Subsidising babies has bolstered Poland’s ruling party—so far

POLITICIANS elsewhere kiss babies. Polish ones subsidise them. In a new report by the OECD, a club of mostly wealthy countries, Poland was the only one of its 35 members where families receive more in state handouts than they pay in tax. For a single-income Polish family on an average wage with two children, the average net personal tax rate is minus 4.8%, compared with an OECD average of 14%. While the rate has crept up in most of the countries surveyed, in Poland it has dipped by five percentage points since 2016.

Since coming to power in 2015, the socially conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) has championed families, albeit only of the traditional heterosexual sort. Its flagship 500Plus programme offers families a monthly handout of 500 zloty ($139) per child, from the second child onwards (and from the first in poor households). Since the launch in 2016, the government has splurged a total of 42.6bn zloty to 3.7m children from 2.4m families. Recently it proposed new measures focusing on motherhood, including a bonus for having a second child within two years of the first. Meanwhile, PiS politicians have sympathised with church-backed proposals to tighten restrictions on abortion, already among the tightest in Europe.