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The Monocle Daily
Tensions ramp up between the US and Venezuela. Plus: How much sway does the Pope have in the Middle East?
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You'Re listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on 1 December 2025 on Monocle Radio. Why is the self styled peace president threatening war with Venezuela? How much attention are the Pope's Middle Eastern audiences paying? And what word Sums up your 2025? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts now.
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Foreign.
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B
Hello and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London, I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Daniella Peled and Michael Binion will discuss the day's big stories. And we'll hear from the political scientists Ben Stanley and Stanley Bill about their new book chronicling the rise and fall and possible return of Polish populism. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Daniela Peled, managing editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and by Michael Binion, foreign affairs specialist for the Times. Hello to you both.
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A
Hello.
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B
Hello, Michael. First of all, I believe you come to us, as you very often do, with a cultural recommendation in this specific instance of the cinematic variety.
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C
Indeed, yes. Yes. Well, I went to see a second Ralph Fanes film in a year and it was just as good. And it's called the Choral and it's about the First World War men's choir, well, a mixed choir, but there are no men because they've all been called up to fight in the trenches. And it's very moving, it's funny, it's bitter, it's sad. It's very, very capturing the image of Britain outside the trenches, you know, what was left behind in a Yorkshire town. And it's really good and just terrific acting. Written by Alan Bennett, who must be almost 90 now.
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B
I was going to say he must remember the times.
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C
Well, he probably died. Yes, yes.
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B
Films about World War I, for obvious reasons, Michael, tend towards the. The somewhat depressing and harrowing, isn't it?
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C
Oh, that's awful. Yes.
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B
I mean, does.
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C
No, no trenches, no blood and gore, no men dying in the trenches, none of that. It's all offstage. It's rather like that very moving film Zone of interesting, where you never see the horrors of Auschwitz. It's all in the background. You're just there in the commandant's garden.
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B
Okay, so. So four stars from Michael Binion's film.
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C
I think so, yeah.
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B
Excellent, Daniela, because clearly our guests are all creatures of habit. You have once again been visiting obtuse local history museums on this occasion in Kuala Lumpur and Chisinau, which means in the latter example in particular, you may have been to one that I went to this year. Their strange little Moldovan military museum.
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A
Of course.
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B
It's a. It's a ripper, actually.
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A
It is. I. I' very fond of it. This was not my trip. First trip to Kishinau, not my first trip to the local history museum. I did a sort of re. A sort of like, return tour of them, but I. This time I managed to get in. In previous visits I failed. To the Kishna City Museum, which is in an old water tower that was.
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B
Closed when I went. Is it good?
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A
Let's discuss the parameters randomly. There was one. Only. There was one piece of signage in English, but I think my Romanian is getting quite good.
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B
Okay.
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A
After all the local history museums.
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B
Okay. No, it was. I did go there with a view to actually, you know, consuming the contents, as it were, but it was. It was shut.
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A
Kuala Lumpur has some small offerings as well, given that the local history is not really its forte. But there are, I think, a few buildings that are old.
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B
By which you mean built sometime in the 1990s.
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A
Well, there is a little. I did a little walking tour which. Which took in the excitement of buildings built in the 1950s, of which. But. And though I did go to the craft museum, hoping I would be. There would be lots of dioramas and strange waxworks and. Yes, there were a couple.
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B
Okay, well, that's that. We'll give that a solid three and a half stars. Then. We will start in Venezuela, where it has been confirmed just over the weekend, that a week or so back, Venezuela hosted one end of a telephone conversation between President Nicolas Madur and his American counterpart, Donald Trump. Yes, the beleaguered demagogue, menaced by enemies real and imagined, forever appealing to the baser instincts of his supporters by stoking hallucinatory specters of foreign subversion and imminent national collapse, increasingly visibly detached from reality, holed up in his gaudy palace, surrounded by scheming supplicants to whose plotting is. He is oblivious, spoke to Nicolas Maduro and afterwards said, quote, I wouldn't say it went well or badly. It was a Phone call. A possible subject of discussion may have been the considerable American armada which has assembled off Venezuela's coast in recent weeks. Michael, just for fun, it falls to you to divine the thinking of President Trump. Are they doing this or not?
