"Do Mention the War": Nostalgia for Nazi-era heroes in NATO's host Latvia

 

By Mark Almond (Oriel College, Oxford. MPAlmond@aol.com)

 

Imagine a country in which grand monuments to collaborators with Hitler were put up while memorials to anti-Nazi partisans were pulled down. Think of a state which neglected its main concentration camp as memorial to the victims of the Holocaust while Nazi nostalgia was commemorated in stone. Ponder a military which employs aged veterans of the Waffen SS to give pep talks to young recruits before they go a-peacekeeping abroad. What would Western democrats like George W. Bush, Tony Blair or Angela Merkel say about such a state?

 

The answer is: "Let's party!"

 

Sadly what might seem like a black joke or Borat-style calumny is true about NATO's host-state Latvia. Imagine the German or Austrian governments giving permission for a "private" memorial to the Waffen SS mimicking the Washington Mall's Vietnam Wall – only with more than 30,000 names of martyrs who died fighting for Hitler. That is the  huge memorial complex to the dead of the Latvian legion of the Waffen SS erected at Lestene west of Riga. The Salaspils concentration camp just outside Riga is poorly maintained, ridden with weeds outside and spiders' webs in the display cabinets inside! In 2004, an elderly veteran of the SS was showing a group of Interior Ministry troops preparing to go to Iraq around a "private war museum" near the frontline in 1945 west of Riga. It is filled with authentic equipment and other exhibits of the Latvian legionaries' fierce resistance to the Red Army. The vet assured German speaking visitors that statues to "Adolf" would be put up because he had led the anti-Russian struggle then.  

 

Old Nazis from the Baltic States and Ukraine as well see NATO expansion as proof that their anti-Soviet struggle at the side of Hitler put them on the side of the march of history – only they were a bit premature in choosing sides.

 

No doubt George W. Bush  is as ignorant about the deep-roots of his hosts anti-Communism and pro-Western views as he is about his grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush's acting as an agent on behalf of Nazi German companies in the United States until February, 1942. I doubt if Tony Blair knows much about Latvia's past or World War Two.[1]

 

To add insult to injury, on its last day in session before the start of the NATO summit the Latvian Seimas (Parliament) voted down a bill to pay restitution to Jews who had lost property during the war.[2] Even Britain has paid compensation to German Jews whose assets were seized to help fund the common anti-Hitler war effort, but plucky Latvia apparently can find more time to ponder the rights and wrongs of the issue.

 

The only concession the Latvian government made to any lingering Allied squeamishness about the war was its instruction to the hundreds of Latvian folklorists knitting commemorative mittens for the NATO delegates not to embellish them with swastikas! Even Sasha Barron Cohen could not invent analysis like "Swastikas have featured in traditional Latvian knitwear for centuries, variously known as the Thunder Cross or Fire Cross, but its feared that delegates, unfamiliar with local folklore, may take mittens decorated with swastikas amiss."[3] Although Latvians like to explain the Perkonkrusts or "Thunder Cross" as a an ancient pagan fire symbol – which it was in Germany too – they cannot get away from its use by Latvian collaborators in the Second World War.  It decorates the names of the Lestene monument's most solemn dedicatees: the martyrs to whom Hitler awarded the highest decoration, the Knights' Cross of the Iron Cross. 

 

Maybe the war was a long time ago but elsewhere insensitivity to Nazi crimes let alone celebration of collaborators would lead to outrage around the world. It is difficult to imagine a US president letting a country get away with neglecting the scenes of the Holocaust and celebrating last ditch-defenders of the Bunker without a serious finger-wagging.  

