Now is that quadrinal (is that a word?) affair that is the bane of most countries these days: the national election campaign. As a political scientist by profession perhaps I should be more supportive of the democratic process but I am often reminded of Winston Churchill's comment to Parliment when he described democracy as the worst form of government except all of those others that have gone before it!
Churchill's other famous remark about democracy is perhaps never quite so fitting than during an election campaign: that the best argument against democracy is to have a five minute conversation about politics with the average voter.
The crazy fever that is modern politics brings to the fore many of the manipulative streaks common to the human condition.
Take the Law and Justice party for example; they have based their campain on the percieved injustice suffured by Poland (read them) as a result of the Smolensk aircrash. Rather than dealing with any real issues affecting Polish people they divert attention.
That is not to say that Civic Platform are any better. Rather than explaining why they have failed to solve the pension problem left over from communism they focus attention on GDP growth and infrastructure projects. GDP is all very well but it often provides an inaccurate inducator of real standards of living for the majority of people. Take India or Brazil as cases in point: GDP growth has been phenominal in recent years, yet poverty persists.
On the one hand we have PIS who uses campaign strategies based on a reliance on their voters having a complete ignorance of the issues being discussed. Take their campaign message calling for the slashing of fuel tax for example (where exactly do they plan to get the money from to run the country?) while on the other hand PO are no better in some respects as they focus on non-controversial goals that they can plod on with and show that they 'are doing something'.
This in many ways is indicative of the state of Poland's political scene. A colleague of mine said to me a while back that she would not discuss politics with most people as they would become aggressive and dogmatic. Polish people have lost the ability to debate in many ways. By ability I obviously do not mean Linguistic but rather cultural. Divisions within society have been allowed to be monopolised by political forces to the extent that the normal definition of a pluralist democracy is in fact ironically misplaced as what choice lies in such diametrically opposed positions? There is no to and throw of political ideas; rather people are entrenched and fight a war of attrition.
