alt Hacker News>Ehhh, because only MAGA complains
No.
Because Russia has specifically invested in propaganda efforts influencing rural voters in Poland to support Polish far-right parties (and PiS), using it to foster anti-EU and anti-Ukraine sentiment.
The Polish farmers blocking the border checkpoints used for delivery of military aid to Ukraine a few years ago as "ptotest" was a mirror image tactic of the Canadian conservative truckers blocking the roads.
Russian investment and collusion with conservative and authoritarian movements worldwide — and MAGA in particular — is well-documented. I welcome you to read Mueller's report.
>Don't politicise where it is not applicable
Don't tell me what to do.
You're out of your depth here to determine what's applicable, and what isn't.
>this has nothing to do with the cat fight between 'democrats' and republicans
It has everything to do with the geopolitics and the war taking place in Ukraine, in which both Poland and the US hold a stake (and are both targeted by Russian influence campaigns on that dimension).
Not the "cat fight". The real war.
Look, I'm a Ukrainian-American who went to Ukraine during the war (spent a month in Kyiv in 2023), and lived in Poland for about a year.
I speak Ukrainian, Russian, and English at native proficiency, and I know enough Polish to be renting an apartment there, owning a car, etc.
Russian disinformation campaigns are my special interest. I can tell you a lot about Surkov's postmodern Firehose-of-Falsehood machinery, Gerasimov's hybrid war doctrine, and how it was instrumental in the 2014 invasion of Ukraine as well as 2016 US election meddling and the rise of MAGA.
I can direct you to RAND and RUSI studies, books and articles by Pomerantsev, Applebaum, Gessen, which will give you a wider look into Russia's hand in the right-wing "conservative" voices across the world and in the EU in particular (Orban in Hungary, Fico in Slovakia, AfD in Germany, and PiS supporters in Poland).
But you really won't learn anything if you insist on projecting your myopic US-centric attitude that purports that MAGA is a dem-vs-not-dem "cat fight".
I'm happy that you get to live in a world where you can avoid "politicizing" politics.
Out in the real world, complaining about the EU while living in a EU country whose economy was lifted from shambles by the EU is inherently a political issue.
And it's not coincidentally similar to MAGA supporters e.g. rallying against Obamacare only to discover that they literally depend on it for survival, and in general, voting against Democrats while benefitting from and depending on the policies that Democrats established.
And it's not coincidental that the Polish anti-EU rural voters are sharing the anti-immigration, "they took our jobs" sentiment with MAGA even as immigration provided an immense boost to both the US and Polish economy.
Ukrainians number in millions in Poland because of the war; MAGA's anti-Mexican sentiment maps 1:1 to anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Poland — specifically because Russian information warfare efforts help fuel both (it's a literal industry in Russia, with infamous St. Petersburg human-staffed "bot farms" being well exposed by now).
I'm not saying that all MAGA is like that, but there is a sufficiently big overlap (and a sufficient amount of evidence) that me saying that those rural anti-EU folks are Polish MAGA has a lot more weight than you are realizing.
As other commenters have pointed out, by the way.
So, if I may: please revert your downvote and learn.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
You seem to assume that I'm an American? I'm not, nor do I live in the Americas. You're not an American either but for some reason you seem to have taken over an awful lot of the "democratic" viewpoints. Those viewpoints are quite polarising whether you see this or not and they're largely based around the "democratic" attempt to gain the upper hand in American elections by creating an "us versus them" narrative in which everyone who does not abide to a desired narrative is part of, in collusion with or influenced by "them". You insist I don't tell me what to do when I call out your reference to 'MAGA' in a thread around Poland being a growing economy but in the same post you tell me to 'revert my downvote' (what downvote? I do not vote down, I discuss) and that I should 'learn'. Well, I learn all the time and from your discourse I learned that you seem to have taken a rather polarised position when it comes to American affairs which seems to come straight out of the "democrat" playbook. You also infer that those who do not agree with your position on these subjects must be "influenced by Russian disinformation campaigns". Let me put a few things straight:
- as said I'm not an American
- ...and I do not want the extremely polarised political discourse from the U.S.A. to be exported more than it already is...
- ...so I disagree with the application of the 'MAGA' moniker to the current discourse on the Polish economy...
- ...nor do I see the "democratic" party as the "good" side versus the "bad" republicans or - if you dislike the d/r dichotomy the "non-MAGA" versus "MAGA". The "democrats" accuse the republicans of what they've been doing during the Obama and Biden regimes while the republicans accuse(d) the "democrats" of what they were doing during the Bush and Trump regimes. Pot, meet kettle. The result of all those shenanigans is that the populace got fed up with all the politicking and voted for a candidate who came from outside the political circus: Trump. This did not stop the politicking, it only made it worse so they voted for him again, and again. I suspect they'll keep on voting for candidates like him until they're fed up with the constant turmoil and vote for a "boring" candidate. I say let them, it is their country, we have our own share of problems here.
- With regard to the Russian invasion of Ukraine I'd like to see Putin pushed back over the original borders...
- ...but I also realise that Ukraine had and has its own share of problems with corruption so the country has quite a way to go once Putin (or whoever succeeds him once he happened to fall out of a window in his underground bunker) has been put in his place...
Now let's get back to discussing the Polish "wirtschaftswunder" - there'll be a better Polish term for that - and keep American politics where it belongs, in the U.S.A.