 

NATO's government leaders plus 4,100 other freeloaders, sorry delegates with defence expertise have descended on Riga for two days and three nights. Northern Europe's stag party capital[4] has been closed to ordinary traffic so NATO delegates can get from conference hall to the clubs without hindrance from the largely Russian-speaking locals. Latvia is the EU's poorest member per capita and yet this orgy of international bonhomie is at the expense of the impoverished people who are kept away from the festivities for security reasons. Independent Latvia's first foreign minister, Janis Jurkans says that the Summit is a holiday organized... at the expense of the whole Latvia: "Ask any person in the street: what city hosted the previous NATO summit? and he will hardly answer your question… I would understand if each of the guests paid for himself… but what they do is coming to Latvia, the poorest and almost the most corrupt EU country, to hold a summit that will cost it a pretty penny – a penny Latvia could well spend to build some good hospital…"[5]

 

Even when Brezhnev visited the capitals of Soviet republics they were not subject to this level of security shutdown and the official propaganda was not quite so insistent on the "joy" felt by locals at the presence of a real live superpower president in their midst.[6]

 

In Soviet times it is true history was re-written, but then so it is today. Under Communism, the official line grossly exaggerated the welcome given by ordinary Latvians to the incorporation of their country into the Soviet Union after 1940, but Soviet propaganda also played down the amount of collaboration with the Nazi invaders after 22^nd June, 1941. Nowadays, Latvian official history – and it is written by state-sponsored committees and published in volumes sponsored by history-minded institutions like the Latvian Ministry of Defence -  weasels away at explaining why joining the Waffen SS was not so unreasonable for "patriots" and in any case they were conscripted. It is all terribly reminiscent of the apocryphal Turkish explanation for the Armenian genocide in 1915: "It never happened and any way it was a long time ago." 

 

The basic problem is that active Latvian collaboration in Hitler's military did not start until 1943 _ apart from the few thousand police battalion volunteers who took part in the extermination of most of Latvia's Jews in the two years after Hitler's invasion. Whereas in June/July, 1941, Latvians like many other unhappy subjects of Stalin could be forgiven for hoping that the German army would be liberators from Communism, by 1943 who could really believe that Hitler offered Latvia a restoration of national independence, let alone any kind of democracy? Hitler's local enforcers had made clear that the Baltic States were to be an outpost of the Reich, ruled by Germans with the Balts in loyal subordination – and the Russians as slaves.  It was only after Stalingrad when Hitler needed more troops than Germany could provide that he reluctantly agreed to recruit Balts among other subject peoples who were not even permitted the hollow dignity of a Quisling or Vichy-style nominal self-government. 

 

Those troops fought a bitter battle to hold on to the Courland peninsula until May, 1945, though some Latvian troops like Estonian SS men also participated in fighting away from their homeland in Poland, Czechoslovakia and in Berlin the dying days of the war.

 

Although many Latvians fled westwards, or tried to, only in 1945 as Stalin's troops advanced, the Nazis evacuated privileged collaborators. Latvia's president Vaira Vike-Freiberga was only a child at the end of the war but her parents' relations with the Nazi occupier seem to have been privileged. Her biographer tells us, "three days before the arrival of Russian [sic.] troops, her stepfather heard by chance that a German convoy was on the point of leaving… and that a certain number of people would be allowed to join it."[7] This was in autumn, 1944. Memory can play tricks on all of us, but at the NATO Summit in Prague in   she gave her "dramatic narrative" of her family's flight into exile.  US ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns,  ''You could feel what she was saying. There was absolute silence in that room. President Bush was very moved by it, and I believe it was one of the finest speeches I have ever heard in Europe.''[8] But did they understand that the future Latvian President's family was conveyed by a Nazi ship to German-occupied Poland, or what her biographers call the port of  "Gotenhafen (now Gdynia)." The problem is that "Gotenhafen" only existed on Nazi maps. The port of Gdynia was founded by Poles in newly-independent Poland after 1919 to give the reborn Polish state an access to the sea of its own. Anyone with any sense of the true history of would refer to Gdynia as "Gotenhafen under Nazi occupation", but being NATO's pin-up means never having to get the past right.[9]

 

