WARSAW — Poland’s conservative government wants more Polish babies — and it’s willing to pay for them.
The governing Law and Justice Party, with a political base in the country’s heavily Catholic east, last month launched an expensive initiative to reverse the country’s flagging population growth and soften the impact of global competition.
It is the latest contentious program by a populist right-wing government that has proved repeatedly willing to challenge the reigning liberal orthodoxy in Warsaw and across the continent.
Nobody knows whether the program’s subsidies will spark a baby boom or whether more workers will stay home rather than emigrate to the West. But there is no doubt that the Family 500+ program is part of a government agenda that has rocked the political scene.
“The new government is deliberately divisive, adopting a mentality of, ’If you are not with us, you are against us,’” said Anthony Goltz, 39, an English teacher in Warsaw. “It saddens me.”
Critics, including top officials with the European Union, say the government of Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, in its haste to impose its conservative agenda, has run roughshod over democratic norms since taking power last fall, even trying to subvert the country’s highest constitutional court.
The government and its supporters say EU meddling — including a threat to punish Warsaw if it doesn’t back down — amounts to a violation of Polish sovereignty and an attempt to frustrate the clear will of the people.
“This is not the kind of union, not the kind of membership that we have agreed to,” Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski said in Brussels on Monday as EU officials were weighing whether the Polish government presented a threat to the rule of law.
The International Monetary Fund and Moody’s ratings agency have issued critical reports in the past week, and the air of perpetual crisis has cast a cloud over the economy and cost the government popular support.
Fifty-three percent of voters say they disapprove of the job performance of Ms. Szydlo, President Andrzej Duda and party boss Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a former prime minister who is widely viewed as calling the shots, according to the most recent TNS poll. Only 34 percent of Poles support the party, which won the presidency and a majority in parliament in October.
Mr. Goltz’s dissatisfaction stemmed from the Family 500+ program and the stalemate between the government and the Constitutional Court.
Critics say the Family 500+ stipends are too small to help most Poles but would place tremendous fiscal burdens on the government.
Add the party’s deeply traditional, pro-Catholic social agenda — Polish leaders have proposed a strict pro-life law and told state-owned media to adopt a Christian bias in reporting — and the Kaczynski premiership has arguably become the most divisive in the country’s post-communist history.
“They promised we would be one red-and-white team, that they would glue the divisions in society if we vote for them,” Pawel Reszka, a political commentator for the centrist newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny, referring to the colors of the Polish flag. But “society is polarized.”
Social solidarity
Government defenders say the Family 500+ program and other reforms are necessary to revive social solidarity.
Although Poland has managed to avoid recession during Europe’s ongoing financial crisis, much of the country remains poor, especially in regions that have never recovered from the exodus of manufacturing in the years after the end of communism.
The Family 500+ program offers families 500 zlotys — about $130 — in stipends for the second and every subsequent child in a country faced with an aging population, anemic economic growth and high emigration rates. Poland’s birthrate is about 1.3 children per woman of reproductive age, compared with a rate of almost 1.9 in the U.S.
The program is just one piece of what Mr. Kaczynski and other Law and Justice politicians say is a needed jolt of economic nationalism for a small country hammered by the forces of globalization.
Foreign corporations that dominate Poland’s banking and insurance sectors and big retail supermarkets have helped the economy, but the government argues that they have failed to create widespread prosperity and have stifled domestic business. The government has levied taxes on those industries to help cover the costs of the Family 500+ program, pegged at more than 1 percent of gross domestic product.
“Everyone should benefit from progress and economic growth — not only narrow groups, like it has been until now ,” said government spokesman Rafal Bochenek. “We have to remember that 25 percent of Polish families with at least two children are on the bread line.”
Some are grateful for the subsidy.
Unemployed mother Dorota Bien, 35, said the more than $400 she receives has changed the lives of her three children. Because of her lack of income, she receives extra subsidies under the program.
“For me, this is a big injection of money,” said Ms. Bien. “Now my children at last have their pocket money. They often go to the cinema, to the pizzeria, can afford pleasures. Before, unfortunately, I had to refuse them and tell them to refrain. Now I am renovating my flat. I can buy a new bed, a desk.”
But 31-year-old painter Tytus Brzozowski said his handout doesn’t go far.
“The 500 zloty I get for my second child equals one-third of the monthly payment for a nursery in Warsaw,” he said. “So you still have to remain quite self-reliant.”
Jan Grabiec, a spokesman for the Civic Platform party, the main opposition group in the Polish parliament, said the program reflects how the conservative government is seeking to benefit its political base, not Polish families in general.
“Before the elections, they said Family 500+ would be for every child,” said Mr. Grabiec. “Now it is only from the second child onward. It discriminates against families with one child. The biggest number of large families is in the regions where the majority votes for Law and Justice.”
Court clash
The clash between two visions of Poland’s future has crystallized in the fight between the Szydlo government and the Constitutional Court. It recalls the U.S. “court-packing” battle between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his critics over the New Deal.
Hoping to preempt the court from blocking key parts of its agenda, the governing party in March installed three judges in supposedly vacant spots. But the previous Civic Platform government had already appointed judges to those seats.
The court ruled that the Civic Platform judges should take their seats, but the Law and Justice government overruled the court and enacted a law weakening its powers. The court declared the law unconstitutional, but the government has ignored that decision.
Massive protests and frank criticism from the European Union followed the government’s moves.
The court issue still agitates government critics, although EU and Polish government officials this week toned down their rhetoric and said they were trying to reach a compromise.
“They’re undermining the Constitutional Court,” said Agata Dambska, an activist with Forum Od Nowa, a pro-democracy nongovernmental organization. “By ignoring its decisions, they’re de facto disturbing the separation of powers.”
Ryszard Legutko, a Law and Justice lawmaker, defended the party’s moves on the court by saying the judges were not impartial.
“Nowadays, we see judges’ decline in credibility in many countries. In Poland, this happened rapidly,” Mr. Legutko said. “I am a very moderate optimist, though, and I believe the compromise we proposed will finally solve the problem.”
Criticizing foreign investors while preaching economic populism and a social conservative agenda isn’t new in Europe.
“Nearby Hungary, whose government is ideologically close to the Law and Justice administration, has enacted similar programs in the past,” said a recent report on Poland by Stratfor, the American geopolitical think tank.
Poland’s ruling party does not have supermajority necessary to change the constitution as conservative Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has done, Ms. Dambska said.
Still, Law and Justice supporters control every branch of government, so until another election is held — October 2019 would be the latest possible date — they still have leeway to enact their agenda, she said.
“While polls tell us most people disapprove of the current situation and believe things are getting worse, currently nobody, neither parliamentary opposition nor the people’s street protests, are able to change it,” she said.
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