The Quiet Before the Weather Changes
Stefan Zweig wrote in The World of Yesterday that nobody in Vienna noticed the old order dying. Trams still ran, cafés still poured coffee, and the clerks went home at five. The rot, he said, doesn’t announce itself. It arrives as a series of small administrative facts. I thought of Zweig this morning, going through the last twenty-four hours in Poland and around it. Taken one by one, the items look like routine business. Put side by side, they say something less comfortable.
Start with the numbers that seem almost cheerful. Poland’s economy grew 3.9% year on year in the second quarter, and 1.0% on the quarter. Few European finance ministers would turn that down. But September inflation came in at 4.0%, up from 3.4% a month earlier, and fuel did most of the damage. The central bank held its main rate at 3.75% on 7 October, and it had little choice. Interest rates can’t pump more oil. They can only squeeze demand at home, and nobody in Warsaw is eager to do that with the government borrowing heavily for defence and infrastructure. Meanwhile the zloty slipped a little: the official euro rate moved from 4.3775 on Friday to 4.3889 on Monday. A small thing, but importers of fuel and machinery feel small things in their margins first.
Now the other thread. Prime Minister Tusk reported that 135 people have been detained since the wave of attacks on schools. Roughly 80,000 educational sites have been checked and about 20,000 police officers pulled into patrols. Those 135 are not one case, and anyone treating them as such is selling something. Still, the direction is better: classes were cancelled in 59 schools on Friday and in ten on Monday. A country can exhale a little. It cannot yet relax.
What strikes me is where the argument has landed. The government wants sharper tools against dangerous content online and a meeting with the big platforms. President Nawrocki, who vetoed earlier legislation tied to the EU’s Digital Services Act, warns about constitutional limits and an overreaching executive. Both sides have a point, and that is exactly what makes it hard. A bill that gives school principals more power and platforms more responsibility sounds fine until you read who reviews the decisions, and how. The Sejm doesn’t sit again until 20 October. Until then it is all talk, which is not nothing, but it is not law.
Then the wider frame. On Monday the EU Council listed 826 companies and 743 individuals, the largest single package of its kind since the invasion. Another 77 names were added for organising Russian “elections” on occupied Ukrainian land. And yet the energy truce Donald Trump announced has not stopped anything. Kyiv counts strikes on at least six energy sites, and Moscow won’t even confirm a truce exists. A ceasefire that exists only in one capital’s press release is a rumour with a flag on it.
The remaining items fit the same pattern. The IMF now sees global growth at 3.1% this year and 3.4% next, lifts the eurozone to 1.1% and trims China to 4.5%. Chinese carmakers sold 28.1% fewer cars at home in September and exported 73.2% more, which tells you where the overcapacity is going. America raided the home of Representative Ilhan Omar in an immigration inquiry that her party calls political, and Washington condemned Beijing’s sanctions on ministers from Paraguay and Belize, another small chapter in the long Taiwan story. Closer to home, NATO’s €1 billion innovation fund is putting down roots in Warsaw, with drones, intelligence systems and dual-use technology at the top of its list. That money is a pool, not a cheque made out to Poland. Projects will have to win it.