I wish people would stop using the word “leftist” as it means nothing and comes from dumb-fuck Americans who never studied politics in school. Now it’s used by far right parties in europe to describe anything not Nazi enough for them.
As far as I agree generally its a term also used in Poland. It regained popularity due to the far right using it to stigmatize anything loosely associated with left wing values, but it was actually coined… by the communist regime apparatchiks to mark out dissenters. There’s a pretty interesting Polish book on the term itself. BTW Polish radio is a state owned media.
His party are social democrats
To be completely fair though, Zandberg and much of Razem’s present day management does have a part with Młodzi Socjaliści, an actuslly socialist youth group, and even as recently as 2023 Zandberg admitted that they’re market socialists (whether that actually counts as socialist or not is beside the point and even then that is still substantially closer to workers owning the means of production than the Third Way variant of social democracy that Nowa Lewica, the left-wing party in our current government, currently supports).
That being said, “leftist” is a somewhat derogatory term. Had this article’s title been written with the identical language in Polish, it might’ve used “lewak” which is fully derogatory towards people with left-wing beliefs (or if you’re far-right also towards liberals).
Then I’m sure this journalist can use this term instead of “leftists” which says nothing about ideology.
Tbf they are speaking to a Polish audience who would recognize what the term ‘leftist’ means in their culture.