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C
Well, I don't know. I mean, nobody knows. I mean, one moment he sends an armada there, the next moment he has a phone call, then they go ahead and bomb ships, not once but twice, trying to kill the survivors, which actually constitutes a war crime. And that is pretty serious if that's what they're doing. And you wonder, well, is this outright aggression? Is it attempt at putting pressure? Is it an attempt to force Maduro to just quit? What is it and what's it about, apart from simply saying, I want the Caribbean to listen to me, and the whole of the, you know, near. Near abroad, as you might call it. Not only Venezuela, it's also Honduras, where they're having an election. And he said, if my guy doesn't win, in other words, the one he likes, I'm going to cut off all aid. What do you think? Is that the way. Is that diplomacy?
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B
It is. Curious. And tragically, Daniela, we have already been beaten to all the Donroe Doctrine jokes, but if we focus on Venezuela in particular, Trump, during the course of this call, apparently offered Maduro safe passage if he would leave to destination unspecified. It's not clear who else the United States would prefer to be in charge in Venezuela. Is it possible that they may not have thought this entirely through?
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A
Well, I think Venezuela is a bit of an easier option. It's not like regime change in Iraq, where there wasn't really a replacement. They do have an active opposition, that's.
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B
True, but I'm not sure they're going to be Trump's favourite people either, necessarily.
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A
Well, yeah, you can't have everything, though, can you? But, I mean, the optics are interesting because the Machado is about to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, which of course, I think probably annoyed Trump because he was passed over in favor of hers, as his narrative would go. But this is brinksmanship, I guess, and no one knows which way it's gonna. It's gonna go. But, you know, we. It's about an element of control. And Trump has acted on the world stage with, and again, I'm thinking from his perspective, a great deal of authority and some actual success. The, the. Does anyone remember that there was a war between Iran and Israel a short while ago that was supposed to be apocalyptic and he intervened. It also seemed to go away. Various other peace deals which Washington may or may not have played a huge part in. So I think there's this idea that, okay, I want something to be so, then it will be so. And sometimes it actually does seem to work out.
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B
But this would be Michael starting a war rather than stopping it. And it strikes me at least that no particular case has been made about any urgency or necessity of this. I mean, we can take as read that President Maduro is a wrong'. It's very, very arguable that Venezuela would be much better off if somebody else was running it. There are people who have suggested that what the United States really wants is the oil. But that argument rarely stands up when you apply the fact that it is just so much cheaper and easier to buy someone's oil than invade their country and steal it. So if the United States does do this, is it possible to see what, how this would be pitched to the American people? Like, why do we have to do this and why do we have to do it now?
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C
Well, the pretext is that Venezuela is fueling and promoting the drug trade to.
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B
The United States, which is probably not entirely inaccurate.
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C
Well, I'm sure there's quite a bit of that, but so is Colombia and so are plenty of other places. I mean, drugs are coming up across the border from Mexico every single day. It's because the appetite in America for drugs is so great. But the pretext is I'm gonna stop these drug smugglers, I'm gonna destroy their boats. I'm gonna keep America safe. But the irony is that what he's now said also is he's going to release a former president of Honduras who has been sentenced to, I think more.
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B
Than 40 years, 45 if memory is.
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C
45 years for drug smuggling and promoting drugs. Well, you release on the way, Wesley. Don't people think that's a bit ironic?
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B
These are somewhat mixed messages.
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C
They certainly are, yes. I mean, it's old fashioned gunboat diplomacy, which the Brits used to pract practice with great aplomb in the 19th century. But one wonders what on earth for?
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B
I mean, the sharp end of the gunboat diplomacy, Daniela, to which Michael has alluded, has been this campaign of sinking what we are told are boats being operated by drug couriers. There is plausible evidence to suggest that at the very least, not all of them have been. At least 80 people are now known to have been killed in these raids. And there was that suggestion, to which Michael also alludes over the weekend, that Secretary of State for Defence Pete Hegseth ordered a second strike on a stricken boat with injured people in the water. And it's, you know, there's not much passing of the Geneva Conventions about that sort of behavior. It's not on and you don't do it. Has he potentially incriminated himself? He asked, somewhat wishfully.
