過去三年間波蘭也以「抗俄援烏」第一男配角身份出現在國際舞台上(本欄開欄文)。也請參見此欄2025/05/20貼文。

Poland was once a ‘communist, third-world country’. Now, it’s overtaking Britain

The European superpower is luring a record number of UK immigrants with its restored economy and robust patriotism

Tim Wigmore, 01/08/26

Three months ago, the British businessman, Johnny Mercer, advertised a marketing role in his construction firm, Polstrad, based in Poland. “[Not long ago,] people weren’t interested in moving here,” says Mercer, as he sits down in Charlotte Bouillon, a trendy French bistro that opened in central Warsaw in 2019.

This time, however, Mercer was inundated with Britons eager to work in Poland. Thirty-five applicants for the job were British and happy to relocate permanently – including one, without any Polish links, who got the job.

The traditional migration flow between Poland and the UK has been reversed. In the year to June, just 7,000 Polish nationals moved to the UK. Meanwhile, 3.5 times as many – 25,000 – emigrated and returned to Poland.

And the Poles are not leaving Britain alone. Since 2020, the number of people with UK passports living in Poland has soared from 113,000 to 185,000. Such a surge reflects the growing optimism in Poland, a contrast to the mood in most of Western Europe.

“This is the golden era of the Polish economy and the golden era of Poland,” says Jadwiga Emilewicz, who recently served as deputy prime minister. “For the last 200 years, we have been the country of emigration. Nowadays, we are becoming one of the most attractive destinations for immigrants, including from the United Kingdom.”

In 2000, Poland’s GDP per capita – the average economic output per person – was 42.7 per cent of that in the UK. In the 25 years since, Poland’s GDP per capita has soared to $45,113 (£33,565) – 85.9 per cent of the UK’s. And the trend is not stopping there. Average household income in Poland is forecast to exceed the UK’s in 2031.

Julia Chelminska is among the Britons to move to Poland in recent years. Born and raised in London to two Polish parents, Chelminska, 33, moved to Warsaw three years ago, shortly before having her first child. She is not surprised by the influx from Britain.

“With the economy, the food, the city centre, the fancy restaurants, you’re thinking, ‘Wow, that looks good – I’m not losing anything,’” Chelminska reflects. “I’m not going to a communist third-world country, which is sort of what Poland felt like 15 years ago.”

It’s not just the economy. The attraction for Britons, she says, is cultural too. “You had the wave of Poles come to the UK. Britons know what Poles are like – we’ve been neighbours. There’s a symbiosis.

“It’s easy for Britons to think, ‘Oh, it’s a two-hour flight away. I see the quality of life feels better there. I already know Poles, so I can get on with them. They speak English anyway, and I like pierogi [stuffed dumplings].’”

Affordable cost of living

More than anything, Chelminska was attracted to the cheaper cost of living. Her three-storey house with a garden in Warsaw costs less than a two-bedroom, ex-council flat in London. A pint costs 10zł (£2).

Yet there are other reasons why she considers Poland a better place than the UK to start a family. Parental leave is fully transferable between couples. Chelminska, who was not working at the time she gave birth, was able to transfer eight-and-a-half months of her maternity leave to her husband. All families also receive 800zł (£160) a month per child from the government, which is not means-tested.

Chelminska feels safer, too. Her old ground-floor apartment in Shepherd’s Bush was broken into three times. In Poland, she has never been the victim of any crime.

As a young woman, Chelminska has become used to walking alone in Warsaw. She unthinkingly did the same on a recent trip to London. “I was out quite late in an area where my friend was like, ‘What are you doing walking at this hour?’ She didn’t think I’d be safe.”

Elektrownia Powiśle, a power plant a mile from the centre, was long a symbol of Warsaw life. It remains an emblem of the city – but now of its dynamism, not its dreariness.

The plant’s characteristic grey chimneys have been rebuilt, fusing contemporary architecture with the industrial past. In 2021, the building, previously fenced off, reopened as a trendy street food hall. Inside, locals choose between Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Indian, Mexican, Lebanese and Italian cuisine, and much else besides.

I, too, am viscerally aware of Poland’s transformation. My mother, a Polish native, maiden name Batyra, was 27 when, having met my father, she moved back to Britain in 1985. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I visited Warsaw almost every year to see my grandparents. When I walked through the front door of their house, I would be greeted by rosol, traditional Polish chicken soup.