If President Vaira-Freiberga's memory of the wartime period is understandably hazy in someone born in 1937, reading Latvian history books would hardly help set her mind clearer about the who, what and when of 1941-45. If any of the NATO delegates or journalists travelling with them were to break away from the conference sessions they could visit Riga's bookshops and see for themselves what is on sale. For those who are linguistically challenged and have difficulty understanding "Waffen SS" in Latvian, several bookshops have English-language sections with the nostalgic works usefully translated along with officially-sponsored histories of the country which repeat the improbably claim that Nazi Germany equipped unwilling and unreliable conscripts with tanks and even their own air force. Just look at how cautious America and Britain are in "newly democratic Iraq" about letting  "sovereign Iraq's own army" get its hands on up-to-date equipment for fear that the soldiers might desert to the insurgents to see how implausible it is that Hitler and Himmler would let their most powerful weapons fall into the hands of likely deserters.  

 

In Estonia, where George W. Bush broke his journey en route to Riga, the capital Tallinn rejoices in an Occupation Museum. Visitors are greeted at its entrance (or were on my last visit) by a life-size model Estonian Waffen SS soldier with a flame thrower! He is a "resister" not an "occupier". Edward Lucas of The Economist told me in December, 2004, if anyone thought the exhibits in museum were bad enough, he thanked God no-one could read the Estonian-only signs to go with them "full of stuff about Judeo-Bolsheviks"!

 

For the Nazi nostalgics in the Baltics, NATO expansion marks the belated victory of those who collaborated with Hitler. The blatant russophobia sponsored by NATO expansion and its supporters is a sinister echo of the anti-Slav racism of the war period. Instead of damning Communism and Stalin's agents whether Russian or Latvian, the new Latvian elite has forged an alliance of Latvian ex-Nazis and Latvian ex-Communists to beat up on Russians and other non-Latvians. Yet all of this ignored by the bigwigs of the West and EU who usually never lose an opportunity to wag fingers at backsliders on human rights, racism let alone neo-Nazism.    

 

Up to 700,000 ethnic Russians and other Slav "occupiers" are denied full civic rights in Latvia and are frequently told to "go home", including in the past by Mrs. Vike-Freiberga if they did not like their conditions in "free" Latvia. The Baltic model of national homogenous states replete with occupation museums to decry the "Russian" communists who ruled them before 1991 are being promoted across the pro-Western states of the old USSR. In Georgia, for instance, the Estonian Occupation Museum was taken as the model for Tbilisi's own account of Russian occupation by Stalin et al! (Sadly when I tried to enter the Tbilisi Occupation Museum a few weeks ago  a power cut closed the building.)

 

So long as American and West European leaders mouth anti-fascist slogans and the rhetoric of democracy while ignoring those in  NATO and the EU's ranks who turn a blind eye to nostalgia for Nazism at best or actually promote it, then Russian fears that NATO expansion is a weapon directed at them as a people won't diminish. Bush and Blair may not know or care what their new allies in the New Europe think about their Slav neighbours but those who remember attitudes in the first New World Order to Russians who will not be easily reassured when they see the propaganda of yesteryear endorsed and the symbols of Nazi Europe proudly displayed in the new NATO.  

---

[1] Blair claimed after 9-11 that ""My father's generation went through the Blitz… There was one country and one people which stood by us at that time. That country was America." See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1555440.stm One North American country fought with Britain during the Blitz in 1940-41, Canada. Hitler declared war on the United States on 12^th December, 1941. Knowing no history leaves Blair free to make it uninhibitedly with the well-known consequences See BBC News, "We share grief, Blair tells America" (20^th Sept. 2001):  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1555440.stm.

[2] See Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Latvia's Parliament rejected a proposed law on the restitution ... (24^th Nov, 2006) and the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), "Latvian parliament rejects Jewish restitution law" (24^th Nov, 2006): http://www.cjp.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=201150. So far as I can find, the German DPA is the only mainline news agency to report the rejection of restitution to the victims of the Holocaust.

[3] See Laura Sheeter, "No swastika for Nato mittens" BBC News (20^th Aug. 2006): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5268950.stm.   

