Remi Adekoya explains in Foreign Affairs how Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party has been able to remain popular despite truncating democratic norms and institutions and antagonizing the EU:
It has raised social spending, specifically for poor rural families with children.
It portrays its domestic opponents as corrupt elites fighting to preserve their influence.
It portrays its European critics as fanatical multiculturalists and militant secularists who are so obsessed with political correctness they have lost all sense of self-preservation. (more…)
Polish president Andrzej Duda answers questions from reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels, January 18, 2016 (NATO)
Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, has surprised observers by vetoing legislation from his own Law and Justice party that would have defanged the judiciary.
Closer scrutiny suggests Duda’s opposition is less meaningful than it is made out to be, though.
The president has said he will sign the bills if they are amended and Leonid Bershidsky argues at Bloomberg View that his proposed changes don’t deviate from the legislation’s objective: “to put the judiciary, which the party argues has turned into an elitist caste, under more political control.” (more…)
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party pushed through more changes to the court system on Wednesday:
One bill takes power to appoint members to the National Judicial Council, which is responsible for appointing lower-level judges, away from the judiciary itself and gives it to parliament, where Law and Justice has a majority.
The same law removes fifteen of the 25 judges currently serving on the National Judicial Council.
A second bill gives the justice minister the power to unilaterally replace court presidents. (more…)
Skyline of Budapest, Hungary (Unsplash/Tom Bixler)
The European Union is clamping down on its recalcitrant Central European member states.
The European Commission has opened what is called an infringement procedure against the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland for failing to take in their share of refugees.
This comes on the heels of several probes into Hungary’s and Poland’s right-wing governments.
EU countries committed to distributing 160,000 asylum seekers across the bloc in 2015 to ease the burden on Southern European member states. The Central Europeans have refused to do their bit.
The Czech Republic was only expected to house 2,691 people, Hungary 1,294 and Poland 6,182 — at a time when countries like Germany and Sweden sheltered hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
Yet even those token amounts were apparently too much. (more…)
President Jean-Claude Juncker and other members of the European Commission listen to a debate in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, September 14, 2016 (European Parliament)
The European Parliament has opened an investigation into the state of democracy and rule of law in Hungary, which is ruled by the self-described illiberal democrat Viktor Orbán.
The resolution, introduced by liberal and left-wing groups, passed on Wednesday with the support of 68 members of the conservative European People’s Party, to which Orbán’s Fidesz belongs.
The mainstream right has long shielded Budapest from scrutiny, despite Orbán’s years of attacks on the courts, the central bank and the media, the removal of checks on his parliamentary majority and his pursuing of economic and migration policies that defy the European mainstream.
At the same time, it has repeatedly warned Orbán to keep his anti-EU rhetoric and authoritarian tendencies in check; warnings that have gone unheeded. (more…)
Poland’s ruling party has come out against a proposal for more flexible integration in Europe that is supported by the leaders of France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
“We cannot accept any announcements of a two-speed Europe,” Jarosław Kaczyński, the head of the conservative Law and Justice party, told the weekly W Sieci.
This would mean either pushing us out of the European Union or downgrading us to an inferior category of members.
This is hyperbole.
The whole idea of a multispeed Europe, as endorsed by the “Big Four” earlier this month, is to break through the false dichotomy of more or less Europe. It would allow countries to integrate at not just one or two but many speeds.
For example, countries that wish to pool their defense procurement could do so within the context of the EU without militarizing the union as a whole, which is something Poland opposes. (more…)
Skyline of Berlin, Germany, December 31, 2005 (Max Braun)
The first thing Poland’s Law and Justice party did when it returned to power a year ago was pick a fight with Germany.
Jarosław Kaczyński’s national-conservative party, which controls both the presidency and parliament, has yet to forgive Germany for what it did to Poland seventy years ago.
When Martin Schulz, then president of the European Parliament, accused the Poles of hypocrisy for expecting European solidarity in the face of Russian threats but refusing to help the rest of Europe cope with a refugee crisis, Mariusz Błaszczak, the interior minister, felt it necessary to invoke World War II. He called Schulz’ comments “another example of German arrogance” and pointed out, “We are talking in Warsaw. Warsaw was destroyed by the Germans.”