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A
Again, the wishful thinking. I mean, I, my perception of it is that the idea that when you say that you're fighting a war against drugs and, you know, all gloves are off, and that's like ultimate populist measure, you know, America, as you said, has got a real problem with drugs. And the issue, the way they seem to want to deal with it, is try to prevent the drugs coming in rather than deal with any of the root causes of perhaps why life is so miserable. And there's no safety net that it's such a scourge in, in America. But actually, I was looking at some polling this afternoon about how this whole affair is, is viewed. And although again, the drug dealers don't have much sympathy and the idea that maybe you would be defending your country by, by bombing drug boats, the consensus was that actually Americans would like to see some evidence of this. And certainly when it comes to the Democrats, obviously they're much more opposed. But even amongst Republicans, they're saying, well, okay, this is the policy, but have we seen any evidence? They'd like to know a little bit more. And this latest incident, I think it's going to be really hard to prove ultimately where the final order came from. But this is just a step too far.
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B
Okay, well, to Lebanon now, where Pope Leo XIV is today on the second leg of his perhaps unlikely first overseas trip since ascending the throne of Saint Peter back in May. He was in Turkey late last week. He may find a more receptive audience in Lebanon than in Turkey. Lebanon is roughly one third Christian and its Christians substantially Catholic, as opposed to Turkey, where Christians are a fraction of a single percentage point of the population and the Catholics are a rounding error. However, the message appears to be consistent, if unsurprising, from an occupant of Leo's present role. Addressing Lebanese politicians and religious leaders, he kicked off with Matthew, chapter 5, verse 9. That is the bit about blessed are the peacemakers. Daniela, it does strike me that, you know, giddily reported though this has been, it would have been more of a story if the Pope had sort of stood up and encouraged war, just said, come on, come on, everybody, have at it. I mean, this is what popes say.
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A
Isn'T, is it is. But I think it still, I don't think we can underestimate the message he sends, you know, in general in a Middle Eastern tour. I mean, the Christians are an ancient minority in the Middle east, but much beleaguered for multiple reasons. One narrative would have it that Islamist extremism has driven them out. Often they have smaller families and they've got a better connections outside, so they move more. But they're a really important part of the fabric and they feel. I've visited many Christian communities across the Middle east, and although on the surface people pay lip service saying, oh, we're all part of the community and, you know, this is multiculturalism, I think they do feel under threat and overwhelmed. I think this sends a really powerful message wherever he would go in the Middle east, especially, especially Lebanon.
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B
He did address domestic concerns in Lebanon, Michael, and he made a specific point that Lebanese people, if possible, should try and stay in Lebanon, which is, as anybody who has been there knows, a marvelous country in many, many respects. In fact, in almost all respects except the people who keep ending up governing it. The Pope said there are times when it is easier to flee or simply more convenient to move elsewhere. It takes real courage and foresight to stay or return to one's own country. Is that bit right coming from an American who moved to Italy to further his own career?
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C
Well, no. I mean, it's not a reflection of him. I mean, you know, leaders.
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B
He could have stayed in Chicago.
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C
Well, he could have done, yes, but I mean, he got itchy feet and he wanted to go and proselytize and do good works overseas. I think it's probably just a message to tell refugees, look, just fleeing abroad actually won't better your lot.
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B
And it very often does, though.
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C
Well, it can do, but not if you try illegal asylum all over the world. I mean, that this is a major problem, the flight of refugees. I would dispute your point that the Turkey visit was sort of incidental. That, I think, is absolutely key to it, because it's not Turkey he was going to. It's the Eastern Orthodox Church. That's the point. It's the headquarters, believe it or not, of the Eastern Orthodox Church are where they've always been. Constantinople, now Istanbul. Tiny number of Christians, but that's where the Ecumenical Patriarch, the head of the whole of all the Orthodox churches has his seat. And Orthodoxy is the large other Christian denomination dominating the world, mostly Eastern Europe, where the Pope clearly wants to see better relations, particularly as it is the religion of Russia. And to try to get the Orthodox Church working with him to promote peace is also a message not just directed at the Middle east, but directed also at Russia and Ukraine.
