Familiar feeling... :-(
Many thanks for this detailed summary!
Before, I always wondered why Poland has three far-right parties, turns out it has just one. Samoobrona was most interesting, From the little I read I assumed it is right-wing in the style of the onetime Smallholders' Party here in Hungary (but much more extreme).
Tough, worth to note, in our region on economic policy, conservatives, liberals and socialists were never on a left-right continuum, it's more like they were three poles, or three segments of a circle, with actual political movements always being some mix. (For example, what passed for communism in Central-Eastern Europe was almost always nationalistic, too.) Conservatives always liked economic control by the state, but their goal wasn't redistribution (well except fascists), but pure control, or preparing for the next war...
BTW, does that idiot really present Lukashenko as something positive? If I am not mistaken, Belarus still has state-run collective farming, but Leppner's supporters are smallholders, how does he reconcile that? *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
And yes, Polish politics aren't on a strictly economic policy spectrum. The most right wing on econ is the PO, then come the SLD and PiS tied, then the LPR, then Samoobrona. With the elimination of the left-liberals as a political force, the PO knows that regardless of how reactionary its economic policies are, there really isn't another choice available for those who don't care for the rhetoric of extreme nationalism or for the organized utterly cynical and ideology bereft group of lifelong kleptocrats that is the SLD. The sad thing is that I would eagerly support a different ultra liberal program, one that took a chainsaw to the maze of regulations designed (often intentionally) to facilitate corruption and cronyism. But it's not like the PO is exactly crystal clean, just less corrupt than some of the others. Yuck, yuck, yuck.
