Poland at the crossroads

The Vistula River is a natural border that splits Poland into two parts, the rich and liberal west part and the poor and conservative east part. It is here in eastern Poland that the discontent with the elites of Warsaw has grown. Entry into Europe has guaranteed better social and economic conditions, but not to the point of eliminating inequalities with the western part of the country. It was in eastern Poland that Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader without office of the ruling sovereign party Law and Justice (PiS), aimed to win the elections. With a promise: reverse course. In the future, the west will go eastwards. It is the recourse of Poland B against Poland A, of Eastern Europe against Western Europe, of Christianity against secularisation.

And so Lublin, the heart of eastern Poland, has become in recent years the laboratory of Polish sovereignty. A sovereignty that has made the fight against immigration and LGBT rights (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) the focus of its strategy to achieve consensus. But what are the limits to this rhetoric? In Lublin, where an important community of Ukrainian migrants live, who arrived mainly after the war in Donbass, foreign labour is used to sustain the pace of production in the country. A precious resource for Poland, an economy that has never gone into recession despite the economic crisis that has hit both sides of the Atlantic. Yet the xenophobic rhetoric of the PiS risks making the country lose this fundamental resource, disputed as it is by another country that has a strong need for a labour force: Germany. And it is perhaps also for this reason that the Polish government has attenuated its anti-migrant rhetoric to focus instead on another “enemy” the LGBT community, which has become a symbol of the moral decadence of the West.

Before May, Europeans, or rather the PiS, unleashed a real war against what it calls the “LGBT ideology” a totalitarian thought promoted by the LGBT community to annihilate the nation in its deepest essence: the traditional family and the Christian values on which it is founded. In recent months dozens of municipalities and regions, including the voivodeship of Lublin, have declared themselves “free from the LGBT ideology”. This refers to a homophobic definition that evokes the macabre term ‘Judenfrei’ used by the Nazis to designate an area “cleansed” by Jews during the Holocaust, creating a pogrom atmosphere. This was impossible to imagine until recently especially in this corner of Poland, where the entire Jewish community – about one-third of the population of Lublin – was exterminated during the Second World War