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The Economist September 22nd 2018 Europe 47
2 activist was detained on September 11th.)
Officials inAnkara are now talking about a
newstart in relationswith the EU .MrsMer-
kel’s government, meanwhile, has come
out against America’s decision to impose
economic sanctions on Turkey, scrapped
its own export-guarantee limits and made
it clear that a collapse of the Turkish econ-
omy is in nobody’s interest. According to a
report in Der Spiegel, two German compa-
nies, Siemens andDeutsche Bahn, are hop-
ing to take part in a €35bn overhaul of Tur-
key’s rail network. Turkey would like
Germany to help finance the project.
Caution is in order. Much as Mr. Erdo-
gan might like to thumb his nose at the In-
ternational Monetary Fund, the likelihood
of Germany giving Turkey a bail-out with
few strings attached is close to zero. “Ger-
many will not go behind the IMF ’s back,”
saysMarc Pierini, a former EU ambassador
to Turkey. Given Turkey’s sorry rule-of-law
and human-rights record, any progress in
its accession talkswith the EU is also out of
the question. In theory, Turkey couldmake
some headwaywith the Europeans in talks
on a new customs union and visa-free tra-
vel. In practice, these would require eco-
nomic and political reforms that the Turk-
ish government appears to have no
intention of passing. Mr Erdogan did not
spend years constructing a system of pa-
tronage that reaches into most corners of
the economy and the bureaucracy just to
dismantle it at the first sign of a crisis.7
SLUPSK, a townof some100,000 inhabit-
ants near Poland’s Baltic coast, is these
days a favourite place to tie the knot. “It has
become a Polish Las Vegas,” says Robert
Biedron, the mayor, who has married
some 140 couples. Yet Mr Biedron, who is
openly gay (still a rarity in Polish politics),
cannot marry his partner. Unusually for a
Polish politician, he is also secular, as well
as something of a green.
As the socially conservative Law and
Justice (PiS) government continues to chip
away at Poland’s institutions, most recent-
ly the supreme court, the 42-year-old
mayor has emerged as the hope of the Pol-
ish liberal left. Yet emulating the success of
Emmanuel Macron, who emerged from
popular near-obscurity to become
France’s president in 2017 at the head of a
brand-newparty, will be a tall order.
Still, he has a chance. For all his appeal
toWarsawmillennials, Mr Biedron knows
small-town Poland well. Now a P iS heart-
land, the rural south-east where he grew
up was not an easy place to be a gay teen-
ager in the 1990s. In his 20s he founded a
pressure group, Campaign Against Homo-
phobia. After a stint in parliament, he ran
for mayor of Slupsk as an independent in
2014, winning 57% in the second round.
Mr Biedron has tested out his vision for
a Poland in which no one is left behind.
From the neo-Gothic town hall of Slupsk,
he has slashed debt, increased transpa-
rency and banked on sustainable develop-
ment. Guests are served water from the
tap, rather than plastic bottles. Led by Mr
Biedron, a dozen Polish mayors have
formed a network of “progressive towns”,
tackling problems from depopulation to
air pollution. In Poland, this amounts to
revolutionary stuff.
Although critical of PiS’s illiberalism,
Mr Biedron has little sympathy for its arch-
rival, the centrist Civic Platform (PO),
which governed from2007 to 2015. In pow-
er, PO neglected “everyday democracy”,
based around local public services rather
than distant institutions like the supreme
court, he says. To increase popular partici-
pation in politics, he recentlywrote a book
on democracy for children.
As the European Commission consid-
ers cutting off money for countries where
the rule of law is at risk, ie, Poland and
Hungary, Mr Biedron is wary of penalising
ordinary people for their government’s
misdeeds. Instead, EU cash should go di-
rectly to local officials, NGOs and business-
es, bypassingWarsaw, he suggests.
With Poland split between PiS ’s sup-
porters and critics, Mr Biedron is aware of
his own power to divide or unite. At a re-
cent talk in north-eastern Poland, he was
greeted by a man wearing a T-shirt with a
homophobic slogan (zakaz pedalowania,
which translates loosely as “no faggotry”).
Rather than call security, Mr Biedron invit-
ed him to pose for a photo with him (the
man obliged).
Popularity, though, comeswith high ex-
pectations. Already, polls put Mr Biedron
among the top three contenders for the
presidency in 2020, after Andrzej Duda,
the PiS -aligned incumbent, and Donald
Tusk, who might return to Poland after the
end of his term as president of the Euro-
pean Council. Mr Biedron declines to say
whether he is planning to run, but this
month said that hewill not seekre-election
in Slupsk and will instead establish his
own “progressive” movement ahead of
the European Parliament elections next
spring. Those, he says, will be a “test” be-
fore the general electionnext autumn, after
no left-wing parties made it into parlia-
ment in the previous one. He shrugs off
criticism in PO circles that thiswill split the
anti-PiS vote and dash any hope of ousting
the current government. “They should be
cheering us on,” he says. 7
Poland
Taking on PiS and
Civic Platform
SLUPSK
Meet Robert Biedron, a young gay
Polishmayor
FROMStettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the
Adriatic, a health divide has fallen
across Europe. Although in global terms
citizens of the EU live long (2.5 years more
than inAmerica and 4.6 yearsmore than in
China), the continent is divided. At the far-
thest ends of the spectrum, Spaniards from
Madrid can expect to live to 85, but Bulgari-
ans from the region of Severozapaden are
predicted to live just past their 73rd birth-
day—a gap of almost 12 years. The only ex-
ceptions are Slovenia, which scrapes in
above the EU average, and Denmark,
which falls a fraction below.
It was not always that way. In the
mid-1960s Latvians and Lithuanians still
blew out as many birthday candles as the
citizens of Cyprus and France. But “the po-
litical division of Europe is important,”
says Denny Vagero, a professor of medical
sociology at Stockholm University. After a
long period of convergence caused by re-
ductions in child mortality, the east of the
continent gradually fell behind after the
iron curtain descended.
According to ZoltanMassay-Kosubek of
the European Public Health Alliance
(EPHA), an NGO, eastern Europe is home to
more smokers and more heavy drinkers.
“This is the major source of the gap,” he
says. Bad habits and unhealthy environ-
ments are contributory factors to chronic
illnesses such as cancer, diabetes and heart
disease. Hungarians face the poorest odds
when it comes to chronic ill-health, but
rates are also high in much of Poland, Slo-
vakia, and Croatia.
Money might be thought to be at the
Mind the gap
Europe’s chronic
health problem
The final curtain falls earlier in eastern
Europe
84.0+
80.0-81.9
82.0-83.9
78.0-79.9
<78.0
Life expectancy
At birth, 2016
Source: Eurostat
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