The highlight of my trips was the visit to the black market, the largest in Central Europe, located on the disused, old national sports stadium near the River Vistula. Each weekend, hundreds of pop-up stores extended all the way around the top of the seating. But it only thrived because the selection of goods available in the shops was so sparse.

No longer. The market shut down in 2008, when the old stadium was dismantled. Now, it is the site of the new gleaming National Stadium, which seats 58,000 people, another huge marker of Warsaw’s broader transformation.

Instead of dull, monochrome buildings, there is a new effervescence to the city’s skyline. The streets are dotted with construction sites, and the roads in the city are either new or being upgraded. This is the visual evidence of Poland’s total GDP growth – the second highest in the world, behind only China, since the end of communism in 1989, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Businessmen who operate across the German-Polish border now say that transport links are often better on the Polish side – Pendolino trains, travelling at up to 125mph, link up major cities.

Only last month, Volkswagen announced plans to expand its factories in western Poland, which is the only place where the company manufactures the Crafter electric van. The Mercedes Sprinter plant also recently relocated from Germany to Poland.

“Bad times create strong people,” says Emilewicz, who was born in 1974, some 16 years before the end of communism in the country. She says that, in some ways, the dilapidated communist inheritance helped inspire this determination to modernise. “We really started from scratch. This willingness to upgrade the way of life was very strong in my generation.”

For some, it is that determination that marks today’s Poland out from Britain.

Philip Warda, 33, was based in Britain until moving to Poland three years ago. He recalls the motto of a close friend in secondary school back in London, “‘I can’t be bothered.’ It was so cool to be lazy,” he says. “In Poland, people do complain, but they work – there’s this mentality of, ‘We’ve got to get something done.’”

Soaring performance in education

Poland’s educational performance in the international rankings has soared since 2000, which has been credited to measures like lowering the age at which students start school and pre-school. Reforms also delayed the start of vocational programmes to raise minimum standards of literacy and numeracy.

My grandparents could scarcely speak English, leaving me to try and communicate with them in my shoddy Polish. But the standards of English among young people today are such that ambitious parents I meet tell me they expect their children to become trilingual.

Poland is not alone in its economic success. All 10 former Eastern Bloc countries which joined the EU in 2004 have enjoyed strong economic growth. But Poland has specific advantages compared to those other nations. With a population of 38 million, it is comfortably the largest member of the group, and has used its size to become a regional hub.

Since 2004, Poland has received €175bn (£152bn) from the EU – largely structural funding, which has improved infrastructure in the regions, as well as capital. Membership of the single market has perhaps been even more important. Foreign direct investment in Poland has risen seven-fold since 2003, the last year before EU membership, to 2023. Poland’s exports to the EU have grown five-fold since 2004.

“Polish farmers became the largest beneficiaries of European integration,” says Dr Roch Dunin-Wąsowicz from University College London. Now the third-largest milk producer in the EU (after Germany and France), Polish agriculture now outperforms European rivals, including the UK, in some key areas.

But Poland’s growth has not just been built on the country’s traditional strengths, like farming or manufacturing. Internet speeds are faster than those in the UK. Warsaw is regarded as a leader in financial technology, and also has a thriving gaming sector.

“The previous growth was basically catching up,” explains Professor Joanna Tyrowicz, an economist at the research centre, Grape. “What we’re seeing increasingly is that the best Polish companies in many industries are performing as well as, or better, than those in any country in the EU. It’s a pretty new phenomenon.”

‘All the ingredients’ for success

Should this trend continue, Tyrowicz says, Poland’s income levels could soon overtake those of many Western European countries.

“If this really pans out, it is going to be massive. All the ingredients are here. We used to be catching up, and now we start having our own speed. Whether or not that succeeds is still an open question. Are all those innovative businesses enough to pull the whole economy?”

Such optimism should not obscure the problems that Poland faces. The birth rate has plummeted to 1.1, among the lowest in Europe. Politics has a quasi-American dimension – a cocktail of knife-edge elections, with little to reconcile the two main parties, and an electorate sharply divided by gender and between urban and rural areas.

Since joining the EU, Poland has received three times as much as it has contributed. One perverse sign of the country’s economic success is that it could soon go from being a net receiver of cash from the EU to a net contributor.

“Yes, the growth has been impressive,” says Gavin Rae from Kozminski University. “But investment is now low, manufacturing output is in decline and public services – health and pensions – are in crisis.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought unprecedented challenges. Over 2.5 million Ukrainians, the vast majority refugees who have arrived since 2022, now live in Poland, amounting to almost 7 per cent of Poland’s total population. As well as civilians and children, the number also includes tens of thousands of injured Ukrainian soldiers with mental health challenges.

