Polish politics is utterly boring nowadays. I can’t force myself to follow it closely. Some of my friends still do, shocked that Tusk did not turned out to be the saviour they hoped for, but as I had very low expectations, there is nothing that would surprise me. Tusk was doing nothing waiting to get rid of Andrzej Duda and replace him with his man in presidential palace. As we now know, this didn’t worked out, and new president Nawrocki seems to be even worse, and so government’s hands are now even more tied. I don’t know, maybe it’s good for PO as they don’t seem to be too keen to do much anyway, but general mood in Poland seems to be that we just replaced radical PiS with PiS soft.
Click HERE to read the previous part of the series
Click HERE to see all the chapters of the series so far.
So one of the few things that surprised me was change at the position of the speaker of the parliament. Not that it was unexpected: as per coalition agreement, the first half of the term the parliament was led by Szymon Hołownia, leader of Polska 2050 party and now he gave up the seat to his coalition partner, Lewica’s Włodzimierz Czarzasty. I was just surprised how quickly time flies.
It was about time for the change as while Hołownia’s performance in the beginning became somewhat of internet sensation, when he was shooting down PiS MP’s with his witty remarks and managing well to stay on top the rowdiness – like during the struggle when PiS was trying to ignore the court ruling, stripping their MP’s of their mandates after they were found guilty of abuse of power – with time, he seemed to have run out of steam. While two years ago it seem that his dream of becoming the next president might actually have some chances of succeeding, as regular readers might remember even his presidential campaign seemed to be pretty flat, barely keeping the remainders of the initial momentum.
Meanwhile his party, created around his media personality, seems to be lost too. As he seemingly lost the will to run it, they had to elect a new leader via online voting – and all that ended up in disaster, as there were allegedly some irregularities and they had to repeat the election. The fact that I don’t even remember which of the female candidates had been finally appointed as new party leader and I can’t be even bothered to check shows how little it matters. Hołownia’s party seems to be following well trodden path of the Polish “third way parties” that try to cut a piece of the pie in the centre – charismatic leader, hype in media, decent result in first election, bleak performance in parliament along with virtual invisibility outside Warsaw’s political circus – due to lack of structures on the ground – and finally slow demise, during which some of the remaining MP’s slowly filter to one of the two main parties. This was the case of Ruch Palikota started by Janusz Palikot, .Nowoczesna created by Ryszard Petru, or movement surrounding Paweł Kukiz, and Hołownia’s party seems to be following their steps.
With the general marasm of the local politics (apart of some insignificant games between PiS and PO that nobody, but some true political nerds, cares about), the new line of division in the Polish politics seems to be defined by the attitude towards Donald Trump. The left – both opposition Razem and coalition Lewica are clearly not fans. The new Speaker of the Sejm Włodzimierz Czarzasty had even caused international scandal by refusing to support Trump’s candidacy for the Nobel Peace Price saying Trump does not deserve it prompted a pretty strong reaction from the US.
“As of today we are ceasing our relations and we refuse to communicate with Speaker Czarzasty, whose outrageous and unfounded insults against president Trump are getting in the way of our tremendously good relations with prime minister Tusk and his government” – wrote US ambassador Tom Rose, adding that they won’t allow anyone to offend Trump who did so much for Poland and the Polish nation. Pressed by the journalists, he was unable to iterate what Czarzasty said that was so insulting. Nobody also asked him what Trump really did for Poland.
This is of course not significant and media forgot about it after couple of day. If someone keeps track on who is the most shameless member of the diplomatic corpse, Rose is now surely up in the top along with his peers representing Russia and Israel, but as for me I only feel sorry for American reporters, who in the midst of all that is going on in their country had to learn how to pronounce “marszałek Włodzimierz Czarzasty”.
As for Tusk, he seems to have a decent relations with the Trump government indeed, although probably because he wisely stays away from all that madness, working closely with other European leaders instead. Unlike, for example, Keir Starmer, he is in this comfortable position, that he does not need to do any brown nosing, as president Nawrocki is more than happy to fulfil those duties. On the other hand, Nawrocki also has it easier, as he can express, for example, his great support for Trump’s ideas such like the Board of Peace and then avoid actually joining it, saying Tusk didn’t let him to do so (as in Poland, it’s the government that shapes international politics).