[4] Google offers 197,000 links for Riga and stag party.

[5] See Regnum.ru, "Death in the airport: First victim of the Nato summit in Riga" (27^th Nov, 2006): www.regnum.ru/english/745480.html.

[6]  The Latvian embassy in Washington's website assures visitors: "Latvia's Minister of Foreign Affairs Artis Pabriks notes that he is "truly delighted that Riga will have an opportunity to receive NATO leaders at the time between two significant celebrations – the anniversary of the proclamation of the independence of the Republic of Latvia and Christmas, thus making the year-end an unforgettable and very special occasion…" See http://www.latvia-usa.org/backgrrround.html. The sycophancy extended even to possible US presidential candidates: "[Latvian President] Vike-Freiberga expressed joy that Giuliani had accepted the invitation to attend the NATO Riga summit." See "Giuliani praises Latvia's democracy" in the Baltic Times (28^th Nov, 2006): http://www.baltictimes.com/news/articles/16915/ 

[7] Emphasis added. See Nadine Vitols Dixon, A Life's Journey: Vaira Vīķe Freiberga, President of Latvia (Pētergailis: Riga, 2005), 12.

[8] See Charles M. Sennott  and BrianWhitmore, "Latvia shining example for new NATO nations" in  The Boston Globe (24^th Nov. 2002): http://www.iub.edu/~bafsa/tidbits.html

[9] See Vitols Dixon, A Life's Journey, 14-15. Latvian language lives of the President contain the same anti-Polish geo-historical howler.

Poland November 2006: The First Round of the Local Elections

Poland November 2006: The First Round of the Local Elections

 

 

Introduction and background to the elections

 

It is a year since the Law and Justice (PiS) party came to power in Poland with the election of its leader, Lech Kaczynski, as president. PiS also became the largest single party in the Sejm.[1] The honeymoon for PiS was short-lived. Tensions quickly arose, especially regarding the composition of the coalition government, which excluded the other post-Solidarity rightwing party, Citizen's Platform (PO), but included politicians previously excluded from mainstream. Recurrent cabinet crises raised the prospect of a premature re-run of parliamentary elections.

 

Among the concrete issues were the apparent difficulties in reaching a budget decision within the constitutional time constraints in January of this year. Threats of a no confidence vote Sejm where PiS was a minority also haunted the government. This came to a head with most recently with the break-up and re-formation of the now majority coalition government after the dismissal of and then reappointment of Andrzej Lepper as Deputy Prime Minister and Agriculture Minister in September 2006.  All this seems to be a far cry from the "quick creation of an effective government"[2] as promised on the eve of Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz's nomination for the post of Prime Minister of Poland in September, 2005.  Indeed, whatever the party's confidence in Marcinkiewicz's Prime Ministerial ability, the president's quickly waned when he was replaced in July by  Lech Kaczynski's older twin brother (older by 45 minutes), Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who also happens to be the chairman of PiS. The rule of the twins was a gift to satirists and cartoonists but the first test of its acceptability to Poles was the local elections in November, 2006. 

 

The opposition Citizens' Platform party (PO) which has wide media support to back its standing in the Sejm was a looming menace to  Kaczynski's parliamentary control. The ruling coalition, combining pro-market PiS with Andrezej Lepper's  Self-Defence/Samoobrana  (SO) which has criticised the social costs of capitalism  and the arbitrarily labelled  "ultra-conservative" League of Polish Families (LPR)[3] faced a tough challenge to stay united..  Unlike speculation about early of parliamentary elections, the local elections could not be annulled and the polls to elect the now numerous local mayors and council members – not to mention the swarms of representatives for each of the sixteen different voivodships – went ahead on schedule.  Around 47,000 council seats were available, along with around 2,500 mayoral posts. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warsaw was a key battle ground. Being mayor of the Polish capital had acted as the launching pad for Lech Kaczynski's presidential ambitions. A future rival from PO would hope to take control of the city which would damage Kaczsynski's authority as president and weaken his re-election chances. By promoting former premier Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz as the PiS candidate the president probably hoped to avoid Warsaw becoming headquarters of a bitter rival. The PO candidate, Hannah  Gronkiewicz-Waltz had a track record as a neo-conservative reformer regardless of the social consequences which made her popular in the West but her image would have to be softened to attract a broad constituency unhappy with the first year of Kaczynski's  rule. Although PO scored decisive wins in Solidarity's birthplace Gdansk and Poland's old mining capital Katowice, key races like that in the capital went to a second round.

