Why Warsaw loves to hate Brussels

WARSAW — The Polish government is turning up the volume on Brussels-bashing. Answering “why now?” reveals little about what’s happening in the EU — and a lot about what’s happening inside the ruling Law and Justice Party.

The salvo fired on Sunday by Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski was the latest in a series. In an interview with POLITICO, he said the Commission’s criticism of Poland’s record on rule of law is just “a personal crusade by (Vice President Frans) Timmermans.” He went on to blast an “unelected” Commission that “is monitoring and ordering and ruling the member states.”

This personal attack was unprecedented, but it came only days after an eye-catching speech in the Polish parliament by Prime Minister Beata Szydło. Dredging up the fight over the relocation of refugees across the EU from 2015, she called out “the Brussels political elites … blinded by political correctness” and promised Poland won’t be “blackmailed” by the EU. To a standing ovation from the Law and Justice party caucus, she added, “We will not participate in the madness of the Brussels elites. We want to help people and not the political elites.”

“Timmermans has a personal, emotional problem. Poland has no problem with Timmermans” — Ryszard Czarnecki, vice-president of the European Parliament

By Monday, the Brussels elites seemed to have heard enough. In an unusual intervention from the Commission press podium, chief spokesman Margaritis Schinas responded directly to the attack on Timmermans, saying the jab at “unelected” bureaucrats showed the Polish minister “does not understand the Commission’s role, structure and competence.”

From Warsaw’s point of view, there seems to be little downside to continuing to pick this fight. At least the Law and Justice party appears to think so. The spitballs have kept coming even after Warsaw’s debacle at the EU summit in March, when it lost a fight over the reelection of Donald Tusk to a second term atop the European Council. No one, not even illiberal Hungary, backed Poland’s opposition to native son and PiS rival Tusk. The episode seemed to only revive Tusk’s political fortunes and give his until then demoralized Civic Platform a boost in the polls. “Today there is a clear crisis of principles in Europe,” Szydło said after the Tusk outcome in Brussels, which Waszczykowski attributed to “Berlin’s diktat.”

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So what’s going on?

The rhetoric has certainly raised the hackles of Polish liberals. The daily Gazeta Wyborcza compared Szydło to France’s Marine Le Pen and warned of a “Polexit.” Ryszard Petru, who leads the liberal opposition Modern party, called it “dangerous rhetoric” that “introduces fear” and puts in jeopardy the billions of euros in EU’s generous aid (€105 billion to be exact, in 2014-2020).

Top PiS officials deny there’s been any change in their approach to Europe. “Poland respects all the obligations arising from the membership in the Union and also wants to use all the privileges which derive from it,” Ryszard Czarnecki, vice president of European Parliament and a confidant of PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński, wrote me in an email. But he added, pointedly: “Personally, I believe, having already heard four of Timmermans’ statements about Poland in [the parliament] … that he has a personal, emotional problem. Poland has no problem with Timmermans. He does not listen to the arguments and does not accept the facts he was told about.”

As Czarnecki suggests, PiS is aware of the EU money on the line and the generally deep support among Poles for the EU, currently near record numbers — at 78 percent according to a March poll by IBRiS or 88 percent in an April CBOS poll, one percentage point below the recorded high in 2014.

But PiS also, a bit like Donald Trump, has core support from anywhere between a third or more of the electorate that responds well to rhetoric about the threat from foreign (i.e. “Brussels”) elites who want to impose their values — not to mention mostly Muslim and darker-skinned refugees — on them. A poll CBOS published on Wednesday by the Onet portal (POLITICO’s partner in Poland) showed that 70 percent of the population is against accepting refugees from Muslim countries.

The party’s majority in parliament is at only four seats and needs to make sure it can hold together its caucus, which includes dissidents from Civic Platform along with several strongly right-wing factions of about a third of PiS deputies. Catering to their expectations of policies that are very conservative and nationalistic is a way for Kaczyński to keep control of the Sejm (lower house of parliament). He’s also aware that the party’s ratings, at a time of economic health, are slowly falling from 38 percent on election day in October 2015 to around 30 percent in recent polls.

By a pragmatic reading of all this, PiS will keep up the harsh rhetoric in public — and, with a view to keeping the EU money coming and in light of the strong popular support for Europe (and the recent trend away from populist parties on the Continent), be open to accommodation and dialogue with Brussels in private. Some EU diplomats say they’re picking up signs of that.

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There’s another view that would counsel Brussels to brace for a continued chill from the east. “This is something more than just sharpening of rhetoric. It appears to be a new domestic doctrine,” Paweł Kowal, a former MEP and a deputy foreign minister in the previous PiS government in 2006-2007, told me. “They believe that such a narrative helps them well and strengthens the expected attitude of the electorate.”

Kowal split from PiS in 2011 while serving as an MEP. He is the head of National Council of the Polska Razem Party (Poland Together) which is presided over by Jarosław Gowin, a vice premier in the Szydło government. Kowal is a supportive critic of PiS.

“This is something more than just sharpening of rhetoric. It appears to be a new domestic doctrine” — Paweł Kowal, former Law and Justice lawmaker

For Kowal, this approach hurts Polish interests. Only recently, European Affairs Minister Konrad Szymański appealed directly to Brussels to block the Russia-backed Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline across the Baltic, assuming that the EU would naturally defend a fellow member. “If we question the Commission’s right to speak about Polish matters, it will harm us in such strategic issues like for example competition or energy,” Kowal said. “Potential losses can be very big … This is not an international strategy. It amounts to a transfer of domestic political requirements to the field of foreign policy,” he said.

“While it is just rhetoric so far, singing this tune for long will transform it into reality,” Kowal added.

One of those realities is that you could see Polish Euroskepticism emerge and grow with time. The other is that Poland’s EU partners will get fed up. As POLITICO first reported earlier this week, Germany wants the EU to cut aid for countries (ahem, Poland) that are deemed to be in breach of the bloc’s standards on protecting the rule of law.

Michał Broniatowski, a contributing editor, edits POLITICO‘s Polish-language vertical on onet.pl.