Now the prospect of Schulz coming to power in Berlin has Błaszczak’s party scrambling to repair Polish relations with his rival, Angela Merkel. (more…)
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party backed away from controversial press reforms on Tuesday after several nights of street demonstrations in the capital Warsaw.
The concession is a rare victory for the liberal-minded opposition, which has otherwise been unable to stop Law and Justice from reversing the last twenty years of Poland’s democratization and liberalization.
Last week, the nationalist-conservative party proposed a law that would ban all recordings of parliamentary sessions except by a select few broadcasters. It also called for a limit on the number of journalists who are allowed in the building at all.
The bill became a focal point of protest against Law and Justice’s illiberal agenda, prompting even Lech Wałęsa to speak out. (more…)
Donald Trump’s unexpected presidential election in the United States has delighted his ideological counterparts in Europe. Brexiteers in the United Kingdom think he will give them a better deal than Hillary Clinton. Populists in France and the Netherlands have responded to Trump’s victory with glee. So have ultraconservatives in Central Europe.
They should think again. Trump may be a kindred spirit. His triumph is a setback for the liberal consensus that nationalists in Europe and North America are trying to tear down. But he is no friend of European nations. (more…)
Benjamin Cunningham reports for Politico that Europe’s Visegrad Four are an “illusionary union”. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia are often lumped together in a Euroskeptic club hostile to closer integration, he writes — “wary of domination by big Western European countries like Germany and wary of accepting migrants, especially Muslims” — but they are actually riven by tensions.
In particular, the Czechs and Slovaks are keener than their fellow Central Europeans on building strong relations with Germany, their key economic and political ally.
The two also worry about being left on the sidelines if the European Union consolidates itself in reaction to the threat posed by Britain’s exit, according to Cunningham.
A confluence of politics and geopolitics helps explain this division. (more…)
American president Barack Obama speaks with Australian foreign minister Bob Carr as Russian president Vladimir Putin opens a plenary session of the G20 in Saint Petersburg, September 6, 2013 (White House/Pete Souza)
During the past year, the primary focus of the American-Russian rivalry has centred around Iran. The United States put an end to Western sanctions against Iran and also chose to keep American troops in Afghanistan, who support, among others, many of the tens of millions of Afghans who are Shiite Muslims or who can speak Farsi (as opposed to the Taliban, who are Sunni and typically Pashto-speaking). Russia, meanwhile, intervened to aid Bashar al-Assad in Syria, whose survival diverts Sunni attention away from Iran’s Shiite allies in Iraq.
With Russia now withdrawing most of its forces from Syria and the United States hoping to do so from Afghanistan, the focus of the American-Russian rivalry could revert, perhaps, to Ukraine. By comparison to the Middle East, Ukraine has appeared to be quite quiet of late.
Russia may have dialed back the conflict there partly in order to shift the West’s focus to the Middle East. This of course has not been very difficult to accomplish, given Europe’s influx of Syrian migrants and America’s election-season rhetoric on issues like ISIS, the conflict in Libya and Donald Trump’s proposal to ban, for an unspecified amount of time, all Muslims from traveling to the United States.
If the American-Russian focus does move back toward Eastern Europe, one can perhaps guess the rough outlines of any geopolitical contest that may occur there. (more…)
While the world’s attention is mostly focused on bailout territory in the eurozone, there has been quite an economic success story in Eastern Europe. In twenty years since the end of communism there, Poland has climbed to sixth in Europe’s economic standing.
Due to a policy of rapid liberalization, the once desolate country has seen considerable economic growth and industry, especially after its accession to the European Union in 2004.
Poland’s tax regime is highly competitive. The highest income tax rate of 32 percent, low in comparison to Europe’s economic powerhouse next door, Germany, where the rate is 45 percent. Poland’s two tier system is also far simpler. There is no capital gains tax.
The country has an “A” or “A-” credit rating from the major rating agencies, something that countries as Greece and Spain can only dream of. They and other high debt nations in the south of Europe would be hard pressed to not be jealous of Poland’s performance at the moment.
Despite having an unemployment rate of 9.7 percent last year, it is less than half of what several of Poland’s European counterparts are experiencing. (more…)