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B
On the plane from Istanbul to Beirut, Daniela Leo reiterated his enthusiasm for a two state solution in the Middle East. The Vatican is among those countries which has recognized Palestine. It did so back in 2015. If the Pope sticks his ore in on that, especially when he says, I favor a two state solution, does that make any difference to anything? Because it increasingly strikes me that two state solution has just become that thing that people actually, people just say. And there's generally then something of a vacuum of detail along lines of like, well, how?
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A
Well, I think fewer and fewer people are saying it in the leadership of the, of the, of the region that he just visited, including the Israeli government themselves. So saying it is a, is a political statement, even it doesn't seem a very, a very bold one. I mean, I, I agree it seemed completely moribund before, just before October 7th, and I think the chaos and horror that erupted after that has made internationally revived it. But perhaps it revived it because as you said, there are no details. It seems, it seems implausible and impossible right now. But if the Pope says it, that certainly gives that, that said, that's certainly something. If you're talking about an ideal, an idyllic ideal, then, well, who better than the Pope to discuss it?
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B
Just reflecting on this trip overall, Michael, his first trip overseas as Pope, six months into the job, he has taken his time getting out and about. And this, as I understand it, was a trip that had been substantially planned by his predecessor, Pope Francis, who was a very enterprising, one might almost say buccaneering, papal diplomat who went to lots of places popes usually don't. Do we get any sense yet of how Leo sees the role of the Pope as ambassador at large or what kind of papal diplomat he wishes to be?
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C
Well, he's a very steady diplomat. He's very cautious, but at the same time he's consolidating his base, trying to now heal the sort of splits and wounds that had opened up under Francis between conservatives and liberals within the Catholic Church, offering the Latin Mass, for example, and all the other things, but at the same time making pronouncements on social issues that would seem to appeal generally to the more liberal minded Catholics. So he's consolidating his base quite successfully. I think one of the reasons is you don't hear much about it, which is a measure of the success. Then he's quietly moving out beyond Rome to other areas. Probably he won't be as globetrotting as some of his predecessors. I Mean, John Paul II was all over the place all the time. He seemed to seem to love it. He has symbolically converted the Popemobile into a mobile clinic which is going to be sent to Gaza, I think, to help with the emergencies, medical emergencies there. I don't know, I don't think there's. The pattern hasn't yet fully emerged. But he seems to me a cautious, thoughtful and probably fairly hard working diplomat who's not going to be splashy. But he may have behind the scenes some effect.
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B
Well, to Switzerland now, where it seems that the country's more fortunate families may cease bubble wrapping the gold cuckoo clocks in preparation for a hasty decampment. Swiss voters have overwhelmingly rejected a proposal for a new inheritance tax which would have imposed a 50% slug on passed down fortunes of more than 50 million francs, or about 53 million euros, which would just about COVID dinner for three in one of Geneva's more modest diners. Finance Minister Karin Kalasutta, who also presently holds Switzerland's rotating presidency, expressed satisfaction with the result, saying such a tax would have unbalanced the tax system and made Switzerland less attractive. Daniela, how would you have voted? Would you have voted to protect your own colossal inheritance or would you have voted to absolutely soak the rich?
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A
Yeah, it would be fun to soak the rich, wouldn't it? This wouldn't actually affect too many people. And I think, I think it has to be seen in the context that Switzerland is forever having a million and gazillion referendums.
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B
Oh, we could do one of these every week.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
There was one on leaf blowers a few weeks back.
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A
Right, right. And there was another one about extending mandatory military service to women, you know, having just given them the vote.
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B
Come on, that was in 1973, 1991, I think. No, I'm sure it was in the 1970s. They gave women the vote, I think.
