Leaders of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party appear intent on stoking an anti-EU and anti-German climate as it faces a battle in next year’s parliamentary elections.
Speaking at an economic forum in Karpacz this week, Jarosław Kaczyński, the chair of Law and Justice (PiS) and the country’s de facto leader, went further than before in denouncing the EU as a culturally alien project led by a neo-imperialist Germany. He said it was “the sacred duty” of Polish politicians to oppose it.
He said Poland had joined the EU out of necessity, but left the impression that the case for remaining inside the bloc lay in the balance. “We had to join the EU just to exist and develop,” Kaczyński said. “There was no other way back then.”
The essence of the EU project had been revealed, he said. “In the EU there is a rule: who is stronger is better. And because Germany is strongest, the old German concept – a concept that can be called neo-imperial – holds sway. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, wants to build a superstate of world importance under German leadership.”
Kaczyński does not hold a government role but is seen as a driving force behind the conservative-national governing party, which has launched a crackdown on judicial independence that has drawn Poland into a row with Brussels.
Speaking to a packed room and surrounded by his closest intellectual advisers, Kaczyński continually described the EU as a culturally alien project without specifying in what way.
The ferocity of the alienation from the EU project – synonymous with Germany – was on daily display at the economic forum, described as the Davos of central and eastern Europe. Many of the sessions on the overpowering march of liberal values rejected globalism.
Kaczyński said: “We realise that western Europe is culturally alien to us,”, adding that it was something Poland had affirmed at the time of accession by passing a resolution defending its sovereignty.
But at the same time, the PiS leadership seemed optimistic that the tide may be shifting and that power inside Europe was heading eastwards since the “Carpathian’s” analysis of Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine had been validated. “I think that we are at a turning point in world geopolitics so today, what counts is the common voice of those who were right in the face of what happened,” said the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.
But with the PiS polling at about 35%, inflation at 16% and trust ratings in Morawiecki at a new low, the party does not seem confident that its perceptiveness about Putin will reap electoral rewards next year.
Kaczyński also appears to be testing out criticism of transgender people as another possible strategy to boost turnout among rural and older voters, the bedrock of his victory in 2019. In recent months, he has used several meetings with supporters to launch attacks on trans people.
It would not be the first time the Polish government has targeted the LGBT community: two years ago the PiS-aligned president, Andrzej Duda, ran a successful re-election campaign based on a fight against so-called LGBT ideology, though the focus was rarely on trans people.
Nevertheless, the focus of PiS’s strategy for now is a ferocious attack on Germany and, specifically, a demand that Germany pay reparations for the devastation wreaked on Poland by the Nazis during the second world war. A three-volume study by a parliamentary body, four years in the making, calculates the bill at €1.3tn, three times Germany’s annual state budget.
Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, says the topic is closed and an understanding on the issues was reached in August 1953.
But suggestions that the demand from PiS will be tailored solely to a domestic audience have proved wrong. Morawiecki has written a piece in the UK’s Spectator magazine spelling out the crimes “that can never be fully forgiven and can never be forgotten”.
A motion is being tabled in the European parliament and Polish diplomats say a formal note demanding compensation will be sent to Berlin shortly. Morawiecki argues that any decision by a Polish government in 1953 to waive claims could not be valid since no motion was passed by the Polish parliament and, being within the Soviet sphere of influence, Poland could not be classed as a free state at the time.
The PiS is hoping it has set a trap into which opposition parties, notably Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform, will fall by opposing the move and so seem insensitive to the traumatic history of Polish and German relations.
Scholz, for his part, is hoping the issue will go away.
In the short term, the demand for compensation risks bleeding into other contemporary disputes, including increasing German weapons deliveries to Ukraine, soaring energy prices, and the refusal of the EU to hand over €35bn in pandemic funds to Warsaw until Poland meets a series of rule-of-law “milestones”.
The language has already become extreme, with some MEPs saying Brussels represented as great a threat to Poland as Russia, and with one Polish ambassador warning that the Brussels elite risks breaking up the EU with its federalising plans, and so handing victory to Putin.
• This article was amended on 12 September 2022. Owing to an editing error, an earlier version stated incorrectly that Poland had been part of the Soviet Union.
