WARSAW — Poland’s transition from the long-ruling Civic Platform to its conservative rivals from the Law and Justice party was always going to bring change. Few predicted how swift and deep that change would be.
In a matter of weeks after taking full control of the country, Poland’s new rulers are moving fast to assert control over public media, the top court, intelligence agencies and the diplomatic service. Their recent moves have angered the opposition, attracted criticism from civil rights groups and unsettled foreign partners.
“Now begins the process of reconquering the country, and it may be brutal,” said a senior adviser to President Andrzej Duda, who asked to remain anonymous.
Law and Justice (PiS) swept the table of Polish politics this year, first unexpectedly winning the presidency in May and then in October taking an outright majority in the parliament. The party now wields more clout over Poland than any government since the end of communist rule a quarter century ago.
Brutal change is something of a Polish political tradition. Because the country has never been able to create an apolitical civil service, and state-controlled corporations remain an important part of the economy and a source of lucrative jobs, every new government tends to enact wide-ranging purges, removing supporters of the ousted administration and replacing them with loyalists to the new regime. Over its eight years in power Civic Platform did the same. Now the PiS is moving quickly.
Controversial nominees
The first surprise from PiS was the makeup of the cabinet, which didn’t jibe with the centrist message that the party pushed during the election campaign.
Antoni Macierewicz, an activist who had battled communists decades back, became defense minister. He said one of his priorities would be to reopen an investigation into the 2010 crash of a government airliner that killed President Lech Kaczyński and other senior officials while trying to land in Smolensk, Russia. Polish and Russian investigations put the bulk of the blame on undertrained Polish air force pilots, but Macierewicz has long maintained that the airliner was blown up as it tried to land.
The web page of the government investigation that had concluded that the crash was an accident was taken offline last week.
“The page was shut down and will remain closed,” said Beata Szydło, Poland’s new prime minister.
Elżbieta Witek, a government spokeswoman, told Poland’s TVN television that it’d be a “good idea” for Donald Tusk, now president of the European Council and Polish prime minister at the time of the crash, to be placed before a special court over his alleged negligence in preventing the crash. She later clarified that she was speaking privately and not on behalf of the government.
“Now begins the process of reconquering the country, and it may be brutal” — Adviser to President Andrzej Duda
Duda raised more eyebrows by pardoning Mariusz Kamiński, the current head of Poland’s special services, who had been convicted of abuse of power and sentenced to three years in prison for the way he ran an anti-corruption agency during the party’s previous 2005-2007 stint in government.
A fight over courts
The government is putting its stamp on the Constitutional Tribunal, the country’s highest court, which can vet parliamentary laws and potentially derail Law and Justice’s legislative agenda.
Parliament adopted a bill to invalidate the election of five new judges to the 15-member court. Two of those judges were voted through by Civic Platform just before the party lost power, replacing two judges whose nine-year terms still had a month to go before expiring. That bending of principle by one party moved PiS to claim the moral high ground and reshape the court more to its liking. Most of the opposition walked out of parliament before the vote was taken.
“Over the past eight years only judges from one [political] camp were chosen,” Jarosław Kaczyński, Law and Justice’s founder and leader who’s now Poland’s most powerful politician, said in a television interview. “The goal is to make the Constitutional Tribunal more diverse.”
Parliament is set to choose new judges on Wednesday. The Constitutional Tribunal is to consider the legality of this parliamentary move a day later, possibly setting up a clash between the country’s legislative and judicial branches.
Gaining control of Hungary’s constitutional court was one of the steps taken by Viktor Orbán to cement his grip on the country. Kaczyński’s critics say he’s on the same path. “This is an anti-democratic march in the direction of a dictatorship,” warned Andrzej Zoll, a former chief judge of the Tribunal.
The new order is imposing itself on culture. PiS wants to reorganize the public media, which the party has long seen as too beholden to Civic Platform. Piotr Gliński, the new culture minister, berated a television interviewer for asking him questions instead of letting him give a statement, telling her, “This program is propaganda.”
Gliński was defending his attack on a play, “Death and the Maiden,” by Nobel prize winner Elfride Jelinek, which he said was “pornography” because actors fondle each other on stage. He demanded the play’s cancellation, as the theater receives part of its financing from the state.
PiS has built an alliance with the powerful Roman Catholic Church, and has vowed to resist social liberalism allegedly imported from Western Europe.
“Single-sex marriage, abortion, gender ideology — these are red lines for us,” the presidential adviser told POLITICO.
During its time in power, the center-right Civic Platform tried not to offend social liberals, but did very little to pass legislation that helped them.
A new tone from Warsaw
Poland’s foreign and defense policies are taking on a new look.
Macierewicz called into question two large defense contracts, a €5 billion deal to buy Patriot missile defense systems from Raytheon of the U.S., and a €3 billion deal for 50 multipurpose Airbus Caracal helicopters. He has fired the heads of military intelligence agencies.
Witold Waszczykowski, the foreign minister, wants to scrap the 1997 NATO-Russia accords, under which the alliance agreed, for the time being, not to build permanent bases in countries that had once been part of the Soviet bloc. The previous government pushed for permanent NATO bases on Polish soil, but Waszczykowski is being more pointed and public in his views.
There’s a new willingness to challenge European diplomatic niceties.
Konrad Szymański, the Europe minister, astonished Poland’s EU partners when, in a column published hours after the December 13 Paris terror attacks, he declared that Poland would not follow through on earlier pledges to accept about 7,500 asylum seekers, citing the security risk.
Warsaw has become stroppier with Berlin, the country’s closest EU ally.
A senior PiS MP, Piotr Naimski, who helped formulate his party’s energy policies, called for Poland to block a deal at the COP21 Paris climate summit — standing up for Polish coal even more aggressively than the previous Civic Platform government. Jan Szyszko, the environment minister, later backtracked on Naimski’s comments, saying Poland would not torpedo a global climate agreement.
However, Warsaw has made clear it wants to renegotiate the EU’s 2030 emissions reduction and renewables goals, fearing they may hurt Poland’s economy.
Warsaw has become stroppier with Berlin, the country’s closest EU ally. When Martin Schulz, the German president of the European Parliament, criticized Poland for not being more generous towards refugees, pointing out that Poland has taken billions in EU structural funds and was also asking for help in deterring the threat from Russia, he was quickly denounced by Mariusz Błaszczak, the interior minister.
Schulz was “arrogant,” said Błaszczak, reminding the German of the war and that tens of thousands of people in Warsaw had been murdered by “agents of the German state.”
All those moves have Law and Justice’s opponents warning that the party is bending democratic norms to accumulate power. About 100 demonstrators turned up in front on Parliament last week, chanting, “Hands off the Tribunal.”
The party insists it is doing nothing more than cleaning up the mess it found after Civic Platform.
“The fears that Poland is going in the direction of Hungary are hugely overstated,” said the presidential adviser. “Orbán has the state in his hands. Here, we are at a completely different stage.”