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A
Finally, I think it took a while, it was a staggered rollout, but yeah, it's, that's the thing with participatory democracy. You can put out something that's fairly outlandish or fairly extreme. And I think my reading of it is that it's just, you know, we don't want, we don't want these things to be passed on a federal level, even though it will only affect a very, very few people, even in Switzerland. I mean, Switzerland is what it still is, one of the more economically equal, equal countries if you look at it on a, on a global scale. But I think this is more a sort of slight two fingers up at the Maneuvering, saying, no, not this, but this is a.
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B
This is a conversation happening all over the developed world, Michael, especially in places where there has been a huge boom in real estate prices, which has meant that some people, when their parents or grandparents pass on, are effectively going to win the lottery and others are not. So you're familiar, I'm sure, with the arguments against inheritance tax, which is that it might encourage capital flight, that all that money has already been taxed once anyway, so it isn't fair. Where do you come down on this one?
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C
Well, I can see that governments need inheritance tax because it's. Well, certainly in Britain, it's quite a large revenue earner for the treasury. And when the country is so pressed to make ends meet, you know, where else can you find the money and it doesn't directly hurt or any of the people on whom it's levied? In other words, those who are thinking they're going to inherit a massive amount of money, a windfall, as it were, not through any work of their own, but simply by being the children or friends or descendants of whoever's died, well, they simply won't get their jackpot.
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B
Well, they'll get. In the UK, they'll get 40% less, over 320,000.
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C
I'm not against it in principle. I mean, I'm not against mansion tax, although my house is probably going to fall into the category where I'm going to have to pay a whopping amount every year. The answer is sell the house. But all these things, I mean, yes, there's always the argument that the rich will flee. Well, can you have all the world's millionaires living in Dubai? They'd all be absolutely bored silly of each other's company, surely. And you can't all go in Dubai, go and live there. I'm in favor of inheritance tax in principle. I don't think it's the monster people say. I don't think it destroys all the work that the noble father or founder of the company has put in. Yes, you don't want to take everything away, but a certain amount, sure.
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B
Is it one of those things, though, Daniela, where people sort of advocate inheritance tax or things like wealth taxes or mansion taxes or indeed rent controls, because they want it to work rather than whether or not it actually does have the intended effect?
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A
I think it's got a very pleasing symmetry. Right, we're going to tax the rich. This is great. But I think experience shows that if you want better services and you want better life and you want more equality in your society, Everyone needs to pay a bit more tax. It's not about one group paying a whopping great watch. And I think in inheritance tax, I'm not really sure that it's fit for modern day where people earn, people live much, much longer in more reduced circumstances. The care costs people are expected to pay are huge. And this is a real, you know, this is a real, an ongoing. It's not a question of you work hard, you leave your house for your. For your children, you work hard, you sell your house for someone to get you in and out of bed.
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B
Well, we'll move along now to Oxford, specifically the university thereof, where the boffins of the Oxford University Press have unveiled their annual word of the year, their annual assessment of the neologism, which best encapsulates the 12 months we have all just endured. As the OUP sees it, the 2020-to date have been defined in chronological order order by Vax, Goblin Mode, Riz and Brain Rot, which, yes, was also the LineUp of the second stage at Donington in 1992, etc. Joined this year by Rage Bait. The OUP defines rage bait as, quote, online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive. Boy, do they have the monocle dailies number. Michael, we have, we have included this item, or at least Monica, the producer has included this item, principally because we just wanted to hear you say the phrase rage bait.
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C
Rage bait. It drives me crazy. But since I hardly ever follow social media at all anyway, I'm not quite so infuriated as I would be. I know quite well if I looked at some of the bizarre, absolutely absurd and frankly elephantine kind of things that are put out, I would immediately blow a blood vessel or whatever one does, you know, get. Just get fur. Which is what it's meant to. Yes, but since I don't look at this stuff very much anyway, it doesn't happen. But there's enough rage bait, not just online, but just generally in public life all the time. I mean, people put things out just to stir it all up and sure enough, I react with fury and anger and say, oh for God's sake, you know what's going on?
