President Andrzej Duda has signed into law measures to boost financial support for people who were involved in opposition to Poland’s former communist regime. The legislation was earlier passed with cross-party support in parliament.
Among other benefits, former anti-communist activists who receive pensions below 2,400 zloty (€527) per month will be compensated to bring the amount up to that figure.
They will also now be allowed to count time in which they were prevented from working for political reasons before 1990 towards the period used to calculate their pension. Income thresholds for receiving one-off financial assistance have been reduced, as have fees for staying in care homes.
The changes are “an act of historical justice”, said Duda at the signing ceremony. “It is thanks to the toil, the suffering, the struggle of members of the anti-communist opposition and all those who were repressed under the communist regime that today we can enjoy freedom and a democratic state.”
Noting that the new measures are an amendment to a law introduced in 2017, the president commented that “it is shameful that until [that year] this compensation, this gratitude, this justice was not there”.
He pointed to the injustice of the fact that, while some former functionaries of the communist state received generous pensions, many of those who opposed the regime did not. “I hope that [today’s] Poland is more like the Poland that you really fought for,” said Duda.
Since coming to power in 2015, Duda and the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party from which he hails have sought to redress what they claim are continued injustices left over from the communist era.
They have reduced pensions for many who served in the communist security services. Last year, however, the Supreme Court ruled against those measures, saying that their indiscriminate nature itself resembled the actions of a “totalitarian state” by denying individuals the right to a fair hearing.
PiS has also justified its controversial overhaul and purges of the judiciary, public media and other institutions by arguing that it is “decommunising” the system. “We are still cleansing Poland of all kinds of dirt that was introduced by that era,” said Duda last year during his re-election campaign.
After winning re-election, Duda signed into law legislation that removed the statute of limitations for communist crimes. The justice minister announced in December that he was seeking to have the Polish Communist Party (KPP), which was founded in 2002, outlawed.
Many, however, have accused PiS of hypocrisy, due to them having former communists in their own ranks. In 2019, Duda accepted the nomination by the PiS-controlled parliament of Stanisław Piotrowicz as a Constitutional Tribunal judge. Piotrowicz, who served as a PiS MP until that year, was a communist state prosecutor in the 1980s.
The new benefits approved yesterday by Duda will apply to the 12,000 or so people who are officially recognised as having been opposition activists or having been repressed for political reasons in the period between 1956 and 1989. (Those who fought on behalf of Poland in 1939-56 hold a separate war veteran status.)
Main image credit: Igor Smirnow/PKRP/Prezydent.pl
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
