The ghastly tragedy that befell the Polish nation when its president was killed in a plane crash over the forests of Russia plunged Poles and friends of Poles into mourning. Not only President Lech Kaczynksi lost his life: leaders of Poland’s social democratic party also perished, including their delegate to last year’s Labour Party conference.
Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party (PiS) had lost office, even if he remained in the titular post of president. He would have been challenged and probably lost the presidential election due to be held later this year.
The ruling centre-right Civic Platform party had maintained constitutional rule and order and it is a tribute to the democratic strength of Poland that, alongside the Diana-style outpouring of grief there is no challenge to the functioning of what is now an increasingly important member of the European Union. For those who want to see a reset of EU and British relations with Russia, the sensitive language and outstretched hand of friendship to Poland from Vladimir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev, both on the Katyn murders of 1940 and then following the plane crash, are extremely important.
As Russia seeks to improve its relationship with Poland, the anti-foreigner right in Britain represented by the likes of the Daily Mail, the UK Independence Party and the British National Party have targeted Poles. Like the generation of British workers driven to Germany by Tory economic policy 25 years ago, there are a good number of Poles in Britain now. They work hard, pay taxes, enrol as voters and fill Catholic churches.
The Federation of Poles of Great Britain recently published a list of 80 hate headlines in the Daily Mail alone, which treated Poles as second-class, unwelcome foreigners. There have been xenophobic attacks on Poles as a result of inflammatory, anti-immigrant language in some parts of the media.
Now a new book, The Populist Radical Right in Poland (published by Routledge) by the Eton and Oxford-educated Polish political scientist Rafal Pankowski lifts the lid on the nastiness of the right in Poland. The Law and Justice party grew out of the Catholic nationalist wing of Solidarity. To begin with, it was in alliance with the moderate liberal conservative Civic Platform, but moved sharply to the right to win power in 2005.
Although Kaczynski was never anti-Semitic – he was strongly pro-Israel – the PiS did incorporate elements of the extreme nationalist and anti-Semitic right. As Pankowski writes: “Anti-Semitism is crucial to the Polish populist right. The number of Jews in Poland today is minimal, but the anti-Jewish prejudice serves as a code for a general hostility to diversity and to Polish [liberal] democracy.”
It is with these people that William Hague has entered into the perhaps ugliest alliance ever sealed by the Conservative Party. David Cameron may be fully signed up to the campaign against the rising ideology of anti-Semitism, but too many of Hague’s new friends in east Europe reek of the old politics.
Contemporary political scientists do not like to highlight anti-Semitism. They prefer the term “radical populism”. However, to anyone with half a sense of European history, the parallels with an older, Jew-baiting politics can no longer be dismissed. Economic dislocation and a rapid loss of confidence in traditional politics gave rise to ultra-nationalist movements in the first half of the 20th century. Now a global recession and the hunt for someone to blame as jobs and incomes disappear is producing the same toxic politics. It is anti-Muslim in the West, with demagogues such as Gert Weelders invited by UKIP to rant against Islam. It is anti-Jewish and anti-Roma in the East. In this country, Nick Griffin combines anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim and anti-European poisons into one BNP toxic mixture.
In Hungary, the openly anti-Semitic Jobbik Party now has nearly as many seats as the defeated socialists after the recent elections. The Czech right-wing ODS Party – allied to the Tories – has had to dismiss its leader, former premier Mirek Topolánek, after he attacked the Jewish origins of the current Czech prime minister and castigated the gay transport minister. In Poland, criticism of nationalist politics is suspended as Poles mourn Lech Kaczynski and PiS leaders killed in the air-crash tragedy.
But the record of PiS activists, including Michal Kaminski, Poland’s best-known MEP and leader of the small right-wing group in the European Parliament that includes Tory MEPs, is worrying. An admirer of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Kaminski uses ugly language about gays and has said he will apologise for the killing of Jews on Polish soil in the Second World War II when “Jews apologize for killing Poles.”
So radical populism – anti-Muslim in western Europe, anti-Jewish in eastern Europe, and anti-foreigner and anti-immigrant rhetoric everywhere – is no longer fringe politics. In Britain’s general election, the Tories are seeking to appease anti-foreigner feeling with language on immigrants that they would not tolerate if applied to British citizens living and working abroad. Comparisons with pre-war Europe should not be overdrawn. Fascism is dead and not coming back. But a new politics of intolerance is afoot in Europe and no one knows how to deal with it. And, if the Conservatives win, their new allies will be part of the problem.