Even the right wing Konfederacja sees that Trump went off the rails and they cautiously distance themselves from Trumpists, hoping that people forget how supportive of Trump they were just a year ago. As a result, the biggest pro-Trumpist force is now PiS. Their MEP Dominik Tarczyński is very active on Twitter, praising all the actions of the republican administration, including murders of innocent bystanders such as Renee Good or Alex Pretti, desperately hoping that Elon Musk will retweet him again. Last time this happened, Tarczyński became a token European for the American radical right and his (bullshit) speeches about how we don’t take a single immigrant in Poland etc. go viral and just as we speak probably are on their fifteenth round around the radical right internet. He is also invited to take part in radical right events in Britain, organized by such people like Nigel Farage or Tommy Robinson
As for party that talks so much about patriotism and sovereignity, PiS seems to be pretty submissive to their great American friend. No wonder that it’s them, to whom Americans send their lobbyists to try to derail some European projects. The most recent example of PiS throwing the stick into the spokes of the wheel is president Nawrocki’s veto to SAFE program of EU common fund for military spending. This was actually a tricky one, as PiS and Nawrocki spend a lot of time saying how we need to built the strong army, so throwing away such great amount of funds would be hard to explain to them. But luckily PiS still has a few aces up their sleeve, such as Adam Glapiński who has another couple of years left as chairman of the National Bank of Poland. He ran to the rescue and – despite telling the government for the last two years that the National Bank is losing money, suddenly announced they have a surplus. Soon Nawrocki and Glapiński came with hastily stiched up plan, which they called SAFE 0%, arguing, that we don’t need to borrow money, as we can fund all our army needs cheaper. How? Well, the National Banks has gold reserves. The price of gold went up, so the gold is now worth more. So the plan is as follows: Glapiński will sell the gold and use the profits to funds to buy arms for our army. The right instantly announced him to be a true statesman and an economical genius, but I guess you, dear reader, have already saw the flaw in this cunning plan.
See, imagine I have a 100 g bar of gold. I bought it some years ago and paid 50 000 zł for it. It’s now worth over 60 000 zł. But I can’t just go to the shop and tell them “please sell me this item, as my bar of gold is now worth 10 000 zł more than when I bought it”. No, I would have to sell it to cash the profit and have some actuall cash to use in the shops. Then if I spend the 10 000 zł, I won’t be able to buy the same gold back again, as I will now only have 50 000zł and gold is now worth more than it was when I first bought it. So either I will buy back less gold, or try to save money and buy a 100g of gold back, but by the time this happen the gold might be even more expensive. Of course this is a simplified explanation, but the bottom line is that when we take all the caveats into consideration, the plan looks even more stupid. And if they implemented it regardless, just the cost of the whole operation would actually be more than the interest on the SAFE loan.
Some say National Bank can just print more money, but of course there are regulations against that for obvious reasons.
The government, as well as the opposition, did not wanted to play this game, so they said “Ok, that’s great, we really need all the money we can get, so how about we buy some stuff from SAFE and some other from those gold reserves”? But to no avail, Nawrocki went too deep into it and he could not back down, so he vetoed SAFE. Government announced that they will try to use some loopholes to be able to get their hands at least on part of that funding, which of course caused outcry on the PiS side.
Some say veto was inevitable, as the SAFE program prioritizes European purchases, there are suggestions that American lobbyists pushed PiS to veto this, as this would be, obviously, harmful to the American arms industry and PiS government’s for years was opting to get their military shopping done across the ocean, rather than cooperating closely with our European partners. But this of course has been dressed up in the PiS anti-German obsession, as seen by the headlines from pro-PiS media such as “DER SAFE FÜR DEUTSCHLAND KAPUTT” (no, I am not joking. I wish I was but here it is [image])
According to this narration, the whole plan was conceived in Brussels in order to drive business to German arms industry, as countries banned from buying from the USA will have, allegedly, to buy everytyhing from Germany. This only shows how little those “patriots” think of our own arms industry, which actually doing pretty well:
– the Slovaks are considering buying our armoured people carriers.
– a new artillery shell factory was opened recently in Pionki, that increased the factory’s production capacities fivefold
– a new joint-venture enterprise will be manufacturing Bohdan howitzers together with Ukrainians
– another company works together with Turkey on unmanned aerial vehicles and Turkish army expressed interest in buying the results of that cooperation
– Jelcz, a truck manufacturer that today focuses solely on military vehicles, just got 750 000 000 zł investment to expand their factory and radically improve their manufacturing output
One could think that such project could be a great way for our arms industry to boost their sales. But apparently for those self-proclaimed patriots it does not matter, as long as their imaginary German conspiracy can be destroyed.
This radical anti-EU stance, even at the cost of self-harm, seems to be the new direction PiS set the sail upon, as proved by the fact that they announced a new candidate for the prime minister after their planned victory in the parliamentary elections in two years: it’s Przemysław Czarnek, known to our reader as a man who said “Enough those idiocies about equality or human rights. LGBT people are not equal to normal people, so enough of this silly discussion” and was later awarded with a position of Minister of Education. He started his campaign with claim, that Polish energy policy should be based on coal, calling renewables “shittevables”. But, of course, he’s from PiS, and they are masters of hypocrisy so it was quickly pointed out that on the roof of the house he lives in (that formally does not belong to him) there are solar panels that he allegedly installed using some EU grant…
And so, the live in Poland goes on. And only somehow everyone seem to have forgotten about what brought the change of government: the issue of women’s rights.
This text was written for Britské Listy
Picture: TV Republika
