While France and Germany have been left with weak governments, Poland is newly emerging as a European leader. In retrospect, the Central European country has been right in many ways, especially with its warnings about Putin’s aggression.
Modern Poland: Passers-by and cyclists in Warsaw use a new bridge over the Vistula.
Volha Shukaila
Just a few years ago, the atmosphere between Brussels and the national-conservative government in Warsaw was consistently tense. On top of proceedings accusing the Polish government of infringing EU rule of law standards and a daily million-euro penalty payment, outright expulsion from the EU was being discussed at least hypothetically. These issues largely centered around the Polish state’s erosions of judicial independence.
Does anyone else remember that? Everything has changed since the start of the war in Ukraine. The right-wing populist Law and Justice party government is also gone.
No sooner had Russia attacked Ukraine than Poland wanted to hand over MiG-29 fighter jets to its eastern neighbor. The government in Warsaw was initially persuaded to wait by the U.S., but a year later the first MiGs were in Ukraine after all. Warsaw leapt ahead, just as Polish generals fought in America’s Revolutionary War in 1776, and just as thousands of Poles fell on the side of the Allies against Mussolini and Hitler in Italy during World War II.
Poland has always done it right, has always its heart in the right place. This impression has become even stronger since France’s descent into political weakness as a result of the misguided dissolution of its parliament in the summer. Germany, meanwhile, has just lost its governing coalition. Compared to these two EU mainstays, Poland is in a stable, decisive position as this year comes to an end. And hardly anyone here is afraid of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, either – least of all Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister.
Abortion only a side issue
Tusk, the former EU Council president, may have ideological problems with the partners in his centrist government coalition. However, in view of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threatening gestures against the West, many in Poland see contentious issues such as LGBTQ+ weddings and or a policy allowing abortion within a certain number of weeks as marginal problems at the moment. Tusk’s camp is also expected to win next spring’s presidential elections with the left-liberal Rafal Trzaskowski, who was chosen as the candidate on Saturday. If he does win, the government would then no longer be blocked by an incumbent president from the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party.
Poland warned of the Russian president’s imperialist voraciousness early on. When Putin sent his army to invade Georgia in 2008, Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski flew to Tbilisi for a visit in solidarity. Warsaw has consistently supported Ukraine’s independence from Moscow. During the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Maidan Revolution in 2013 and 2014, Polish flags flew alongside Ukrainian and EU flags. Above all, however, Warsaw vehemently opposed the German-Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipeline projects. Polish policymakers argued that these were not purely economic projects, as Berlin claimed, but rather constituted Russia’s preparations for a possible war. Their position was ridiculed by many in Western Europe.
But Poland was proven right at the end of February 2022. It is also clear today that Western Europe, and Germany in particular, effectively pre-financed the war in Ukraine with their hunger for cheap natural gas.
The Poles, on the other hand, were quick to diversify their energy supply despite a heavy dependence on Russian sources inherited from the socialist era. They even built a gas pipeline to Norway, although this natural gas was of course more expensive than Russian gas. However, unlike Berlin, Warsaw did not want to gain any economic advantages at Ukraine’s expense. Poland imported liquefied natural gas from Qatar early on, as well as from the United States. Warsaw’s policy has always been pragmatically transatlantic. Although the Central European country joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004, it has always relied on bilateral mutual guarantees from the U.S. in security matters.
This is also why Poland has just received a new, permanent American army base in Redzikowo, 120 kilometers west of Gdansk. This was originally planned during the George W. Bush era as an interceptor station for missiles launched by Iran. Now, in the third year of Russia’s war of aggression against its neighbor Ukraine, the American base is of even greater value to Poland.
A base for American soldiers was opened in Redzikowo, in northern Poland, on Nov. 13 of this year.
Adam Warzawa / EPA
The stationing of American soldiers represents a true U.S. security guarantee, the Poles believe – and thus a much more effective mechanism than EU membership or Article 5, NATO’s collective defense clause. And no other EU country spends as much on defense as Poland, which spends 4% of its gross domestic product.
Accordingly, people in Poland have fewer reservations about Trump than their counterparts elsewhere in the EU, because after all, it was Trump who deployed the first American troops to Poland, albeit only in the form of rotating personnel.
In retrospect, Poland was also right when it came to migration policy. When Tusk was serving as EU Council president in 2015, he already regarded quota regulations for the distribution of refugees within the EU to be the wrong path. Today, Warsaw feels vindicated by the EU’s more restrictive asylum policy.
Asylum suspended
The prevailing opinion in Western Europe is that Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party drove Poland ever closer to the abyss over the last eight years. It is often forgotten that the Law and Justice government pursued policies that were critical of Russia, imposed stricter controls on migration and raised defense spending – all of which were supported and continued by Tusk after his election victory in 2023.
Nevertheless, Tusk caused a stir across the EU in mid-October when he announced that he would suspend the right to asylum in Poland for an indefinite period. «Tusk was misunderstood at the time. It is only about asylum applications from illegal migrants at the Belarusian border,» Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said recently – thus, along 418 kilometers of the country’s almost 3,000 kilometer-long border.
Speaking on the edges of a meeting of the foreign ministers of the five largest EU member states and the United Kingdom in Warsaw last week, Sikorski said Warsaw wanted to prevent itself from becoming the target of further hybrid warfare by Putin. Poland is now also trying to forge a «coalition of the willing» to provide further military and civilian aid to Ukraine. «We will rise to the occasion,» Sikorski said.
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Publish date : 2024-11-26 04:17:00
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