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 The report entitled “Cheer up” while praising the country’s economic progress, it argues that Poland’s public sector and state administration still need radical reform. “The best bits of Poland are now indistinguishable from their counterparts elsewhere in the world; the worst bits, including public services such as transport, are egregiously bad,” observes The Economist.
The survey—a ten-page special report published as a supplement to this week’s edition of The Economist—devotes several pages to the current government, arguing that its socially-conservative stance and incompetence in public relations do not merit the criticism heaped on it at home and abroad. “As a minority government, it had a dreadful image in the international media, reflecting its unpopularity among much of the Warsaw-based chattering classes” says the survey’s author, Edward Lucas, who has been reporting from the region since 1986. “But the survey aims to paint a much more balanced picture. They have their shortcomings, and the new coalition deal is regrettable, but they’re not fools or monsters”.
Poland’s new bosses, the survey notes, “seem to delight in picking fights with gays, feminists, secularists, liberals, most of the media, ex-communists, uppity foreigners (especially the European Commission) and anyone else who crosses their path.” But the government is also serious about rooting corruption from social and economic life. “Polish politics is dirty, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his government are, for the first time in the country’s democratic history, making a real effort to clean it up.”
The survey contains an exclusive account of the discovery made by defence minister Radek Sikorski, that the WSI military intelligence service had spied on him not only in the communist era, but as late as the mid-1990s, when he had already been deputy defence minister. “I was really shocked by this” says Edward. “It is easy for outsiders to dismiss Polish conservative politicians as paranoid. But sometimes they have every reason to be.”
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The survey aims to dispell outdated cliches of Poland as a backward, rural country. “Warsaw bristles with skyscrapers, and most of Poland is online,” writes Edward Lucas. He also emphasises that the country’s entry to the European Union two years ago has transformed the environment for Polish-based businesses. “Instead of being isolated behind customs barriers, they can sell their wares everywhere,” he writes.
Against that, the bureaucratic and other problems faced by firms in Poland are substantially worse than in other countries in the region, and economic performance since 1989 has suffered as a result, the survey demonstrates, using data from the World Bank and other international sources.
The survey concludes with an article about Polish national psychology. “Poland is a country that it is dangerous to praise, or to criticise” notes Edward Lucas, who studied Polish in Cracow in 1986. His survey argues that many Poles are too gloomy about their country’s past and present—the result of a lack of self-confidence stemming from the country’s traumatic history.
"The message is clear", comments Martin Oxley, CEO of the British Polish Chamber of Commerce. “In the current economic environment, British business has to do 2 key things to drive strategic growth and become more competitive. Optimise operating efficiencies and seek new geographic markets. Poland, increasingly seen as the gateway to Central and Eastern Europe offers both."
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