.
Poland weathered the Great Recession better than most its neighbors, with its economy growing at an average rate of 3% a year between 2008 and 2014. Yet this success was relative. Even if the rest of the European economy came to a halt and Poland continued to expand at its 2008-14 growth rate, it would be another two decades before Poles might see the per capita incomes that Germans enjoy.
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