Backlash in the East.(Polish right wing)(Brief Article)

Make no mistake, Roman Giertych can be a real fire-breather. The leader of the right-wing League of Polish Families delivers his message with passionate conviction--and it's exactly what his audience in the depressed city of Olsztyn wants to hear. "When Poland joins the European Union, Poles will only be left with jobs in supermarkets," he tells 300 or so rapt listeners, most of them pensioners. "Signs will appear around the Masurian Lakes saying, for Germans only, and the country will lose its money and its media." Before the war, the local newspaper Gazeta Olsztynska was a bastion of Polish values. His own grandfather wrote for it, he adds. And now, "a hundred years have gone by--and the paper is owned by foreign capital!"

While Jean-Marie Le Pen rails against the European Union in the West, Giertych and others are attacking from the East, trying to stop their countries' push to join the Union by 2004. Most Westerners assume that everyone to the East is panting to join their club. But that's not quite the case. A majority still supports membership, but the numbers are going down--in Poland, from 77 percent in 1994 to 55 percent today. Second thoughts are being felt elsewhere as well. Many Czechs are nervous that Sudeten Germans, expelled after World War II, may try to reclaim their old properties. Like their counterparts in Poland, Slovak and Hungarian farmers are growing angry at what they see as the grudging welcome they are being accorded by the EU, reflected in the fine print of the membership documents. Their chief concern: the Union's insistence that new members should initially get only 25 percent of the subsidies that Western Europe's vastly more prosperous farmers receive in France, Spain and Portugal. It will take 10 years of gradual increases until they will be entitled to the full amount--if the troubled program of agricultural subsidies lasts that long.

Many East Europeans see this as manifestly unfair, possibly to the point of rethinking their national options. No more than a quarter of Poles, Czechs and Slovaks believe they will enjoy equal status with the older members once they join the club. While the math is speculative and hotly disputed, there are growing worries that a country like Poland could end up paying more into the EU than it gets out of it. With 38 million people, about 20 percent of whom consider themselves farmers, Poland will be the Union's biggest--and, possibly, most problematic--new member.

Which is why Le Pen's stunning success in the first round of French elections had such resonance farther east. "The future belongs to patriotic, nationalist and anti-establishment groups," says Giertych. Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski puts it in different terms, warning of a wave of "anti-European" xenophobia sweeping across the Continent. But the debate has changed. "In the beginning, the supporters [of EU membership] talked about money and the opponents talked about ideas," says University of Warsaw sociologist Tomasz ...