As I was preparing for my Finnish test and then had a month long holidays, I decided to give myself a break from the news and the social media (for the most part). But this time it was different – this time I completely fell out of the loop. Why?
Click HERE to read the previous part of the series
Click HERE to see all the chapters of the series so far.
It’s because politics is no longer number one topic for everyone. I spent most of my holidays in Poland this year. For the first time in many years all the conversations with my friends weren’t instantly drifting into politics. My family was not running to protests. There were no anti-government posters in the windows or anti-PiS stickers on the cars. My friends and readers weren’t flooding me with links to some crazy stories, commenting “look what they did again” or “that’s something right for your Absurdistan series”. There is a great feeling of relief, the country feels, as I wrote in one of the previous articles from that series, like if someone opened the window and allowed fresh air in.
But, also as I wrote before, it does not mean that we are out of the wood yet. The government does a good job in bringing PiS to justice, which is disappointing to some people who would like to see PiS to be locked away and key thrown away already. Have I lost you here? Allow me to explain:
With PiS gone, the times of “let’s arrest this guy and then try to pin something to him” are gone. By “good job” I mean they do it properly, as per the letter of the law. The new prosecution, under the watchful eye of Adam Bodnar, formerly Human Rights Ombudsman and now the Justice Minister, is painstakingly investigating and preparing a strong cases for the courts – which is not easy, as the prosecution is still full of political appointees placed in strategic places by Zbigniew Ziobro. On the other hand this might actually be good, as the courts are also full of illegal judges appointed by Andrzej Duda on recommendation of illegal National Judiciary council and that needs to be sorted out too, which is not easy, due to legal traps set up by PiS. There is also a matter of judges who were mobbing other judges for not willing to bend their spine and play by the PiS rules – those are currently under investigation.
The PiS politicians and their cronies already know what to expect tho. While Morawiecki and his friends keep talking about “political vendetta”, the fact that those, who have the pants on fire are trying to run for their lives makes it a bit less convincing. There are already arrest warrants for some – like the chief of the Agency of Strategical Reserves – who, among other things, is accused of buying overpriced electric generators from one of the PiS cronies (the guy who made a fortune selling “patriotic clothing” about which we wrote in chapter 25 of this series). As if that wasn’t bad enough, those generators were supposed to be delivered to Ukraine, but he gave them instead to local fire brigades as a part of the election campaign, and as if THAT wasn’t yet bad enough, those generators turned out to be utter crap. The wanted man is allegedly hiding in Cyprus.
The first one to run was Daniel Obajtek, formerly chief of the Polish oil giant Orlen, who was hiding in Budapest. Now he feels safe, as he was elected to Europarliament and, just like many other alleged criminals from PiS believes he will be safe behind MEP immunity. Some also try to hide behind immunity provided by the other EU institutions. Some are already in jail, like father Michał Olszewski (readers of this series may remember him as an exorcist who tried to chase away daemons of veganism with a piece of sausage) who is accused of embezzling money illegally awarded to him from the Justice Fund (which also featured in this series several times). And others – like Tomasz Mraz, a high official from the Ministry of Justice – were apparently preparing for the fall of PiS a long time ago. He was secretly recording his superiors for 2 years and now provided those records to the investigators as a part of a plea deal.
The scale of money embezzlement is so big, that I don’t even want to attempt to list even only major discoveries. It’s worth to mention that they were feeling completely above the law. Michał Pawlak, Children’s Right Ombudsman was spending public money on cars – after renting a luxury Audi Quatro, he purchased several SUVs, starting modestly with Toyota RAV4 and turning the dial all the way up to Ford Explorer ST-Line, V6 Ecoboost Biturbo PHEV with 457 horsepower that had to be specially imported from the US and costed the taxpayer over 400 000 zł.
They were trying to milk the budget to the last moment. In November last year, just before Morawiecki’s short-lived government was to meet an unavoidable fate, they signed new documents regarding the new ammunition factory. Under current circumstances, the ammo factory is of course needed, but here the government signed a deal with private companies that had no prior experience in the matter, according to which the government has to work together with those companies, bearing most responsibility for the financial side of the enterprise while not having control over the factory. In a secret document, Morawiecki ordered the state to purchase 12 000 000 000 worth of ammo from this joint venture, which, as some expert suggests, means that those private companies would de facto have a monopoly on selling the ammo to the government, so they would most likely do it at a hefty premium.
