The political temperature in Poland is poisoned this election year. A controversial commission of inquiry into possible Russian influence on Polish rulers in the years before the invasion of Ukraine, pushed by the ruling party, the ultra-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), has inflamed the atmosphere with just months to go in the elections, scheduled for this autumn.
The initiative, ratified on Monday by the country’s president, Andrzej Duda, was met with indignation by the opposition, and has aroused immediate concern in Washington and Brussels, as directly indicated by the main opposition leader, Donald Tusk, who was Prime Minister between 2007 and 2014.
In response, the opposition parties joined yesterday in the demonstration called by Tusk in Warsaw “against the high cost of life, deception and lies, and in favor of democracy, free elections and the EU” . The day chosen is the anniversary of the first partially free elections on June 4, 1989, which gave victory to Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement.
Tusk told protesters that the opposition’s mission now is “of comparable importance” to that of the 1980s against communism. According to the City Council, whose mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, is a member of Plataforma CÃvica (Tusk’s party), there were half a million people, while the public television, TVP, controlled by the Government, claimed that there were a hundred one thousand. Analysis of aerial images by the major news portal Onet indicated that there were at least 300,000 protesters.
Walesa, 79 years old, absent from the political scene for a long time, was at the march. He assured that he had waited “patiently” for the day when the nationalist party and its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, would have to go. “Mr Kaczynski, we have come for you; this day has come,” he said.
Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council, will be the candidate of the Civic Coalition (KO), which includes his centrist party, Plataforma CÃvica (PO), and three small pro-European formations.
The appointment with the ballot boxes does not yet have a date – it will be in October or perhaps November – but the opinion of the investigative commission, whose nine members will be appointed by a Parliament with a majority of the ruling party, will be presented on the 17 of September; that is to say, in the middle of the election campaign. The date is symbolic: on the same day in 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland as part of the pact with its then ally, Nazi Germany, to divide up the country.
The current polls give victory to the PiS, with 35%, and place the KO in second place, with 28%. They are followed by three coalitions: Tercera Via (13%), Confederación Libertat i Independencia and the leftist Lewica, both with 10%. The ruling party remains the favorite, but may not get a sufficient majority. In the 2019 elections, he won 43.6% of the vote, his second consecutive victory.
The opposition claims that the commission will be a battering ram of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s government – both he and Duda are from the government party – to harm their rivals. The non-affiliated press has already dubbed it Lex Tusk, to reflect who it would be aimed at. The bill, approved by Parliament and rejected by the Senate – where PiS does not have a majority – depended on the presidential rubric to continue.
Attention came early. Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the State Department, said on Tuesday that the United States shares the concern that this commission “could be used to block the candidacy of opposition politicians without due process.” The European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, also spoke. “We are concerned about the situation in Poland with the creation by law of a commission that will be able to deprive citizens of their right to be elected to public office; it will be possible without judicial review”, he warned.
Initially, the commission’s powers included disqualification for public positions involving access to state funds for ten years, without the possibility of appeal. Polish lawyers warned of the unconstitutionality of a non-judicial body with such capacity for punishment. Pressure from Washington led President Duda to announce on Friday that he would propose amendments to Parliament. He had previously promised to send it to the Constitutional Court for its reading and evaluation.
But, despite Duda’s partial rectification, the opposition does not trust it: even if the risk of disqualification disappears, the mere pointing out by the investigators would be electorally harmful.
According to its promoters, the commission’s official objective is to clarify possible Kremlin interference in Polish politics between 2007 and 2022, and the energy sector is one of the areas that must be scrutinized. Poland has gradually reduced its dependence on Russian energy, even before Russia invades Ukraine in February 2022.
In fact, construction of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Świnoujście, which allows gas to be imported from other countries, began when Tusk was in power. But also during his mandate Poland signed an agreement in 2010 with the Russian gas company Gazprom, which is cited in the official justification for the commission.
PiS has been calling Donald Tusk pro-Russian for some time. Its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, accused the Tusk Government in 2022 of “covering up” the 2010 Smolensk air disaster – in which his brother and then president, Lech Kaczynski, and 95 political figures died – to facilitate a “macabre reconciliation with Russia”.
The excessive tone of the upcoming campaign has had a hard episode. On 31 May, to discredit Tusk’s call for the demonstration, PiS published a video with images of Auschwitz and linked them to the tweet of a journalist critical of the Government, who had predicted that Duda and Kaczynski would soon have his komora This Polish word means dark cell, but it is also associated with gas chambers to kill Jews. The alluded assured that he never meant to say anything like that. In a statement, the Auschwitz memorial described the use of these images as “a symptom of the oral and intellectual corruption of the political scene”.
