The financial press is currently frothing at the mouth over Poland. Yes, Poland. A nation primarily known to the average Westerner as that unfortunate patch of dirt that Germans and Russians occasionally use as a communal driveway has suddenly become the 'ignored stockmarket superstar.' It’s a headline that reeks of the kind of desperation only found in a London trading floor at three in the morning when the stimulants have run thin and the MSCI World Index looks like a flatline on a geriatric heart monitor. The WIG20, Poland’s premier index, is apparently 'going gangbusters,' a term financial journalists use when they want to sound like they’re reporting from a 1920s speakeasy rather than a depressing cubicle in Canary Wharf.

One must admire the linguistic gymnastics required to describe the aggressive shuffling of digital tokens in a country that, only a few decades ago, was mastering the art of the bread line. The irony is, of course, lost on the vultures of private equity. They see a 'superstar' where a rational person sees a collection of state-owned energy giants and banks masquerading as a modern economy. It’s the ultimate capitalist glow-up: from Warsaw Pact to Warsaw Price-to-Earnings ratios. Why is it happening? The narrative peddled by the optimists—those unfortunate souls who still believe in the 'progress' of man—is that Poland is finally reaping the rewards of its 'resilience.' This is a polite euphemism. 'Resilience' in this context means the labor is still relatively cheap, the regulations are just porous enough to be 'business-friendly,' and the proximity to a literal war zone in Ukraine provides a spicy discount for those who like their dividends with a side of geopolitical existential dread.

The Left would have you believe this is a triumph of European integration, a victory for the blue-flag-and-yellow-stars brigade who think that if you just build enough bicycle lanes and pass enough ESG mandates, prosperity will trickle down from Brussels like divine manna. They ignore the fact that this 'growth' is largely built on the backs of a population that has traded one form of grey-sky authoritarianism for the neon-lit servitude of consumer debt and predatory mortgages. Meanwhile, the Right would claim it’s a testament to the rugged, traditionalist soul of the Polish worker who hasn’t yet been 'woke-ified' into demanding a four-day work week or mental health days. Both sides are, predictably, full of it. Poland isn't winning because it found some secret sauce of governance; it’s winning because the rest of the world is currently a burning dumpster fire, and Poland happens to be the dumpster that hasn't fully melted yet.

In reality, Poland’s 'success' is merely a symptom of the wider rot. When the traditional titans of the EU—the bloated, bureaucratic corpses of France and Germany—are busy tripping over their own shoelaces and de-industrializing themselves into the Stone Age, any country with a functioning electricity grid and a population that still knows how to operate a wrench looks like a Silicon Valley unicorn. It’s not that Poland has discovered economic vitality; it’s that the rest of the continent has decided to enter a self-imposed coma of over-regulation and energy crises. Poland is the 'superstar' because the competition is currently in a body bag.

Let’s look at the components of this 'miracle.' We have banks, energy companies, and more banks. It’s a portfolio that looks like a 19th-century industrialist’s fever dream. There is no 'innovation' here, no groundbreaking technology that will save humanity from its own stupidity. There is only the efficient extraction of value from a populace that has traded the hammer and sickle for the barcode. The investors are 'ignoring' it no longer because they’ve run out of other places to park their looted gains. Emerging markets in Asia are too volatile, the United States is a theatrical disaster of debt and division, and the United Kingdom is a wet island searching for a reason to exist. So, they land in Warsaw, a city rebuilt from rubble, and decide that the rubble now has a very attractive dividend yield.

The tragedy of the Polish 'superstar' is that it represents the final stage of the commodification of history. A nation that suffered through the partitions, the horrors of the 20th century, and the stifling boredom of the Iron Curtain has finally achieved its ultimate goal: being a high-performing line on a Bloomberg terminal. The politicians, from the performative centrists currently in power to the populist grifters they replaced, will all take credit for this. They will preen on the world stage, acting as if they personally steered the ship of state into the golden harbor of 'market outperformance.' In reality, they are just the lucky beneficiaries of a global capital flight looking for a temporary perch. The 'ignored superstar' will be celebrated until the next 'geopolitical shift' makes it more profitable to short the country than to buy it. Until then, we can all sit back and watch the spreadsheets turn green while the actual world continues its slow, inevitable slide into the abyss. It’s not a miracle; it’s just accounting, and accounting is the most boring way for a civilization to die.