But embezzling money was not the only problem during PiS rule. Destruction of the country’s institutions was widespread in many other fields too. Professor Konrad Szaciłowski of Kraków’s Mining and Foundry University has sent his new paper to several highly rated (thanks to manual intervention of the former education minister) peer-reviewed scientific periodicals. His work was approved for publication by four of them. Some of them would give him as many quotation points as if he published in Science or Nature.
The papers investigate an unknown passion of the late Pope John Paul II. Along with his scientific partner, Kapela Abdulayev Pilaka (a musicologist from Turkmenistan), professor Szaciłowski analysed the pope’s phillumenic hobby – a collection of matchboxes. Except it was all made up. Along with a bibliography. And Turkmen scientists.
But the biggest news of recent days is speculation that PiS might lose most of its funding. In Poland, political parties are funded by the state, pro-rata to their election results, but they have to adhere to strict financial regulations. The electoral commission will most likely reject PiS’s financial reports, arguing that they were using government money to promote their party, which is a blatant breach of the rules.
But while bringing PiS to justice is going well – even if not as fast as some would hope – the other expectations of the voters seem to be either stuck in coalition mud or sidetracked altogether. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, it very quickly turned out that “now it’s not the time to discuss change of law on abortion”. The Left proposed a bill that would at least de-penalize abortion, but this fell in parliament, as many coalition MPs – mostly from the peasant’s party PSL which is recently leaning more to the right, but also from Tusk’s own stables – voted against it or did not participated in the vote.
The discussion about civil partnerships for single-sex couples was totally ridiculous. The already very conservative project was bombarded by PSL politicians again, who were outraged by the fact, that a civil partnership could have a ceremony in the registry office which would look almost like a wedding. Apparently, gay people are not allowed to celebrate, and PSL politicians wanted to limit this important part of their lives to just visiting a notary office. I wonder if the wedding party would still be allowed, or if the wedding guests could be arrested for celebrating for the wrong reasons? The project also makes it illegal for one of the partners to take the surname of the other, or to adopt children – even the children of one of the partners that are already raised together by the couple.
For me personally, the biggest disappointment is the situation on the border with Belarus, where the migrants are still being illegally pushed back to Belarus and die on a regular basis. It just happens that Adam Bodnar gave an interview to my podcast in September last year. In this interview, he strongly expressed the opinion that push-backs are illegal and people responsible will have to face the consequences of their actions. Adam Bodnar has been the minister of Justice for more than 6 months now, and as far as I can say, he not only haven’t undertaken any actions in the matter but he also avoids speaking on the topic as much as possible.
Meanwhile, just recently the government announced Poland will make efforts to become a host of the Olympic games in 2040 or 2044. In other words – Poles won’t get what they want, but they will get the Olympic games. At the same time, the army of social media accounts supporting Donald Tusk is busy attacking the Left – especially the young social democratic party Razem, which refused to join the government coalition predicting – rightly, as we can now see – that this government will not be willing to realise more left-leaning postulates. “Donald Tusk – good. Razem – baaad” they seem to bleat, at the same time trying to accuse anyone who criticized Tusk’s government of being a PiS supporter. In other words, if someone expected things would now be different than under PiS, many aspects of Tusk’s government are eerily similar to what was going on before.
Yes, it’s a great relief that PiS has been pulled away from holding power. At least the matters won’t get any worse. But while removing PiS from power was a crucial thing to do, in my view in many areas, including those most important for many Poles, things are not really getting any better too. Which is worrying. Late Jerzy Urban, former spokesperson of the communist government but for many years also a witty political commentator once predicted that this would be the case, and that will lead to Poles losing patience with mainstream governments. And that the government that will come after this one will be so bad, that we’ll miss the times when PiS was in power. Let’s hope this prophecy is wrong. But for that, Tusk’s government need to start working on the matters that their voters elected them on.
This piece was written for Britské Listy
