— by Alperen Keskin —
Trump’s win in the US, the rise of AfD (Alternative for Germany – a far-right political party) in Germany, recently emerged far-right governments in European Union countries: Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia… It is clear that last year was pretty fruitful for right-wing parties in Western democracies. As in all healthy democracies, election results give us considerably accurate insights into peoples’ mindsets. With the fact that Europe has been facing different problems such as migration & refugee crisis, war in Ukraine, and energy shortage, voters may more likely be tempted by populist political campaigns. Hence most of the populist campaigns include stereotypical concepts such as migration, race, religion, military conflicts outside of the borders, and so on, campaign holders or most specifically politicians use examples from other countries. For more than a year, Poland has become the most used narrative for right-wing campaigns in Western democracies. Politicians and other political names in several countries have been using Poland’s majorly White-European ethnicity, so-called strict migration laws toward non-Western countries, and religiosity to promote their ideas in their countries. Additionally, it is quite popular to correlate the factors mentioned above with security, the growing economy, and the military of Poland.
Narrative One: White-European Ethnicity in Poland Leads to Lower Crime Rates
Poland is the home of 96.7% ethnic Polish and around 1.4% other White-Europeans. According to these statistics, Poland has considerably heterogeneous demographics. To compare these data with other examples, the population of Germany is around 89% White-Europeans (including Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, etc.), and the population of the United Kingdom is around 81.7% White-Europeans. Far-right narratives that have been used by politicians around the world suggest that Poland has a rapidly growing superiority in terms of crime rates. Crime rates in Poland have been reported as 0.71 per 100.000 population while this rate is 0.83 in Germany and 1.00 in the UK. Only considering the numbers mentioned above, it is easy to create a campaign suggesting heterogeneous populations create lower crime rates in all European countries. Of course, we have to ignore important variables such as the justice system, human rights index, and economic factors. On the other hand, if we add a very basic number to our equation, the narrative of “a more heterogeneous population means lower crime rates” becomes only a racist false correlation or a false positive: this variable is the total population. The total population of Poland is around 36.69 million, while this number is around 84.48 million for Germany and 68.35 million for the UK. According to our data, the crime rate in Germany is around 17% higher than in Poland, and in the UK this number is around 40%. Additionally, the total population of Germany is around 130% more than Poland, and for the UK this number is around 86.5%. At this point, only one question is enough to challenge the far-right narrative: which one is more complicated and riskier to govern, a village or a large city?
Narrative Two: The Polish Economy is Increasing due to the Strict Migration Laws
Another argument of far-right politicians is that if a country has strict migration laws, the country’s economy is more likely to climb up. To prove this point, right-wing narratives have recently started to point out Polish migration laws and the Polish economy. The annual GDP of Poland is ranked 6th among 27 EU member countries and is ranked 9th among 27 EU member countries in terms of annual GDP growth. By the end of 2024, the annual GDP growth of Poland is higher than the EU average, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium… When it comes to migration rates, by the end of 2023, Poland was hosting around 1.13 million immigrant workers. Additionally, Poland is the second country among all European countries -not only the EU member countries- that hosts the highest number of refugees and asylum seekers. The data suggest that the correlation between immigration & refugee status and economic welfare is also another false claim. As an addition, it might be good to add that by the middle of 2023, the Polish government has been warned by the European Union about the cash-for-visa scandal. The Polish Prime Minister fired the Deputy Foreign Minister due to around 350 thousand visas granted to non-European Union citizens in exchange for money.
Final Notes
Correlation without supervision can lead everyone to a dead-end in terms of political ideas. Millions of years ago a monkey saw some red berries in a bush and ate it. After a while, this monkey died. Another monkey who saw this incident thought that red berries in a bush were poisonous, and he told other monkeys not to eat them. However, this monkey did not know that the dead monkey was already sick. Monkey see monkey do; monkey correlates because he cannot supervise his data. We should keep in mind that even though populist claims look like information, most of them lack supervised correlation.
Sources:
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