From the point of view of the leading Polish ruling party PiS, the EU appears as an instrument in the service of German hegemony in Europe. Hotheads in Warsaw use the summer break to spread such steep theses. They’re angry because Brussels won’t give them a blank check for damaging the rule of law.
Something is going down the drain between Germany and Poland. It is not just about tons of dead fish in the Oder, but also about basic principles of good neighborly behavior. Verbal salvos are pouring out from Warsaw against an EU allegedly dominated and deliberately controlled by the Federal Republic. Warsaw lashes out at Brussels, but sees the germ of all evil in Berlin. The attacks are as poisonous as the Oder water.
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In August, there were several bangs from the Polish capital during the political slumber of the summer break in Brussels. Poland’s strongman Jaroslaw Kaczynski, chairman of the governing party PiS, set the tone in an interview in the pro-government newspaper “Sieci”. The EU Commission under Ursula von der Leyen, he said, had broken its word in the rule of law dispute with the Polish government.
“If the Commission does not fulfill its obligations towards Poland in this area, we have no reason to fulfill our obligations towards the EU,” announced Kaczynski as a consequence. The general secretary of his party, Krzysztof Sobolewski, extended the threat with a kind of declaration of war: Poland will now “open all guns” and act according to the motto “a tooth for a tooth”. This strategy, he suggested, could escalate to the point of forging an alliance to depose von der Leyen.
The Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki supplemented the rhetorical general mobilization with considerations launched in the German-language press about “imperialism within the EU”, which he believes to be largely controlled from Berlin. Kaczynski himself said at the end of last year that the EU should not become the basis for a “Fourth German Reich”. He again took up the accusation that the EU Commission was acting as a pawn for Germany’s desire to submit to Poland.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban would certainly be happy to support a putsch coalition against von der Leyen – which by the way is completely hopeless. He is likely to interpret the verbal saber-rattling in Warsaw as a signal that his old PiS cronies are getting closer. The previous good relationship had cooled off considerably after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, because the otherwise kindred spirit Orban, unlike the PiS, reacted rather softly to the Russian aggression.
What makes Kaczynski and his followers hyperventilate again are the same problems that both Poland and Hungary have with the EU Commission. Both countries have been pilloried for years as violators of the rule of law. The German head of the commission is not giving up on the dispute over the Polish government’s intervention in the country’s judicial system.
The PiS apparently believed they could get away with a few cosmetic fixes to their “judicial reform” designed to intimidate and bully judges. That Poland’s courageous and important role as an EU “frontline state” in the fight against Russian aggression would give the government in Warsaw the right to a kind of EU “truce” in which its violations of the rule of law would be overlooked.
That was a miscalculation. Not only did von der Leyen let Warsaw know unequivocally that she expects a more convincing departure from the gag policy against the judiciary, and makes the payment of subsidies totaling more than 35 billion euros from the EU’s Corona reconstruction fund to Poland dependent on this. In mid-July, her commission also followed up infringement proceedings against Poland, which concerned the primacy of European law over Polish law and doubts about the independence of the Polish Constitutional Court.
The Polish government now has until mid-September to address these concerns from Brussels. If you don’t do this, you risk being sued by the EU Commission before the European Court of Justice. The Commission and Poland’s strongest ruling party are therefore heading straight for a confrontation after the resumption of political business in Brussels in September.
At the same time, the political climate between Warsaw and Berlin deteriorated against the background of the natural disaster on the Oder. On the west bank of the river, bitterness is growing over Polish authorities, who are said to have failed to inform German authorities in good time about the first signs of fish death in the river.
In Poland, next year’s parliamentary election is casting its shadow, while doubts are growing about the government’s ability to manage the crisis. During the election campaign, Kaczynski’s PiS power machine is unlikely to shy away from pointing the finger at Germany as the alleged mastermind of sinister EU machinations in order to distract attention from its own failures.
Poland advertises itself as an angler’s paradise. The most powerful party in our neighboring country, once devastated by Nazi Germany, likes to fish in troubled waters.