What kind of politician would I be?

What if I would become the president of my country? It is the question that causes some fireworks of creativity in my head, so I love the contest theme. I will try to answer it shortly, but before I will need to clarify few things.


First of all, in my case, it is difficult to say which country is really mine. I am Polish, but I live in Argentina and trying to get citizenship from this country. I have spent also a significant time living in Chile, so partially I recognize that country as mine as well. I have decided that for the need of this contest, I will write about Poland.


The real power of the president in Poland is not that big. President has mostly the representative function, but the law is made mostly by the senate. I understand that it's more like a semantics issue, so I will be just writing about the things which I wish to change in my country and which I believe could make it a better place for everyone.

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Green/Socialdemocrat

I believe my party would be considered as the Green mostly because the global warming issue would be the most important thing for me. I would do my best to preserve nature, maybe create some national parks, take care of the animals' rights and, above all, I would try to start the dynamic transformation of the country into green energy, the zero-emission place to live, because it is our responsibility to the future generations and rest of the world.


Besides the nature preserve, my economic and philosophic believes are close to social democracy. I know that making rich people richer without taking care of the people who were born without equal chances to achieve success is propaganda that doesn't work anywhere in the world. Being born in a poor family drastically decreases our chances to become rich as adults because we do not start with the same access to the best quality education, we often are forced to work instead of learning, we don't have the same social and cultural connections as the people from the upper-middle class. Those kinds of inequalities can be lowered by well-prepared social programs.


Below very few examples from the long list of things I would like to change.

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Shortening working week to 4 days

Recently Iceland became the first country in the world where people work only 4 days a week, 8 hours each. The studies showed that shortening the time of work doesn't have a negative impact on productivity. Workers are much more rested and motivated to do their job and in fact, they manage the do more than during the five days long work week. In the XXIst century, many activities can be mechanized, so there is no need to work as much as before. I would suggest shortening the working week or at least launch some testing projects to check how would it look like. Similar projects are currently in progress in some regions of Spain.


I also believe that the recent quarantine proved that most of the jobs can be made from home and many people prefer it that way instead of losing their time to visit the office. I would be encouraging the companies to digitalize their offices to comfort the workers and lower the cost of work.

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Raising the retirement age

We all might be able to work shorter during the week but while the society gets elder, especially in Europe, raising the retirement age is the must be if we want to be able to provide pensions to the elder people without harming the budget. Currently, Poland has one of the lowest retirement ages in the European Union (you can get the pension since you are 60 years old as a woman and 65 years old as the man) and at the very same time prognosis says that in 20 years the country might not have sufficient savings to pay the pensions to all the people who should be receiving it.


My suggestion is to increase the retirement age to 67 for both genders but also guarantee it on some basic level to every citizen to fight the poverty of elders.

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Accepting Euro currency

While at first Poland was not ready to accept Euro because of the quality of the economy, now it is more like the political decision of the current any European right-wing government. I believe accepting Euro as the currency is the right step which can give more stability to our economy and help it to grow fast in the long term. I'm aware that the history of other countries shows that the transformation might be painful for the first few years and usually means increasing the prices for a bit, but the good politician should think decades in advance instead of worrying only about the current situation.

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LGBT rights

Poland remains one of the last seven countries in the EU without even civil unions for the LGBT community. I would legalize gay marriages, including recognition of the marriages taken abroad, to unify them with the EU law. I would also take care to write down discriminatory law which punishes homophobia equally to every other hate crime and make sure it is well respected by the police.
Currently, homophobia in the country is enormous and non-heterosexual people cannot feel safe in their own homes. The hate crime rate increased significantly in 2015 when the extreme right-wing government took the chair.

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Womens' rights

Did you know that there is still no country in the world without the gender gap in salaries? I would do my best to try to regulate it by law that double standards in paying to the men and women were highly illegal. I would also take care of 50% partities in the senate and all government jobs.
Taking care of women's rights would include the right to free anti-conception and sanitary pads and, obviously, the right to abortion which now is highly limited by the men who believe they can decide instead of women what's the best for them.

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Fight with racism, islamophobia, antisemitism and xenophobia

Unfortunately, it is still a big issue in Poland now. The current government is trying to unite the nation by creating a common enemy and pushing everyone against them. It was LGBT people, it was Jewish and Muslims and recently it is just foreigners in general. A good country is a country where everyone feels welcomed and where discrimination is not encouraged but punished instead. I would increase the punishment for racism, islamophobia, antisemitism, or xenophobia, put extra money on looking for discriminatory institutions and take care of the proper education to stop that toxic behavior in the future.

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Ecology

That would be the most important thing for me, as a politician. Taking care of the climate might be made in many ways: the government might announce some subsidies which will lower the price of the local healthy food. To balance the budget, new taxes which will increase the price of alcohol or unhealthy food rich in sugar could be made. Subsidies may lower the price of electronic cars as well while the taxes could increase the price of less effective old diesel-based machines.


Another way to take care of the ecology is to increase the bicycle roads and invest in public transport, delegalize single-use plastic (that already works quite well in Poland already and many things like plastic bags or the plastic cutlery are already illegal, but always the list of the things might be longer), creating the new nature reserves, increase the taxes for the things imported from another continent (transport produces a lot of pollution) and for the meat (meat production is one of the biggest polluters) while lower the prices of the natural cosmetics and veggies.


The most important thing for the ecology is the energetic transformation though. A huge investment in solar and wind energy is needed to not rely on coal and oil anymore. EU gives a lot of opportunities to transform the economy without the big costs but now there is no will from the politicians' side to do it. That would have to change immediately and should be prioritized.

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No more national TV

National TV doesn't work in Poland well. Each time the government changes, everyone on national TV is fired and new people arrive. Then it is used to spread propaganda and basically make the free advertisement to the government. Well, it's free only in theory, as the nation pays a lot of taxes to make it happen. I assume in modern times when the value of the TV is lower each year as the Internet pushes it out, there is no need to keep the national TV for millions of dollars each month. That money could be used in a more effective way.

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Recognizing cryptocurrency

I would make Poland the second country that accepts payments in cryptocurrency and recognizes it as the legal method of payment. Instead of accepting bitcoin only, I would mention also Etherum and, obviously STEEM. People would be able to pay their taxes or even bills in the crypto, some ATMs that allow withdrawal crypto would be installed in the biggest cities, and I'd basically do my best to popularize it as much as possible.