The Politics of Destruction by François Bafoil

Author:François Bafoil
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030819422
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

2.2 “Us”: Social Policies

In addition to such recurrent attacks against any opposition, the PiS’s main policies seek to support its allies, with the extensive support of European funds. Since 2004, Poland has been the largest recipient of assistance funds among all EU states (without even counting previous pre-accession aid). From 2014 to 2020, this amounted to nearly 70 billion euros, to which was added CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) subsidies of nearly 40 billion euros—that is, more than 100 billion euros for each seven-year program. This amount represents nearly 9% of the European budget and is equivalent to 60% of public investment in Poland. But in the PiS’s account of Poland’s economic success, these funds are never mentioned. Worse, according to the rhetoric of the ruling party, the funds simply mean that justice is served to a country that had been abandoned by Western countries after 1945 and even earlier.

Three categories in particular are targeted in this redistribution policy: family, farmers, and retirees. To manage this, Kaczyński took it upon himself, at the same congress in 2019, and even before the Prime Minister returned to these numbers, to present his enthusiastic supporters with his most important social decisions, designed to accompany significant increases in real wages (3% since 2015 and more than 8% in 2018). He thus announced that minimum wage would be raised at the end of 2020 to 2600 zlotys (573 euros), and then to 3000 zlotys (660 euros), reaching 4000 zlotys (881 euros) in 2021. He promised farmers that by 2023, subsidies per hectare would equal those received by other European farmers. He told retirees they would receive a thirteenth and fourteenth month of “salary.” These social measures were added to the massive policies that had been adopted since 2015, in particular the “Family 500 + ” program, launched on April 1, 2016, to boost birth rates, to which was added an allowance of 500 zloty (120 euros) per month for the second child and any consecutive children. Soon afterward, several laws were passed: to restore retirement ages to those before the 2012 reform, that is, 65 years of age for men and 60 for women; to reduce income tax for the poorest households, increasing tax-free allowances from 3,100 zloty to 8,000 zloty as of January 1, 2018; to “liquidate” precarious employment contracts; and to lower corporate taxes to 15% for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Finally, subsidies were granted to large families for building houses and reforms undertaken for the pension system and healthcare systems.

When Poland joined the EU, its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was 53% of the European average.42 In 2020, this figure had climbed to about 70%; it is soon expected to reach 78% and 95% in 2030. The unemployment rate, which was close to 20% at the time of EU entry, strongly decreased; by 2018, fourteen years later, it had gone down to 3.4%. The exceptional success of the Polish economy over the past two decades was reflected in the World Bank’s Doing Business

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.