SZCZECIN, Poland — Barely a week into his term, Poland’s new president is moving to realize a hallmark campaign promise: To pivot central Europe’s most important country to closer security ties with its immediate eastern neighbors.
In so doing, Andrzej Duda courts confrontation with Russia and strains in Poland’s recent good vibes with Berlin and Brussels. It is a risk that the 43-year-old, right-wing leader sounds eager to run.
“Poland’s foreign policy doesn’t need a revolution,” Duda said in an interview with POLITICO, “but it does need a correction.”
A small but telling sign of the new Polish orientation was this week’s announcement of the destination for his first overseas trip on August 23: Estonia, the small Baltic nation and NATO ally that sits on the doorstep of a newly assertive Russia. Brussels isn’t on his immediate travel itinerary.
“I think we can intensify relations with our partners, especially when it comes to the countries of central and eastern Europe,” Duda said. “I would like Poland to be a country which could in times of need lend a hand and help those who are weaker.”
He called Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine the past 18 months “alarming” and “a rebirth of the imperial spirit, of imperial nostalgia” that threatens other neighbors. He wants Poland to do more in response.
Poland could be a “security guarantor” of the three Baltic states, he said. The country has the largest military in the region and is in the midst of an expensive defense modernization program.
His office is calling for a summit of central European leaders in November to push for a large and permanent NATO ground presence in the region. Moscow has always condemned such ideas, which are also resisted by Berlin and other western European allies who see it as provocative and a violation of a 1997 accord between the alliance and Russia.
“Today we are the border of NATO and it would be good if we were a really significant flank. And that will happen when NATO is present here.”
Speaking over the roar of airplane engines on his way back to Warsaw last Thursday after a visit to a Polish-German-Danish regional NATO headquarters in Szczecin — the only permanent alliance base in formerly communist central Europe — Duda said that his priority would be to overcome German resistance to an expanded NATO ground presence in the region. His second overseas destination as president is Berlin.
Echoing the views of Estonia’s hawkish President Toomas Ilves, Duda is eager to strengthen the security ties with the U.S. and see American GIs on his soil.
“Today we are the border of NATO and it would be good if we were a really significant flank. And that will happen when NATO is present here. Really present, not only symbolically,” Duda said. He wants “American armies, or joint Polish-American bases” in Poland, he added.
‘Son’ of Kaczyński
Duda’s surprise victory in May’s presidential election marked a generational shift in Polish politics. He’s the country’s first leader who reached adulthood after the end of the Cold War in 1989. His youthful, energetic personality struck a contrast in the campaign with incumbent President Bronisław Komorowski, who emerged from the long bench of Solidarity-era politicians.
Yet in his views and mannerism Duda’s also a bit of throwback. He’s suffused with the ethos of an older Poland, where national heroes are extolled, there is nostalgia for a lost way of life on the prewar eastern kresy or borderlands, and the Roman Catholic Church is seen as the guardian of patriotic and religious values.
His political mentor was Lech Kaczyński, the president who was killed in an airplane crash in Russia in 2010. The late president once called Duda his “son,” and Duda has referred to himself as Kaczyński’s “spiritual heir.”
Asked last week to name his heroes, the new president immediately invoked Kaczyński, calling him “a great president, who had a vision of the development of the country, a vision of Polish foreign policy.”
That policy saw Kaczyński trying to build an anti-Russian alliance stretching from the Baltics through Ukraine to Georgia, a scheme that was scrapped after his death.
Lech and his twin brother Jarosław Kaczyński, who was prime minister in 2006-07, founded the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS). It was Jarosław, still party leader, who plucked Duda out of relative obscurity as member of the European Parliament to stand for president.
His victory energized Law and Justice, which stands poised to win parliamentary elections set for October 25 and return to government for the first time since 2007.
For nearly a decade, Poland has been ruled by the center-right Civic Platform. This party’s co-founder and current European Council President Donald Tusk had carried out his own pivot away from the PiS’s policies by building closer ties with Berlin and Brussels upon becoming prime minister in 2007. Polish-German relations had hit a post-Cold War low point by then.
With Germany, Duda doesn’t carry the same emotional distrust or historical baggage that the Kaczyński twins did. Lech Kaczyński called off a 2006 meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel after Germany’s Die Tageszeitung newspaper compared the twins to uppity potatoes. Jarosław once warned that Merkel “belongs to a generation of German politicians who would like to reinstate Germany’s imperial power” in cahoots with Moscow.
Duda’s wife Agata teaches German, and in the interview he said he has a lot of German friends.
Yet Duda’s advisors have already pointed out several areas of possible disagreement with Berlin. “Wartime sensitivities are always present” between Poland and Germany, the new president told POLITICO, adding with a hint of warning that Berlin needs to treat Poland like a “partner.”
“Decarbonization is completely not in our interest.”
“In their dealings with us and with the organizations to which we belong, our neighbors should take into account the fact of our existence, our interests, our point of view,” Duda said of Berlin.
