War & Peace Quote by Aleksander Kwasniewski

Tough times are doing a lot of rhetorical work here: they flatten complexity into a single weather system everyone is supposedly stuck under, and they license urgency without naming culprits. Kwasniewski stacks “very tough, very difficult” like a drumbeat, then pivots to a prescription that sounds muscular but safely noncommittal: “be active,” “work,” “fight.” The verbs are generic enough to fit any agenda and forceful enough to borrow the moral prestige of labor and struggle. In political language, that’s a neat trick: you can demand sacrifice while keeping the details offstage.

The key phrase is “especially in the economy.” It signals that whatever else is happening politically, the real battlefield is economic performance, the arena where governments are most judged and least forgiven. “Make our economy more competitive” is the tell. Competitiveness is one of those terms that feels objective, like a scoreboard, but smuggles in a package of policies: wage restraint framed as “flexibility,” deregulation framed as “modernization,” social spending framed as “cost.” It’s also nationalized - “our economy” - converting market discipline into collective duty.

Kwasniewski, as a post-Communist Polish leader navigating EU-oriented reform and the pressures of globalization, is speaking from a moment when politics sold adaptation as patriotism. The subtext isn’t just “work harder.” It’s “accept change, accept pain, and treat it as necessary.” The rhetoric aims to unify, but it also pre-emptively narrows the debate: if the problem is a harsh era, not a contested set of choices, then disagreement starts to sound like laziness.