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B
Do you ever. I mean, it has become, Daniela, a sort of journalistic genre and almost now I think it's quite willful, verging on self parodic. I was wondering if you had a particular favorite kind. My particular favorite kind. And it's a subject which we just previously touched on. It's those articles aimed clearly at younger people than Us who are wondering how they will ever be able to afford a house. And it's the big interview with somebody who says, well, I'm 27 and I've already bought my own property and paid for it. And about 25 paragraphs down, you discover that their great uncle basically owns Buckinghamshire and gave them a big, big sack of cash when they left university.
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A
Yeah, I think my, my favorite genre of Rage Bay is the Daily Mail, actually. I mean, that really is everything.
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B
It is.
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A
It is everything. I mean, we have to break it down to sub genres. Migrants, single parents. I mean, autism, trans, vegetarians. I mean, there's just like a panoply.
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B
You can do one a day.
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A
Yeah. You could do general fecklessness. That's my new favorite.
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B
Michael, again, you are clearly the person to ask what we make of the other contenders for Word of the Year. They were Aura Farming and Biohack. Mmm.
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C
Aura Farming. I'm not quite sure what that means, and I can think of various explanations.
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B
That sound a bit unseemly, but it's quite unseemly. It is, as I understand it, it's portraying oneself on social media in a meaningful. Which is supposed to make other people.
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C
Oh, aura. Aura, yeah.
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B
What did you think?
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C
Oh, I thought it was oral farming.
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B
No, that's, that's, that's, that's a whole other genre.
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C
Or a farming. Yes. Well, I would, I would like to boost my. An aura, certainly. I walk around with it sort of floating around my head. And the other one was Biohack.
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B
Yes.
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C
That's presumably hack into one's.
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B
I, I. To make yourself like, live to, like the age of 300 by transfusing yourself with. I don't know.
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C
Oh, yes, that'll be fun. Yes. I'll have bits of other graft blood or something.
- [27:56]
A
Yes, well, we have one taker here.
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B
Excellent. But, Danielle, coming back to Rage Bait, does it in fact explain much about the modern world? Because there are one or two fairly successful politicians of recent decades for whom that's, that's basically what they do as well.
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A
I mean, I think what's annoying about these words of the year is they basically take phenomena which have been with us since the, the dawn of time and put them in a sort of alliterative or rhyming sort of annoying figure of speech.
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B
Have you in fact been rage baited by ragebait?
- [28:31]
A
I've been rage baited by rage bait. Yeah, it's happened.
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B
Anila Pellid and Michael Binion, thank you both for joining us. Finally, on today's show. Over the last decade or so, Poland has served as a sort of laboratory for people interested in promoting conservative nationalist populism and people interested in thwarting it. Between 2015 and 2023, the law and party locally rendered as peace went big on religious piety, social traditionalism, somewhat paranoid patriotism and ill disguised authoritarianism and kept winning elections until they didn't. That trajectory is chronicled in a new book, Good the Rise Poland fall of Poland's illiberal revolution, by Stanley Bill, professor of Polish Studies at University of Cambridge, and Ben Stanley, Associate professor at the center for the Study of Democracy at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. I spoke to Stanley and Ben earlier and began by asking if it was possible to look at Law and Justice as a forerunner of the later wave of populism, or if they were a specifically Polish thing.
- [29:35]
D
I think both of those things are true. On the one hand, what we see in the case of Law and Justice is a party that made use of some fairly specific complaints that the Polish right had about post 1989 liberal democracy. But as in the case of Hungary, it turned out that many of those complaints sort of echo what a lot of critics of liberal democracy outside Central and Eastern Europe were also thinking. So while at the time in 2015 this seemed like a particularly Polish set of problems and response to that set of problems, in many respects the actions that Law and Justice took were sort of prefigured a lot of the changes that we've seen in other countries subsequently.
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B
Stanley, you write of the book, or you write of Law and Justice as conducting what you call an illiberal revolution, how vast were their ambitions when I guess from the beginning of the party's founding in the early 2000s by the Kaczynski brothers, how drastically did they want to transform Poland?
