The argument was honed even before the start of the campaign – which is now raging for the Polish legislative elections scheduled for Sunday, October 15 – at a political picnic held in front of cameras on July 8 in the town of Pultusk, not far from Warsaw. "Today, our gross domestic product [GDP] per capita is equivalent to 80% of the European Union average (...) And all because social benefits are very extensive in Poland," stated Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the national-conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), which has been in power since 2015. "Did we think, a dozen years ago, that we would so quickly catch up to Western European countries in terms of per capita income?" he continued on July 30, at another picnic, this time in the western village of Polajewo.
The data is real and tangible for Polish people: The country is constantly catching up to its neighbors. When it joined the European Union (EU) in 2004, Poland was one of the least wealthy member states. Its GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita was half the EU average. Only Lithuania and Latvia were the two countries with worse statistics of the 10 joining at the same time. Today, the country has surpassed the standards of living of Greece, Portugal, Slovakia and Hungary, and is now hot on Spain's heels.
Poland is at the end of its "20 glorious years" – since joining the EU – and it's time for the national-conservatives of the PiS, who have been in power since 2015, to reap the rewards: GDP has risen 32% between 2015 and 2023, and unemployment halved to now reach 5%. "Poland has been catching up with Western Europe since its transition to a market economy. In 1990, our GDP per capita was equivalent to 30% of Germany's; today, we're approaching 70%, but this has been achieved in 30 years, not eight," pointed out economist Witold Orlowski, a professor at Warsaw's Vistula University.
"Other Central European countries have experienced the same phenomenon, and we would in any case, have arrived at the same result, more or less quickly, with a different government and different policies," explained Hanna Cichy, senior economist at Polityka Insight, an analysis center based in Warsaw. European funds have played a role. According to ING Bank, the 2024 Cohesion Fund will represent 2% of Polish GDP. "They have been very important for building infrastructure, without which the investments would probably not have taken place," said Witold Orlowski. A fact that the PiS has kept quiet about.
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