 

 

 

Official Local Election Results First Round from some major cities

 

City                             Mayor                                     Council Seats             Turnout

 

Warsaw                       Gronkiewicz-Waltz                 PO 32                          52.3%

                                    34.40%

                                                                                    PiS 17

                                    Marcinkiewicz

                                    38.40%                                   LiD 11

 

                                   

Lodz                            Kropiwnicki                            PiS 12                          45.8%

                                    35.48%

                                                                                    PO 10

                                    Kwiatkowski                          

                                    27.30%                                   PSL 6

 

                                                                                   LID 4

 

                                                                                    SO 4

 

 

Krakow                       Majchrowski                          PiS 16                          39.7%

                                    42.31%

                                                                                    PO 13

                                    Terlecki

                                    26.20%                                   PSL 4

 

                                   

 

Gdansk                       Adamowicz                              PO 18                          46.8%

                                    60.85%

                                                                                    PiS 9

                                    Jaworski

                                    29.66%                                   SO 3

 

 

Katowice                     Uszok                                      PO 21                          34%

                                    73.00%

                                                                                    PiS 16

                                    Szpyrka

                                    11.08%                                   LiD 8

 

 

 

Local Election Day

 

BHHRG sent two representatives to monitor the proceedings in the cities of Warsaw and Lodz and the smaller towns of Pruszkow and Grodzisk Maz. The observers visited a total of six polling stations and talked to election officials, pollsters, voters and non-voters.  In speaking to the chairmen of the polling stations concerned, all of whom represented the National Election Commission (PKW), the following information was given about public turnout:

 

Warsaw

 

Polling station No 262            @11.45           299/2,238 registered voters had voted

 

Pruszkow

 

Polling station No 17              @13.00           c.400 (c.30%)*/c.1600 registered voters

had voted

 

Polling station No 20              @13.10           (unwilling to give interview/information)

 

Grodzisk Maz

 

Polling station No 12              @14.05           c.500/2058 registered voters had voted

 

Polling station No 13              @14.00           c.7%/c.2000 registered voters had voted

 

Lodz

 

Polling station No 266            @17.30           ≤c.20%/1932 registered voters had voted

 

 

These figures reflect the chairman's information regarding the number of votes cast in their individual polling stations. Some preferred  to give an exact figure, others preferring a rough estimate or percentage. In the case of polling station No 17 in Pruszkow, both a rough figure and the chairman's own rough percentage do not correspond. (See the table above.).

 

Aside from inconsistencies in the way figures were presented by the chairmen, BHHRG observed a number of other irregularities in the voting procedure:

 

- Voting secrecy generally not observed.  This was due in part to insufficient facilities within the polling stations – such as in Warsaw No 262, where only one voting booth was available for the 2,238 registered voters!  It also stemmed from the lack of insistence within the polling stations that voters should not be able to see other people's ballot papers. More importantly, nor should voters have been able to consult or influence one another over their choice of candidates.  Public discussion of whom to support was seen on a number of occasions and in all the polling stations visited, but most overtly in Pruszkow No 17, where a group was seen directing one another on a school bench, whilst casually patting a small dog (see picture).  The lengthy and complicated ballot papers[4] were likely contributors to this very slack conduct, and all but one of the chairmen interviewed admitted that they had witnessed problems with the deciphering of the various papers and, at times, had felt obliged to intervene and help voters – particularly the elderly – with this problem.