- [30:39]
E
Well, in a way they wanted to overthrow the liberal establishment as they defined it, and the liberal establishment that in their understanding had in a way cooperated with the post communist establishment. And so that was what the party had been saying since its formation in the early 2000s. Law and justice itself. But the liberal revolution that we write about has three main aspects. It has the institutional aspect, which is the attack on various independent state institutions, above all courts, but also taking over other bodies like the civil service or public media. There's the second aspect, which is that of economy and social policy. And this is interesting that we describe Law and Justice as effectively almost a left wing party in its emphasis on redistributive social policy, which was cash payments, particularly the flagship child benefit payment, were very, very popular and certainly very much consolidated the party's support. And that was in a way a revolution against the neoliberal paradigm that had dominated Poland after 1989. And then the third element is in culture or values, where this was an illiberal revolution against what the party saw as an excessive trend in a progressive direction and an attempt to stop that trend and reverse it and move back in a traditionalist path that would be inconsonant with Roman Catholic values that they define as Polish values.
- [32:02]
B
Well, Ben, on that thought, because as your subtitle also makes clear, there is a fall after the rise. Is this where it all begins to go wrong for law and justice? Did they over invest in the culture war? Because you do write about, particularly the Memory Law, which sought to protect Poland's reputation regarding events attached to World War II. Describe this as a fiasco. Is this where they overreached?
- [32:28]
D
Well, I mean, I think, to use the sort of the Music Journalist Terminology, 2015-2019 was their Imperial phase. This was really where they didn't put a foot wrong. It was really after the election of 2019 where they, they managed to increase their majority. After that a degree of the arrogance of power crept in and they started to make miscalculations, not least over the abortion law, which they sort of, they farmed out to their politically captured constitutional tribunal as it was considered too controversial to process through parliament on these kinds of issues. They figured that having made the well received steps that they'd taken from 2015 to 2019, that they were going to be able to enact changes in broadly in the area of values such as the abortion law or the anti LGBT plus campaign that they also engaged, engaged in this time, and that they were going to be able to do that and change the political landscape in the same way that they had with economic policy. And it turned out that the public was not actually as receptive to those changes as they had been to increasing child benefit or re increasing the retirement age. So when they started to try to, to make the abortion law more restrictive or to turn the screws on LGBT plus people, they found that there was a limit to what the Polish electorate were willing to tolerate.
- [33:52]
B
So Stanley, is there a possibly depressing lesson there if we think about whether there may be anything to be learned here by other countries beset by populism? Can you actually contrive to defeat it or do you just have to kind of be patient and wait for it to burn itself out?
- [34:11]
E
It's a good question. And adding to the missteps of the party itself, the fall is also directly related to contingent events which are impossible to generate or control. So it's no coincidence Ben mentioned the imperial phase went to around 2019. What followed was the COVID pandemic, which had an impact on the economy. And then after that, even more dramatically, Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, which led to the energy crisis and massive inflationary pressures which also affected the economy negatively. These factors were very, very important in the party's decline and in the defeat of the party in the 2023 parliamentary elections. And so these are factors that it's impossible to control contrive. But what can be contrived and lessons that can be learned is what was required to defeat this party electorally was a very broad opposition coalition that came together with parties from the left to the center right essentially to stand together on rather separate platforms to give each voter in the electorate something a little bit different to choose from, but promising to form a coalition together and to restore Polish democracy, as they discover described it, this was a necessary condition. And of course the problem is now that that coalition is in government. Since winning those elections in October 2023, they now face the challenges of being a broad coalition with different positions on a range of different issues because it means it's very difficult for them to arrive at a common set of policies that they can agree on and pass legislation through the Parliament, even if they weren't also faced with a peace aligned president who can veto their legislation in any case.
- [35:50]
B
That was Stanley, Bill and Ben Stanley. Their new book, Good the Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution, is available now and very much recommended. That is all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Daniela Peled and Michael Binion. Today's show was produced by Monica Lillis and researched by Joanna Moser. Our sound engineer was Lily Austin with editing assistance from from Christy o'. Grady. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening.