The largest EU benefit is that it makes democratic and rule of law backsliding unlikely. So if you invest money in Poland you can be reasonably sure that it won't get stolen from you. Hungary was a demonstration that this works over the long term.

In the EU, money gets stolen from you in a more subtle way. For example, the COVID situation, with unlimited money-printing was a tax on the people who had savings, and supporting a specific subset of the economy, or, delaying the tax in the essence.

There is no lesson of "democracy" to give. At best it is a guided democracy, and this is very generous.

For example, VPNs are going to be forbidden, and the free speech compared to the US is a little toy.

Elections are often a facade in many EU countries.

In France for example, it's always the "right" (btw you can be socially or jailed if you support them by using the wrong words) against the existing party, and communists are begging it's better to vote for the existing party, than support the newcomers.

It's a loop, this is why there is this joke that voters are "beavers", because at every elections they are asked "build a dam" against competition.

There is the same beaver thing, over and over again for 30 years.

Even people that are actually elected you have nowhere your word near their decisions (and even less near Von der Leyen and similar people).

Poland understood long time ago that it needs a safe country, and that they need to make sure that the people in their country are fine and safe before helping the whole planet.

Hungary and Poland are a little bit in the same boat, their relative independence saves them (e.g. refusing the EUR currency, refusing some policies) that allows them to have more leeway to support the local people, while benefiting of the funds from the EU and Schengen.

The EU prevents your money from being stolen, except when the EU itself decides to withhold or deduct it. Hungary has lost over a billion euros in ECJ daily fines...

If you push it even further, this is forgetting about the hundreds of billions that are centrally distributed to third-parties (and this is just Ukraine!). So, your money, our decision.

> The largest EU benefit is that it makes democratic and rule of law backsliding unlikely.

On the contrary. Since the EU has no meaningful penalty mechanism other than withholding funds, and enormous capacity for shared damage absorption, once a country passes a certain threshold of development membership in the EU actually encourages government misbehavior including democratic backsliding, because it insulates the government from many potential adverse consequences.

For example, governments around the world have to fear violent revolution. But in the EU, the shared desire for law and order is so strong that the rest of the members are likely to support a member state in repressing such a revolution with essentially any degree of brutality, regardless of the condition of that state’s democracy, because the alternative (a successful coup in an EU member state) is impossible to contemplate.

Yet you can see crowds of young anti-woke Germans on X claiming that Poland's been growing only because of their (i.e. the Germans') money.

Also, the reason you've given doesn't explain why it worked so much better for Poland than for Czechia, Slovakia and a few others.