 

- The question of lists for voters currently living in other EU countries.  This was a list that supposedly allowed returning voters to cast their votes, but which seemed only a real concern to one of the chairmen, who said that he did have such a list, but that the procedural requirements were such that they did not have to stamp the voters' passports to prove that they had voted, thereby in theory permitting the voter to vote again in a different polling station.  Most polling stations did not have such lists.

 

- Erroneous names on the lists.  As far as BHHRG could gather, there had been several voters' names found on voting lists, where the voters in question were either deceased or should no longer have been registered.  This was discovered and apparently rectified in Warsaw No 262.

 

They were very few observers – indeed BHHRG's representatives found only a single observer with whom they could talk.  This was an independent observer, apparently "observing for her own sake" and said that if anyone was interested in her results, she would willingly divulge them.  She was located in Grodzisk Maz No 12 and, confirming the view of the polling station's chairman, said that procedural matters were "OK".  She did, however, have no objections to the number of people voting with ballots on their knees in full view of other people in the polling station..

 

Exit pollsters were encountered in only one of the polling stations visited – namely Lodz No 266, where there was a couple of students working for GfK Polonia, a group based in Warsaw.  According to the pair, there were 80 GfK pollsters in Lodz alone and the group had a large presence nationally.  They refused to give any statistics regarding turnout or people's choice of candidate as gauged by the exit opinions.

 

Regarding the neutrality of PKW election commission  representatives, it seems that the majority of commission workers at the polling stations were unaffiliated to the parties up for election, but in Pruszkow No 17 the chairman said that "mostly, the commissioners represent different parties" and, presumably, were casting their votes at the polling stations in which they were stationed throughout the day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A family day out at Pruszkow No 17 – pets included!

 

 

Vox Pop

 

During the Election Day, BHHRG took the opportunity to gauge several voters' opinions on the proceedings. 

 

We overheard a group of elderly voters in Pruszkow No 17 say that they found the voting to be very difficult because of the complexity and the length of the ballot papers. Our observers asked them about the turnout, and then the general state of play in current Polish politics.  One man said that he thought the low turnout was a distortion of the media, and that it was in fact very high (even though the chairman at the very same polling station had said it was low).  He added that the EU is an obstacle to good relations with Russia and that it had betrayed Poland with regard to the German-Russian pipeline under the Baltic.  Moreover, he said that Poland was "bleeding to death" as a result of the exodus of Polish youth to western EU states.  He blamed the last left-wing coalition [the Democratic Left Alliance – SLD] for false promises regarding the EU and said that PiS were fine, provided they and SO stuck to the right.  He said that he voted for "the right".

 

Similar views were echoed in Pruszkow No 20 as most interviewees stated that they had voted for PiS.  However, going against the opinion of the elderly gentleman in Pruszkow No 17, was the view of the polling station chairman in Lodz No 266, who said that "you should not be fooled" by the impression that there may have been even a moderate turnout. He said  that groups of voters would wander into the polling station  sporadically but  linger over the voting process, helping generate the illusion of a higher number of voters.

 

 

Conclusions

 

So far as we could see, the trend to apathy of  Polish voters has not been reversed. There were small numbers of voters out in polling stations on 12^th November and even amongst the voting public disillusionment was, in places, near the surface.  Be it with the ruling parties, the voting procedure, or with the Polish state of affairs since EU accession, the sense of disappointment was often clearly expressed.  Some individuals did speak favourably of PiS, saying for instance that they were "satisfied" with their achievements but without specifying what they were.

 

The voting procedure in Poland seems  poorly supervised within the majority of the polling stations observed by BHHRG. The whims of the individual chairman served as the only apparent procedural regulation.  Moreover, the extraordinary long and complicated ballot papers (and booklets in some places) meant that understanding how to vote was for many people  was taxingly high hurdle to have to negotiate before the delights of actually deciding which candidates to select!