The Russian threat has also forced Poland, whose defence spending will rise to 4.8 per cent of GDP next year, to reduce spending elsewhere. The government has proposed £2.1bn worth of cuts to the health budget next year. Should Russia gain more Ukrainian land, and encroach even closer towards Polish territory, the pressure on other parts of the budget will intensify further. So will the country’s budget deficit, which has ballooned since the rise in military spending.

北約會員國軍費支出為GDP百分比統計圖

To walk around Warsaw is to meet the past at every turn. While the streets of London are studded with monuments to those slain in foreign fields, in Warsaw, those being honoured died in their homeland. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed on the ground of the capital in the Second World War, during the six years of Nazi occupation.

A particularly poignant statue in Ogrod Saski, a major park, commemorates the Last Defenders of Warsaw. In this exact spot, men and teenage boys in the Polish Resistance were killed in 1944. In revenge for the uprising, the occupiers executed up to 200,000 Poles.

From 1795 to 1989, Poland was only an independent nation for 21 years prior to the Second World War. About 5.7 million Poles died in that conflict, one-sixth of the population. The tragic irony of the fighting was that Poland was defeated twice – first by the Nazi-Soviet alliance, and then by the Soviets once more, who controlled the country after 1945.

It was only in 1993 that the last Russian troops left Poland. All governments since, regardless of their other political beliefs, have been committed to ensuring that Russian soldiers never set foot in the country again.

For the Polish government, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought bitter vindication. “We tried to teach everyone about Russia without any success,” says Emilewicz. “There was no satisfaction after the outbreak of war – we were simply right.”

While much of Europe agonises over relatively modest increases in military spending, Poland’s defence spending is now the highest of any Nato country. Poland now has the largest army of any country in mainland Europe, and the third largest in Nato, after America and Turkey.

In Britain, military chiefs regularly bemoan a lack of popular willingness to face up to military threats. There is little need to convince Poles. Poland “totally should” spend so much on defence, says Maya Okoń, a 19-year-old studying at the University of Warsaw. “There are many, many monuments to war in every city in Poland. We’re very connected to our history.

“Poland is one of the very few countries that actually appreciates its history, and we take our history very seriously. At school, we learn a lot about our history – not only Polish history, but also history around the world.”

For Poles, a grave lesson passed to each new generation is to fear Russia. “We have no choice other than to be scared,” Okoń says. “Who wouldn’t be scared?”

Military training is compulsory for every adult male, although there is no policy of conscription. This year, 230,000 men aged 18-23 were summoned to be entered into the military registry, undergoing medical and psychological examinations to determine their fitness to serve.

There is an extreme fringe of Polish nationalism, including Neo Nazi and anti-Semitic groups. But several migrants from England note that Poland generally has a far easier relationship with patriotism, and greater comfort in the idea of national pride.

“Patriotism is mainstream here and not tied to any political identity, whereas in the UK it can be tied to the far-Right,” Chelminska observes. “This is a big problem. Polish people are patriotic because we’ve lost our land and we fought to get it back. And we need to have that pride to protect it.”

‘Growing prosperity and international confidence’

Poland’s relative standing in Europe today is better than at any point since the end of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, Michał Przeperski, a popular historian and author, tells me.

“From a historian’s perspective, Poland’s transformation is nothing short of a civilisational leap. In the late 1980s, the country was trapped in stagnation – grey, economically exhausted and burdened by a pervasive sense of hopelessness.

“What we are seeing today, the return of emigrants, growing prosperity and international confidence, is the long-term dividend of an extraordinary, often chaotic, but ultimately successful transformation.”

Poland has achieved what generations long dreamed of – to become a normal European country, defined by its integration with the centre and west of the continent. “Definitely,” says Emilewicz.

Ambitious Poles long considered leaving the country essential to fulfilling their professional dreams. “When I was a student, all we were thinking about was how to move out of Poland, because of the 17 per cent unemployment rate and very low living standards,” recalls Emilewicz.

Today’s students do not look West with the same envy. Poland’s economy is forecast to grow by 3.2 to 3.5 per cent this year, three times the Eurozone average. There is an essential optimism and self-confidence to Warsaw that was absent during my childhood visits to the city.

Today, as they look out onto Park Praski, one of the green spaces that are dotted around Warsaw, a group of first-year students sees no reason to leave Poland.