/ world today news/ The upcoming year 2023 is the “year of the big turning point” for Poland because of the parliamentary elections. The Law and Justice party (PiS), which has been in power since 2015 and until recently was tipped to win by numerous polls and expert opinions, failed to win a majority and went into opposition.
PiS’s defeat is largely its merit, not the success of the three bloc coalition that came to power today: Civil Platform – Third Way – New Left.
Reasons for the loss
As it turned out later, Law and Justice was counting on Poles to vote for it as a sign of “gratitude” for the social and economic successes achieved by Mateusz Morawiecki’s government. But that didn’t happen.
As PiS leader Jarosław Kaczynski said after the October 15 elections, “a large group of people stood against us, who benefited not from the system of the previous government, but from the one we created.”
What is the reason for this “ingratitude” of Polish society?
In October, PiS defeated GP for the third time in a row with a score of 35:31. But at the same time, it woke up the voters, who previously saw no point in doing something for themselves among the duo of “Law and Justice” and “Civil Platform”, Kaczynski and Tusk.
Society had grown tired of the ruling party’s eight years of trying to control everything and everyone.
The “Third Way”, formed by the “Poland 2050” movement led by Szymon Holownia and the Polish Peasant Party led by Władysław Kosiniak-Kamisz, became an alternative for conservative Poles. In another situation, they would support PiS.
But this time they rejected “Law and Justice” because of its extremism in the case of the almost complete ban on abortion, as well as because of its demonstrably negative position towards initiatives and comments from Brussels, which was perceived as “anti-European”.
In parallel, the obsessive propaganda of the state media and the use of Catholicism for political purposes also played a role.
All this led to PiS coming out on top in the election results, but being left alone, which was exploited by the opposition.
“Law and Justice” conducted an overly aggressive election campaign, focusing exclusively on its main opponent – the Civil Platform (GP) and its leader Donald Tusk. And he ignored the traditional “third force” factor for Polish politics – the “Third Way”.
The disarmed militarists
“Law and Justice” has invested a lot in launching the thesis that it was she who initiated the “repair” of Poland’s defense capacity.
This was to be confirmed by numerous purchases of the latest armaments, programs for reforming the armed forces, as well as the creation and deployment of new units in the regions.
However, since the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine, the Polish army is in a situation where the old weapons have been handed over to the Kyiv regime, and the arrival of the new ones and the transition to them is expected only after a few years. This gave PiS opponents reason to claim that the authorities had left the country without weapons.
According to the calculations of military experts, Poland has handed over to Ukraine almost all the mobilization stocks that were in its warehouses until recently.
About 40% of the equipment of the Polish ground forces, although still largely Soviet, was transferred to the “eastern neighbor”. The total value of Warsaw’s military aid to the Kyiv regime amounts to more than 3 billion euros.
At the same time, Law and Justice hoped to become, in the eyes of the US and Brussels, a mainstay of NATO’s so-called eastern flank.
High hopes were placed on Washington, which deployed additional troops to Poland and established a logistics center to transfer weapons and other products to Ukraine.
On the eve of US President Joe Biden’s visit to Poland in February 2023, Warsaw expected “concrete solutions” from him.
They meant Washington’s agreement to establish permanent military bases and command centers similar to the American infrastructure in Germany.
That didn’t happen.
The NATO summit in Vilnius in July was also a disappointment for PiS. As seen, Warsaw hoped to become a full member on the board of the tight US-led alliance that controls military and financial aid to the Kiev regime.
Also, Warsaw has not given up hope of leading some “armed peacekeeping mission” in Ukraine under the banner of the North Atlantic Alliance. But this time too, no “breakthrough decisions” were taken at the summit.
Failed game
The main foreign policy event of the past year for Warsaw was the “cooling” of relations with Ukraine.
Already in January 2023, Polish military experts, generals and senior politicians for the first time began to reflect on the military defeat of the Kiev regime, the growing power of the Russian army and the ineffectiveness of anti-Russian sanctions.
The foreign policy realization of these conclusions occurred in March, when Polish farmers openly raised the issue of the need to ban the import of Ukrainian grain into Poland.
The farmers were supported by the government and in September it decided to extend the embargo in defiance of the European Commission’s request.
At first it seemed that it was all about the election campaign. “Law and Justice” traditionally relies on the village, and it actively opposes the presence of Ukrainian agricultural products on the Polish market. But subsequent events showed that the problem was much deeper.
In August and September, Kiev and Warsaw exchanged painful diplomatic blows. The Polish authorities reacted most sharply to Volodymyr Zelenski’s speech at the UN.
In it, he hinted that Poland was playing on Moscow’s side. This was followed by a public statement by Polish President Andrzej Duda, who compared Ukraine to a drowning man “who can be dragged to the depths”.
This was yet another sign that the “advances” given to Warsaw in 2022 by many Western analysts have proved untenable.
Because of Poland’s strong reaction to the special military operation, the country was expected to play the role of European Union leader instead of Berlin and Paris.
Poland can begin to create a new geopolitical space, bring the main focus of European politics to Central and Eastern Europe and attract the serious attention of Washington. However, the card was not played.
The road to the dungeons
Will the current Polish government manage to accumulate political capital?
The first thing we need to find out is whether the Council of Ministers, headed by Tusk and with Radosław Sikorski as foreign minister, has its own project. For them, this is the second coming to power after the period 2007-2014.
At that time, Warsaw played mainly on the side of Germany. Including in the eastern direction, when Sikorski together with Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bild proposed a project for European integration of the post-Soviet republics under the name “Eastern Partnership”, surpassing France with its orientation towards the south.
But today Paris is already actively producing political initiatives aimed at the post-Soviet space. In May 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron secured the EU’s consent to the creation of the European Political Community (EPC), an intergovernmental format that envisages building a “Greater Europe without Russia”.
Given the traditionally distrustful relationship between Warsaw and Paris, it is unlikely that Poland will be included in the ENP to the same extent as in the case of the Eastern Partnership.
Judging by the first statements of the new Polish authorities, they are even more determined to support the Kyiv regime. However, the impression is that this slogan is a cover for the return of Warsaw under the wing of Berlin, when Poland will try to become the “runner-up” of Germany.
In this year, elections will be held for the European Parliament, as a result of which the European Commission will be formed, as well as presidential elections in the USA.
The Tusk-Sikorsky government is politically oriented towards the current European Parliament and European Commission in the Old World and the Biden administration in the New.
The “changing of the guard” will leave Warsaw without foreign policy cover, which Law and Justice will try to take advantage of.
Given that the Polish government is made up of three blocs and is ideologically heterogeneous, PiS has a chance of achieving its dissolution and early elections next year.
In that case, Berlin will remain the main patron of the current government. Germany can offer Poland to become its leading operator in the eastern direction, primarily in the course of the birth of a new security configuration after the collapse of the Kiev regime.
Undoubtedly, all this will affect Polish-Russian relations. But how exactly will not be decided in Warsaw.
Translation: SM
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