 

As for the final results given by the PKW, the domination of PO was surprising, not simply in terms of the wide gap between PO and PiS and other parties, but also because of official turnout figures.  That 52.3% of voters may have come out to vote in Warsaw simply does not correspond to BHHRG experiences.  Of course, the huge numbers of administrative posts recently created in Poland means that there are plenty of people with a vested interest in the vote, but even taking that into account, it is hard to credit claims that more than one in two Varsovians went to the polls on 12^th November. But, in a country democratic enough to join the other 24 EU states, official foreign observer missions like the OSCE's ODIHR (based in Warsaw itself!) are not "needed" to verify these statistics.

 

All this leaves only the second round of local elections, due on Sunday 26^th November to give us official answers to the remaining 'local questions'. Most eyes will be cast in the direction of the race for the Warsaw 'Presidency', which these days many see as the fast track to the Presidential palace.

 

Visit to Lodz

 

The city of Lodz has recently received a puff in the Independent as a one of Poland's boom towns and a place suitable for property investment by ordinary British speculators:   "Cities like Lodz are undergoing an economic recovery, thanks to the huge amounts of cash and foreign investment opened up by Poland's entry in the EU. Structural funds from the EU alone are worth a staggering $60bn (£31.6bn) until 2013 and Poland's economic growth remains a healthy 5 per cent. All along the two and a half miles of the recently renovated Piotrkowska Street, Europe's longest high street, the fashionable boutiques, bars and restaurants are bustling with locals as they savour the transformation of a city where half the work force was out of a job as recently as the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union."[5]

 

Getting to Lodz along stretches of the very dubious main road, the E8, with juggernauts tearing past at high speed along unkempt surfaces, BHHRG representatives arrived in a city of destitution.  Far from resembling an economic recovery, much of Lodz looked decrepit and destined for further decay.  Yes, there were some western features, thinly filming the neglected features of the city – such as large advertising showing West European products, but this was clearly no more than a  veneer. The supposedly "recently renovated Piotrkowska Street" may be "the best place to organize a pre-wedding meeting for your friends" i.e. stag night[6], but it is a street littered with empty buildings and half-finished facades.  The best kempt building along the city's main street was a beautiful nineteenth century construction, but which houses Nordea, a Norwegian bank and now the largest bank in the whole of Poland.

 

Regarding the question of how "the region's famous redbrick textile factories are being brought back to life as fashionable apartments", a local polling station official gave the following response:  "there is some sort of strange movement here […] there are more foreigners, and more buildings and hotels have been erected.  There is some 'activity'".  The activity in question is partly visible, but what it contributes to is the rise in housing costs within Poland's urban centres, a trend which is effectively pricing indigenous Poles out of the market.  In a bid to generate a quick-return property industry, many new EU members, such as Latvia, Estonia and Poland, are enticing West European property-rich individuals to buy up cheap assets on these eastern property ladders. This produces a superficial GDP growth as prices rise but in reality the inflation in housing prices and rents quickly outstrips the  locals' capacity to pay rising rents or their ability to save for  a deposit on a property.[7] West European "suckers" entering the market after it has started to "boom" sustain the property pyramid – for the moment.

While central city properties may be being bought by these foreigners, on the edges of cities Western hypermarkets are drawing all local merchants' business out of the centre and causing inner-city jobs to disappear. A couple of hundred low paid jobs in a hypermarket make a good headline and mask the disappearance of many more self-employed shopkeepers and their staff.  This was another trend immediately visible in Lodz, where the first (and biggest sign) of construction was that of an Ahold (Dutch-owned) hypermarket on the E72 towards the city's centre.  As one member of the Ministry for Labour and Social Policy commented, "the high streets [of Lodz] have been destroyed by supermarkets […] shopkeepers have lost all"[8]. Migration to Western Europe is many people's economic salvation, but will they ever return to Lodz's property market?

