Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party agreed Thursday that ministers and other top officials must give controversial financial bonuses they paid themselves to charity.
Jarosław Kaczyński, the party leader and Poland’s most powerful politician, also demanded that MPs vote to give themselves a 20 percent pay cut.
“The ministers decided on their own,” Kaczyński said at a news conference. “No one protested.”
The move is part of a broader retreat by PiS, which in its first two years in power has become embroiled in a series of domestic and foreign controversies, and of late has faced slumping opinion poll numbers.
Kaczyński’s retreat on the bonuses is part of a wider recalibration by Law and Justice.
PiS has been hammered by the opposition for the 1.5 million złoty (€357,000) in rewards paid out to ministers and deputy ministers in 2017.
The opposition Civic Platform party sent a fleet of mobile billboards across the country showing the faces of various ministers and how much they got — part of a campaign called “Give back the cash!”
Despite efforts by the state-controlled media to justify the rewards and to try to paint the previous Civic Platform party government as being equally avaricious (during its eight years in power, Civic Platform ministers got a total of 38,000 złoty in bonuses), the issue has turned into a PR disaster for PiS.
The party won the 2015 election by promising to be clean and honest, and the growing scandal around the rewards, as well as frequent stories about friends and relatives of leading politicians earning enormous salaries at state-controlled companies, pose a growing danger ahead of local elections later this year.
Two recent opinion polls showed big drops for PiS, although it is still the country’s leading political force. Another survey found that only a fifth of those polled viewed the bonuses favorably.
That’s forced a change in tactics from Kaczyński.
When the issue first surfaced last month, Beata Szydło, former prime minister and now deputy PM without portfolio, aggressively defended the bonuses in parliament.
The ministerial rewards “were given for hard, honest work, and they were simply due that money,” Szydło told MPs.
In an interview at the time, Kaczyński said he had asked Szydło to “show her claws” in parliament. The bonuses “have to be defended,” he said. “There is absolutely no scandal.”
But on Thursday, Kaczyński said that the bonuses would be given to Caritas, a Catholic charity, by mid-May and the 20 percent pay cut for MPs, financial limits for local government officials and a ban on all future bonuses would be voted through parliament — possibly even in an emergency session.
“If someone doesn’t want to vote for these decisions … they will lose the chance for a place on electoral lists, for a continuing role in politics,” said Kaczyński, who has no government function beyond being a member of parliament.
“I’ve said that one doesn’t go into politics for money, and the people clearly remembered that,” he said.
Kaczyński’s retreat on the bonuses is part of a wider recalibration by Law and Justice.
In an interview this week, the PiS leader said there is an “80 percent chance” of resolving the ongoing dispute with the European Commission, which accuses the government of undermining the rule of law by seizing control of the judiciary.
Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans, who has taken the lead on the Polish issue, will be in Warsaw on Monday. Jacek Czaputowicz, the foreign minister, said the one-day trip will allow him to “hear all sorts of arguments, to see at what stage our proposals are.”
The country has also backtracked on a Holocaust law that was condemned by Israel and the U.S.
“It wasn’t our intention to punish anyone for memories … Nobody will face charges for memories, historical research or describing crimes committed by individual Polish citizens,” Kaczyński said in the interview.
President Andrzej Duda also vetoed a law posthumously stripping former president General Wojciech Jaruzelski of his rank for bringing in martial law in 1981 — an initiative popular with PiS MPs, but which was strongly criticized in the country.