Poland in 2021: Bracing for a Grim Year

The hollowness of the Polish state has been exposed by the coronavirus pandemic: almost half a million people died in the country last year, the highest figure since World War II, and 20 per cent above the annual average in recent years, according to data compiled by Gazeta Wyborcza.

Throughout the year, Poles have been reminded again and again of the decrepit state of the national healthcare system, which has been severely underfunded for decades in a similar fashion to other post-communist countries. The pandemic follows years of protests (including hunger strikes) by Polish doctors and nurses demanding better pay and working conditions.

The months of the pandemic have seen patients die at home because emergency teams were unable to reach them, while some of those that did make it to hospital died outside in ambulances because there were no beds. In the meantime, field hospitals built and maintained with generous amounts of public funds remained unused, as did respirators purchased by the government in dubious deals exposed by the media.

The Polish government sent mixed messages to the public throughout last year, resulting in the country never managing to contain the pandemic beyond spring. In the most egregious example, Prime Minister Morawiecki infamously encouraged people to come out in big numbers to vote for the re-election of President Andrzej Duda in the summer, appealing especially to older people (core voters) and telling them the virus was not something to worry about.

The pandemic further exposed vulnerabilities in the unreformed and underfunded national sanitary inspectorate, which meant a track-and-trace system was never put in place, as well as a host of other problems related to managing the health crisis. And extreme...