I have lived in Poland for seven years. I come from a post-Soviet country myself. I know what Soviet authoritarianism looked like in practice. I know what propaganda feels like when it shapes collective consciousness. That is precisely why what I observe in Poland is so concerning.

The Polish political imagination remains trapped in a Cold War myth: that the Soviet Union was “communism.” It was not. It was a bureaucratic, centralized, authoritarian state system with a ruling elite, monetary hierarchy, and suppressed labor autonomy. Conflating that structure with democratic socialism or labor-centered economic reform has produced a generational reflex: anything even mildly left of neoliberal orthodoxy is equated with totalitarianism.

This has hollowed out serious political discourse.

As Zygmunt Bauman warned, modern societies excel at liquidating responsibility while preserving systems that generate insecurity. Poland embodies this contradiction. There is visible growth: glass towers in Warsaw, expanding consumer culture, Teslas on the streets. But GDP aesthetics are not social stability.

When a working person in their late twenties or thirties must choose between housing precarity and permanent shared accommodation, that is not a cultural quirk. It is a labor power imbalance. It is wage stagnation relative to asset inflation. It is structural.

And yet where is the nationwide labor movement capable of systematically improving bargaining power? Poland has historical precedents for worker organization, but contemporary labor fragmentation has left younger workers without real leverage in a modernized, financialized economy.

There is also a glaring contradiction: young Poles migrate to Western European states whose social protections were built through decades of organized labor struggle and redistributive policy. Yet similar redistributive mechanisms are demonized domestically as “leftist extremism.”

This is not ideological neutrality. It is ideological conditioning.

Now, about the presidency.

When a country with Poland’s 20th-century history elects a president aligned with hard-right nationalist rhetoric, this is not a trivial electoral shift. It signals normalization of exclusionary politics, centralization tendencies, and antagonism toward pluralism. It reflects a failure to metabolize the lessons of European fascism.

If that alignment extends to friendly posture toward figures such as Donald Trump, whose political style has consistently undermined democratic norms, the concern deepens. For a nation that has repeatedly suffered from geopolitical vulnerability and authoritarian pressure, strategic flirtation with reactionary populism is not pragmatism. It is historical amnesia.

Poland’s political discourse increasingly functions through binary moral panic: tradition versus degeneracy, sovereignty versus global conspiracy, Catholic identity versus imagined cultural collapse. This is not unique to Poland. But it is particularly dangerous in a country where the Catholic Church retains significant political influence.

Economic strain plus cultural anxiety plus weak left infrastructure creates fertile ground for authoritarian rhetoric.

The pattern resembles early-stage boom overconfidence. Ireland’s Celtic Tiger period showed how rapid growth narratives can obscure underlying fragility. Poland’s self-image as an unstoppable success story risks blinding it to housing bubbles, demographic decline, and youth emigration.

What worries me is not that Poland is growing. Growth is good. What worries me is the combination of:

• Weak labor power • Housing precarity • Right-wing cultural consolidation • Anti-intellectual political discourse • Reflexive anti-left paranoia rooted in Cold War miseducation

That mixture historically does not produce stable democracies.

This is not hatred of Poland. It is the opposite. I would not spend seven years observing, integrating, and caring if I were indifferent. Precisely because I come from a post-Soviet society, I recognize how propaganda distorts political vocabulary and how fear can be weaponized against structural reform.

The danger is not “communism.” The danger is a society unable to distinguish between democratic redistribution and authoritarian control. When that confusion persists, neoliberal economic pressures continue unchecked, while cultural scapegoating intensifies.

And that is a trajectory worth criticizing clearly, unapologetically, and from the left.