COMMENTS
The EU has got rid of some stubborn staff members in Poland’s government and can now more easily isolate and pressure the tormentors in Hungary, writes Einar Hagvaag.
HEARTFUL: The new Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, received a warm welcome from the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, during the last EU summit. Poland is back as a fellow player in the EU. Photo: John Thys / AFP / NTB Show more
Internal comments: This is a comment. The comment expresses the writer’s position.
Published on Sunday 31 December 2023 – 23:29
ANDn participant was especially a warm welcome to the last summit of the EU in 2023, 14 and 15 December, namely the fresh Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk. He is an old friend and acquaintance in the EU and of many heads of state there. He presided over the EU summits from 2014 to 2019, and then he led the European Conservatives from 2019 to 2022.
He then, in 2022, returned to Poland to take up the fight against the ultra-conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS), the party of the twins Jaroslaw and (the late) Lech Kaczynski, who for so many years had been the tormentors of the EU . Poland, with the fifth largest population in the EU, is now returning to the “good European family”.
The leaders i I, the vast majority of them did not just breathe a sigh of relief after the elections in Poland on October 15. No, it was pure joy to track. After the change of power in Poland, the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, sat there again during the summit increasingly lonely in his defense of illiberal democracy, with restricted freedom of the press and weakened rule of law. Hungary has this in common with Poland. The EU has therefore withheld large sums from its funds that both countries should have received. With Tusk as prime minister in Poland, and the reforms he wants to implement, Poland will probably get its money from the EU. It says more than 35 billion euros.
No i I are happier about the change of power in Poland than the Germans. They have been a chopping block for the ultra-conservatives in Poland, almost in the same way as the Russians, this despite the fact that Germany is today an ally in both the EU and NATO, while Russia under President Vladimir Putin is an obvious danger. PiS has scolded Tusk in the election campaign as “a German agent”. Poland’s outgoing government has insisted on a demand for 1.32 trillion euros in reparations from Germany for the occupation from 1939 to 1945. This dispute has so far not been resolved.
It can make one think of when the EU should introduce voting weight in the EU Council in relation to the countries’ population. The Kaczynski twins, as president and prime minister, then demanded that all the Poles killed during the Second World War be included in Poland’s population when the vote weight was to be calculated.
In Germany have leaders in several political parties advocated using this opportunity to achieve reconciliation with Poland. Germany is not an enemy of Poland and can, on the contrary, help to guarantee Poland’s security within NATO, not least in these uncertain times, it is said from several political quarters in Germany.
It can now move towards two years of arguments between President Andrzej Duda of PiS and Prime Minister Donald Tusk. We have seen that before, when the president and prime minister were not on speaking terms and came to the EU summit in separate planes. Several of the reforms that Tusk has promised to carry out to strengthen the rule of law require cooperation with Duda. Therefore, many difficulties can arise for Tusk. A full dispute over the management of state-owned broadcasting and the news agency PAP, which PiS has made its mouthpiece, arose over the Christmas weekend between the prime minister and the president. Tusk wants to depose the bosses there, but then Duda threatens to veto the new state budget.
Tusk is difficult controversial in the prevailing political climate in Poland. He has been accused of being unwilling to listen and “arrogant”. PiS has even called him a “dictator”. Compared to PiS and Kaczynski, he can appear left-wing. But he is a conservative liberal and so-called “ardent European”. While Kaczynski is authoritarian and ultra-conservative, Tusk is liberal and conservative. In the EU, he learned anyway to listen and negotiate settlements, say those who worked closely with him. Nothing else is useful there.
Tusk had been a bricklayer and painter before entering politics, but he learned to speak English very quickly when he became president of the EU Council. As president, during a summit, he asked the then British Prime Minister, David Cameron, how wise it was to call a referendum on continued British membership in the EU, when Cameron had been complaining about the EU for years. “You can lose,” said Tusk. Cameron just dismissed Tusk and went home and lost and resigned.
Duda had first given Mateusz Morawiecki the task of forming a government, “according to parliamentary custom”, because PiS had received the most votes in the election. The party received 35.4 percent of the vote and is still the country’s largest. The Citizens’ Platform (PO), with Tusk at the head, got 30.7 percent. But the cooperative parties Tredje Vei and Nye Venstre got 14.4 and 8.6 percent respectively. Together, they received 53.7 percent of the vote. Thus they have a majority in the Sejmen (lower house). Morawiecki received support from 190 of the elected representatives, but 266 against him. Shortly afterwards, Tusk received 248 votes with 201 against. That is the law of parliamentarism, not as Duda claims.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of PiS and the actual head of government for the past eight years, could not hide his anger after the election of Tusk. He took the podium and spoke out of turn, telling the newly installed Prime Minister: “You are a German agent.” Part of Tusk’s family has roots on the German side of the border between Poland and Germany which has moved in the drama of history. But especially the close relationship that Tusk had with Angela Merkel, the former Chancellor of Germany, is used against him. When someone asked if Kaczynski shouldn’t congratulate the new prime minister by post, he replied: “You’ve got to be joking!”
With Tusk as leader in Poland, the balance of power in the institutions of the EU is changing. It has already happened in the Council of the EU and in the Council of Ministers. This could open the way for the re-election of the conservative German Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission after the elections to the European Parliament in the summer. The leaders in the other EU countries were able to pressure, slow down and occasionally stop the stubborn regime in Poland in the EU institutions with various means. It was so-called damage limitation. But getting a country as big as Poland on the team when important decisions have to be made is something else entirely.
2023-12-31 22:30:57
#Reunited #friend
