Sunday, May 24, 2015

Rujournalist — Supported Sanctions--Lost Election

J.Hawk's Comment: This is a stunner and, frankly, a minor political earthquake for all of EU. Even in January [Bronislaw ] Komorowski seemed unbeatable. A Polish political pundit famously said that to lose the election, "Komorowski would need to run over a pregnant Catholic nun while drunk." Well, close enough! But it's not just the sanctions and apples. Komorowski can also thank his Kiev Bandera-worshipping "partners and friends" for the untimely demise of his political career. The tide of the Polish public opinion turned very sharply against Ukraine in the last few months ("you can't fool all the people all the time"), and Komorowski paid the price... 
As to [Andrzej] Duda, he is as Russophobic as his predecessor, if not more so (he believes, for example, that Putin had the Polish president Kaczynski murdered by staging a plane crash in Smolensk in 2010...), but at the same time he is a Euroskeptic similar Hungary's Viktor Orban and he enjoys extensive support by Poland's Catholic Church which is, well, you can imagine. But Russophobia and Euroskepticism can't happily coexist, not in the Polish state, at any rate, so very soon Duda will have to make a choice. And ultimately Duda's politics are actually closer to Putin's (when it comes to the fundamental beliefs concerning sovereignty, national security, and basic human values) than to EU's.
Fort Russ
Supported Sanctions--Lost Election
Rujournalist
Original Supported Sanctions--Lost Election
Translated from Russian by J.Hawk

5 comments:

PeterP said...

Completely incoherent. The current president was hurt by Rusophobia and instead the Polish elected a.. bigger Rusophobe. The Russian propaganda is still so inept it is pitiful.

Tom Hickey said...

No indication that concern with Russia had much to do with the Polish election.

It seems to have been driven by domestic dissatisfaction with the status quo and Poland's relationship with EU that many see as disadvantageous for all but the elite.

Tom Hickey said...

Sanctions could be a factor, but perhaps not uppermost in voters' minds. There is popular discontent in the EU in general over neoliberal policy that is enriching the elites while others either languish are are actually harmed by the policies.

The effect of sanctions is adding fuel to that fire but people are upset about the overall economic deterioration rather than specifically focusing on sanctions.

PeterP said...

So if the facts actually support the opposite alternative from what wishful thinking desires, then the election turns out to be about something unrelated. Such is the power of self deception.

Tom Hickey said...

People aren't dealing with "facts." They are dealing with perceptions and these perceptions are fueled by propaganda.

I spend a lot of time trying to separate fact from perception. It is every difficult.

Even the people that have access to the "facts," like clandestine services, gather data selectively and interpret it based on their cultural and institutional cognitive-affective biases of which they are minimally aware.

The one fact of which people are reasonably sure is the money in their pocket. That is a major political force in in places where there are reasonably free elections. At certain point people vote their pocketbooks rather than their ideology and perceptions, and that is now happening in Europe.