My name is Ms Ewa Majewska and I did not vote in the 2015 presidential election. It seemed to me that treating politics solely as an operation to put a cross in front of a name that didn't wake up any affirmative emotions was pointless. Politics is much more to me than elections. Years of activism, artivism and political explanation and union activities are my political actions, and I inactive believe that people limiting their participation in politics to crosses at the urn and grappling at the left electorate are wasting my time and all of us.
However, after 2015, I started voting. I voted in the parliamentary elections, in which – as it turned out – I was besides allowed to run, from the list Total lotsWhich I enthusiastically joined right after her rise. I collected respective 100 votes – mostly from people who had not voted before – and it was sensible to run, even if it did not have a spectacular success. I am 1 of those people about whom Tomasz Markiewka late wrote in a column that they utilized the word "neoliberalism" to emphasize fresh elements introduced in Poland with the shock therapy of turbocapitalism. In 2007, with Janek Owl and Kuba Szreder, we released 2 anthologies of texts exposing abuse and inequality of the fresh system.
I changed my head due to the fact that I realized that the vote not only does not miss out on another actions it implements in politics, but it can be a sensible addition to them and, which seems to me especially crucial to me, is 1 of the tools to block FascismWhat I've been doing for many years, too. In my opinion, blocking Fascism makes sense in all ethically acceptable form, and it is an work erstwhile omission opens up access to political, institutional, financial, cultural or any another influence to fascists.
Nawrocks and Fascism
Fascism is simply a political and moral eventual evil and as specified commits to countering. Neoliberalism has sometimes in practice equally devastating effects: let us look at the borders of the Fortress of Europe and the effects of the EU's migration policy, which leads to the death and threat of expanding numbers of refugees who effort to cross the Polish-Belarusian border or the Mediterranean. But the answer to neoliberal evil cannot be to open doors to an even greater threat. Unfortunately, this is the threat of Karol Nawrocki's candidacy in the second circular of the presidential election.
If we want to fight evil at the borders of the European Union, we must act at the European Union level, due to the fact that it is there that the key decisions are made for what its officers and Frontex call the “border protection” and what, in the eyes of thousands of activists, is simply allowing death and punishing refugees and helping activists. Fascist politicians – Italian, Greek, Hungarian or Polish – push forward the lewd, racist heritage of Europe, but without green light from Brussels they could kiss each other. And with the support of the EU, they get their racist policy approval.
However, if we want to fight fascism, we must block his accession to all tools of power, whether it be a component, a university or the main street of our city; a government, parliament or a Belvedere. We cannot pretend to ignore the second circular of elections simply due to the fact that our favourite candidate is not involved, will improve the destiny of refugees, due to the fact that that will not happen; something precisely the other will happen — racist rhetoric will get an additional reinforcement in the form of a kibolian communicative raised to the rank of head of state and a pen ready to sign the most incriminating anti-refugee laws.
I appreciate that the candidate of the fresh Left, Magdalena Biejat, officially supported the Liberal candidate, Rafał Trzaskowski. I didn't ask, but I fishy she most likely would have more doubts if this candidate was, for example, Bronisław Komorowski. Or Donald Tusk. But the refugees in Warsaw were welcomed for Trzaskovsky, not chased away, signed the LGBT+ Charter and another documents, making the city at least declaratively open. Trzaskowski is not my candidate in the presidential election, but I believe that abstaining or voting for a counter-candidate is unacceptable.
To invent radicalism for times of contradiction
I have explained how and why the vote for Trzaskowski fits into the policy of blocking Fascism. I would besides like to point out what fascism is an acceptable option for the left (and why I will not vote for Adrian Zandberg anymore). Well, the man whom any of you may consider as a voice of opposition to neoliberal housing policy, border, urban or international, declared a fewer days ago that he full agrees with the Confederacy. I'm certain this candidate will win due to the fact that you're either gonna give him the vote or you're gonna decide this full policy, colloquially speaking, blow it. And that's a gift you're gonna celebrate Baby Day.
I am not a typical of neoliberal elites, equipped with a sense of superiority, an absolute economical or political privilege, and a bourgeois habitus, allowing to treat "bonjour" as a political argument (although I talk French a small better than Trzaskovsky, as many left-wing people do). I'm a typical of the independent intelligence I specify for Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich as 1 that nobody cares about paying. This makes me hard to discuss in a political polemic, due to the fact that for independence, both from liberals and from the right, I have been paying a salt price for many years, especially professionally, which most people do not even effort to imagine. But now that I've taken up athletics for you, what will you vote for, if you think of Nawrock's support, here's a fistful of details.
You will vote for Przemysław Czarnek's pet, who says about the sex offender supported (and used) by Nawrocki "let us live 100 years or 120". You will vote in favour of continuing the laws written by Kaczyński and signed by the President. To the individual opposed to refugees and migrants and Ukraine; to misogina, homophobe and racist, the man who would most like to expel LGBT+ people from the country and candidate who in 2023 received the tv Republic viewers award.
You will vote for greater evil
In 2015 I thought the PiS had a strategy.. Already during the first PiS in 2006, I wrote about the dangerous inspiration that Kaczyński drew from German pre-war politics, especially from Carl Schmitt's doctrine and his doctrine of state of emergency. But in 2015 I did not go to the second circular of presidential elections in the belief that I did not want to vote for little evil. At the time, I had to choose Andrzej Duda and a conservative huntsman with noble roots, about which we all rapidly saw that in fact he would be little evil than obeying fascist law line doctor from Krakow, whose own department criticized for breaking the constitution.
The political categories of radicalism and reformism that most of you usage present come from the 19th century. These were times erstwhile refusal to participate in the "election circus" mostly active belonging to illegal Communist parties, trade unions or subversive movements, which fought for what we consider to be apparent today: limitation of working time, wellness insurance, weekends, leave or electoral law for the deprived, left-wing and women. Don't you remember that time? Neither do I, and I don't want to gotta remember them due to your political decisions.
Political radicalism is for me the ability to consistently usage political tools for equality and empowerment of the weakest, with the awareness of their contradictions and entanglements, but without the limitations of dogmatism. The modern planet is full of contradictions, and pretending that they are not there is as naive as trying to overcome them quickly. If there is another task ahead of today's left hand, it is undoubtedly the ability to invent fresh radicalism, right for the complicated times in which we live and vote. This is not the extremist effort to go back 100 or 200 years as Adrian Zandberg proposes to us today. It is effective in combating fascism, at all levels.
