Razem: New Left in Poland
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- Published on Thursday, 18 August 2016 22:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1294 .... August 19, 2016
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Razem: New Left in Poland
Marcelina Zawisza and Maciej Konieczny interviewed by Lorenzo Marsili
"We are not the old Left. It is more than clear if you look at our faces, our age, the way we speak and our new way of making politics." In ultra-conservative Poland, something is moving. We meet some of the founders of Razem ("Together") a new political party emerging from social movements and strongly inspired by the experience of Podemos in Spain. We discuss their project and the Polish scenario: from the surprising social policies of the current authoritarian government to the liberal opposition defending freedom of information but forgetting about inequalities. And the meaning of launching a new party from the bottom-up today.
This interview was first published... in the Italian magazine MicroMega and in English at European Alternatives website.
Lorenzo Marsili (LM): Why a new party in Poland? Why did you make the shift from social movements to party politics?
There was no real left party in Poland. There is the so-called Socialist or post-Communist party, which is just bureaucrats of the late Communist government that became the new establishment after the transition -- basically neoliberal, socially conservative, not leftist at all, but they took the place of the left in the country and our objective was to re-open that space. Nobody trusts parties anymore here, and this is why we were very sceptical regarding the success of this operation. But if parties are in distress, social movements are not in a better situation: small, fragmented groups, incapable of having a strong impact, chronically divided.