Poland's Paradoxical Politics

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has enhanced the influence of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Poland in particular. As Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, told an audience in Prague last August, “The centre of Europe is moving eastward.”

The Polish state has supplied weaponry to the Ukrainian army on a huge scale, while Poles have welcomed millions of Ukrainian refugees into their homes, and they are currently housing 1.3 million.

Poland, which joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, is delighted to be no longer talked down to as just another “new Eastern member” of the European bloc and the military alliance by veteran Western members like France and Germany.

“The voices of Central and Eastern Europeans are being listened to more and taken more seriously in the councils of Europe, and there is a big eastern enlargement agenda on the table,” maintains Timothy Garton Ash, a European historian at Saint Antony’s College, Oxford.

Judicial system

Poland’s new importance to NATO also makes it more important to the EU. Since the war began, therefore, Poland has been treated more gently by Brussels in its ongoing struggle with Warsaw revolving around changes to the country’s judiciary that critics say threaten the independence of Polish courts, as well as by the government’s insistence that Polish law trumps some EU legislation.

Still, at the moment Poland is losing out on $37 billion in EU pandemic relief funds because of its democratic backsliding. The money is being held up until Poland enacts changes related to the rule of law. It is also being fined $1 million a day for not complying with an EU court order related to judicial changes.

The EU contends this is in response to the failure of the Polish government to undo the overhaul of its judicial system which, Brussels insists, has significantly weakened the judiciary’s oversight of the executive and legislative branches.

The Polish government has in turn criticized the EU’s move, retorting that the nation is now fighting wars on two fronts, fending off attacks from both Moscow and Brussels. But critics of the Polish government argue that the remaking of the judiciary is undermining the entire legal order in Europe and that now is the moment to hold firm.

Fall election

They also cite the domestic political battles that lie ahead of national elections coming this fall, when Poland’s right-wing governing party, Law and Justice (PiS), which has been in power since 2015, will face its opponents on the liberal left, centred around the main opposition party, Civic Platform (PO). Polls show that the PiS may not pull off a third victory. As a result, the EU will most likely not disburse the pandemic-relief funds to Poland while awaiting the results.

Nonetheless, politically and morally Poland is more or less off the hook right now because of the role it plays as a front-line state in the Ukraine war, delivering arms and accepting refugees. The nation has a rapidly expanding military, and the government plans to double the size of the armed forces. Warsaw has ordered a large amount of sophisticated new arms, making it a more important player in both the EU and in NATO.

Polish Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak hopes the influx of arms will help build “the largest land force in Europe,” and he sees Warsaw signing billions in weapons contracts with U.S. suppliers. In February Blaszczak said the aim -- to double the size of the military to 300,000 troops -- is “within reach and realistic,” though he did not provide a time frame.

The government’s spending on the military, which now accounts for around three per cent of gross domestic product, is already far above the two per cent target set by NATO, and it will soon rise to four per cent. “This is going to be the highest portion of all the countries in NATO, including the U.S., as a proportion of GDP,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has indicated.

So it seems that supporting Ukraine has transformed a “problematic” country, one that has been, along with illiberal Hungary, the bane of the Brussels bureaucrats, into a reincarnated “democracy.”