Russia and NATO are only one possible friction point. Germany’s enthusiastic embrace of renewable energy and push for a climate deal this year clashes with Poland’s love of coal and opposition to EU emissions reduction plans. This president and possibly the next government led by the Law and Justice party may be even firmer in opposition than Civic Platform has been.
Noting the EU’s ambitious emissions agenda, Duda said, “This direction is bad for Poland.”
“Compared to the rest of Europe, we have enormous coal reserves and simply understood decarbonization is completely not in our interest,” he added. The same goes for any EU plans to impose “limits on the extraction of shale gas.”
He waved off a question about the danger of global warming, saying that Poland could not take the lead on the issue if other parts of the world don’t follow the EU’s lead in undertaking costly decarbonization policies.
Another contentious issue at the EU level is the migration crisis. Italy and Greece are pushing other EU countries to help take in the waves of refugees coming in from Africa and the Middle East, which most central European countries resist. Duda said that “we are not a wealthy society,” indicating that his priority instead was to make it easier for ethnic Poles in the former Soviet Union to move to Poland.
Conservative Kraków values
Duda was raised in Kraków, the old southern royal capital, by parents who were both professors at the city’s prestigious mining academy. He has a doctorate in administrative law from Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, Poland’s oldest, and for a time worked as a lecturer before becoming a politician.
Duda had a traditional Polish upbringing | EPA
His upbringing was traditional. One grandfather was a cavalry officer who fought the Soviets in the 1920 Polish-Soviet war and the Germans in 1939. He was a choirboy and a Boy Scout, a hothouse of Polish patriotism and religious values. He belonged to one of the nationalist splinter scouting groups that considered the mainstream organization tainted by communism.
His heroes are all Polish. In addition to Lech Kaczyński, he named the resistance fighters who took part in the doomed 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Germans, and Pope John Paul II. “I’m not certain that we would have been able to tear ourselves from the clutches of the reds without our Holy Father,” he said.
His favorite book of late?
“Ziele na kraterze,” an autobiographical story by Melchior Wańkowicz, a writer who evoked the nostalgia of Poland’s lost past and the sufferings of war. The book, whose title literally translates as “The greening crater” and is often assigned in schools, describes how Wańkowicz raised his two beloved daughters in pre-war Poland. The tale’s edge comes from the fact that one of the daughters was later killed in the 1944 Warsaw uprising. Duda said he recently reread it.
“I am a conservative politician, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.”
Although he first dabbled with the centrist Freedom Union party at the turn of the century, he left when it migrated to the left, and ended up finding an ideological home with PiS and the Kaczyńskis.
When PiS first won power in 2005, the legal expert helped the new government update the so-called lustration law, which forces communist-era agents to admit their past or face banishment from public life. He then became deputy justice minister in charge of legislation and international cooperation. After failing to win a parliamentary seat in 2007, he joined Lech Kaczyński’s presidential staff.
Following the 2010 plane crash that killed the president, Duda spent some time on Kraków’s city council before he was elected to the Polish Sejm in 2011 and the European Parliament in 2014.
He has been fiercely loyal to the twins, a quality that Jarosław Kaczyński values very highly, declining to join party rebellions against the brothers.
During the campaign, his boyish charm allayed fears that a vote for him meant a return to the divisive politics associated with Jarosław Kaczyński, while his espousal of positions close to those of the Church reassured PiS’s traditional electorate.
Agreeing with the official opinion of Polish bishops, Duda opposes use of in vitro fertilization in Poland that President Komorowski signed into law. He is also adament that Poland resist some of the social changes coming in from western Europe like gay marriage, drug legalization and euthanasia. “I am a conservative politician, which shouldn’t surprise anyone,” he said.
A second PiS dawn
Poland’s constitution grants the otherwise largely ceremonial presidency a role in formulating the country’s foreign relations alongside the government, as well as making him the formal commander-in-chief of the military.
For the moment, Duda’s room for maneuver is constrained by Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz, the Civic Platform politician who replaced Tusk when he moved to Brussels last year. Opinion polls show PiS outpacing Civic Platform ahead of October’s election.
Duda is seen as a big asset for the party in the campaign.
One of his aides pulled out a smartphone showing the new president diving into a crowd at a recent summer fair, to the despair of his security detail. After a ceremony at the Szczecin base, military families lined up in broiling heat to have their pictures taken with Duda. As his motorcade raced back to the airport, people stood in their driveways and waved at his limousine.
If PiS wins, the new prime minister is slated to be Beata Szydło, who was the brains behind Duda’s presidential campaign.
Tusk agonies
The rise of Duda and the return of PiS to power is bad news for the most important Pole in Brussels, Donald Tusk, who has watched his party implode from the other side of the Continent with barely disguised anxiety.
Tusk has already gotten into a dustup with Duda. He didn’t do much more than send a congratulatory tweet on his victory, a sparser recognition than Tusk has meted out to other EU election winners. Tusk was also a no-show at Duda’s August 7 inauguration after a protocol dispute: He was invited as a former prime minister, not as the current head of the European Council.
Tusk is in his first two-and-a-half-year term as Council president. Normally it would be a given that his home government would nominate him for a second term.
Asked if Tusk should serve again, Duda grinned and dodged the question.