 

 

Scenes upon arriving in Lodz via E72

 

Piotrkowska Street, central Lodz

 

 

 

Interviews with party representatives in Warsaw

 

BHHRG was able to interview several key representatives of the ruling coalition parties – most notably Andrzej Lepper, the Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development, party chairman of SO, and recently re-instated Deputy Prime Minister.  Mr. Lepper spoke of his determination to improve Polish production  quotas approved by  in the EU parliament and EU Commission saying that achievements had been made regarding Polish milk and fish exports.  However, he added that the fundamental EU Treaty for Poland is unfair, since it renders Poland a "second category member state".  Polish farmers only receive the equivalent of 25% of the subsidies allocated to Western EU farmers per cow, etc. 

 

Back at home, Mr. Lepper feels that tension within the coalition stems from the patronising attitude of the PiS party (who hold the most seats within the coalition) at ministerial level.  Since the coalition was re-formed relations between Lepper's party and other ministries, such as with the Ministry of Defence, under Radek Sikorski (PiS),. Have shown signs of more coherence and co-operation.  However, Lepperconsiders that the issue of Polish soldiers in Iraq still generates tension inside the government.

 

As for the current elections, he was unable to comment prior to the release of official results (due out he following day, 14^th November).  However, he felt or hoped that at the local level, his SO was bound to be a major force.  When asked whether he trusted official results, he said that distortion on a national or local level would be unlikely, but that there were very big inconsistencies regarding, for example, campaign airtime on television prior to the elections, which was an obvious political injustice.  To this he added that "of course the results do not reflect reality, because the turnout is so low".

 

The same question was posed to the League of Polish Families (LPR) spokesperson and member of the central committee for the Polish Youth Movement, Anna Sirkovska, who said that she did not feel there were any major violations of the election procedure as such. Her main concern was the results.  For her and for LPR, the office of Mayor ('President') of Warsaw holds particular strategic importance in Polish politics, as is visible from Lech Kaczynski's transition from Warsaw Mayor to Polish President.  However, she said that the LPR candidate did not really stand much of a chance in the face of PO's Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz (former deputy chairman of the EBRD) and PiS's Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz (previously Polish Deputy Prime Minister).

 

Relating to the recent calls by Kenneth Hillas, an aide in the US Embassy in Warsaw, for the sacking of Deputy Prime Minister and chairman of LPR, Roman Giertych, Ms. Sirkovska said that she thought it to be simply "imperialistic slander".  In her view, this incident had in fact strengthened Mr. Giertych's public image. Maybe Mr. Hillas lack of diplomatic tact has backfired to Mr. Giertych's advantage but it was a very public warning sign that  Washington is unhappy with the Kaczynski twins in power even though long-term Washington resident, Radek Sikorski still holds the post of Polish Defence Minister.

 

The outcome of the runoffs on Sunday 26^th November may be overshadowed for many Poles by the tragic deaths of 23 miners dismantling redundant equipment at the recently closed Halemba mine in Ruda Slaska but how Warsaw votes in particular could decide the long-term viability of the current coalition government.

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[1] See "Poland: Europe's Neo-con Nation": http://www.bhhrg.org/CountryReport.asp?CountryID=19

[2] See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4288666.stm

[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1932575,00.html

[4] In total there were 4 different ballot papers: an A3-sized city council candidates' paper; a slightly smaller local/regional council candidates' paper; a presidential candidates' paper for the position of mayor; a seven-page long 'booklet' paper for various seats in the voivodships.

[5] http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1935932.ece

[6] http://www.ryanair.com/site/RU/dests.php?loc=LCJ&show=1

[7] See Erik  S. Reinert and Rainer Kattel (2004), The Qualitative Shift in European Integration: Towards Permanent Wage Pressures and a 'Latin-Americanization' of  Europe?.  PRAXIS Working Paper no 17/2004. Available: http://www.praxis.ee/data/WP_17_20042.pdf.

 

[8] >From interview with Marcin Dongala, member of Ministry for Labour and Social Policy and editor-in-chief of SO official newspaper (Warsaw 10/11/06).