Kaczynski’s hardliners are remaking the state along right-wing nationalist lines
"We are turning Warsaw into Budapest", announced the head of "Law and Justice" (PiS), Jaroslaw Kaczynski, after the lost parliamentary election in 2011 already announced. After winning the parliamentary election on 25. October and the swearing-in of the new government under Prime Minister Beata Szydlo on 16. November, he can make his dream of a national-conservative reshaping of Poland along the lines of Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban come true.
It is not Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, the former election chief of the successful PiS presidential candidate Andrzej Duda, who is the crucial figure. Significantly, Szydlo took a vacation in early November, when important talks on forming a government were underway,
It is others who are giving the new government its hardline credentials. They are united by a grudge against the previous, conservative-liberal ruling party "Burger platform" (PO), which ruled for eight years and replaced the PiS government from 2005 to 2007.
There is Witold Waszczykowski, the minister of agriculture, who wants to send the Syrian refugees back, with weapons against the IS: "If thousands of young Syrian men come to Europe, let them form an army. We once also formed legions and fought for our freedom", he said. An allusion to the war actions of Polish volunteers in the time when the country was divided between its neighbors. Asylum seekers to be comprehensively screened before being admitted to Poland.
Waszczykowski is considered a security expert with NATO experience, and was also responsible in Poland’s Foreign Ministry from 2005 to 2008 for the ies surrounding the then planned missile shield. He was dismissed for revealing to Newsweek the circumstances of the negotiations with the USA. Waszczykowski is counting on a stronger partnership with the U.S. and is calling for NATO bases on the Vistula to deter a Russian attack. Partnership exists only with countries that perceive this Polish security need. This is not the case with Germany.
The good relationship between the "Burger platform" (PO), who had governed since 2007, and the CDU, both of which belong to the EU party alliance "European People’s Party" was suspected by the PiS for a long time. That is why Waszczykowski first makes himself known with pithy words. Poland is for Germany only a "Transit zone for goods traffic to Russia", says the 58-year-old.
It is not yet clear whether this is only temporary rattling of the saber or whether a longer bilateral ice age is on the agenda.
Drawing up lists of agents became the passion of the new defense minister, Macierewicz
Antoni Macierewicz, Poland’s new defense minister, is considered far more unpredictable. With the announcement of his nomination, the prospective Polish government under Beata Szydlo has its first scandal even before being sworn in. "Deception of the electorate", the media comment on the decision. For during the election campaign, people were still jerking away from the 67-year-old: At the beginning of October, a video had surfaced in which Macierewicz, in front of conservative Poles in Chicago, described former Prime Minister Donald Tusk as a "Agents of the Stasi" described. This was typical of the deputy party leader, who likes to expose political opponents as agents of hostile powers.
Macierewicz was already being talked about as defense minister. In order not to alienate voters, Szydlo ared that the liberal conservative Jaroslaw Gowin will head the Ministry of Defense. A pledge to which the party, which can now alone form the government, considers itself no longer bound.
Macierewicz announced an immediate "Clean up" The Russian government has announced that it will also insist on the establishment of NATO bases in Poland, and that development contracts with foreign companies will create jobs in Poland. The outgoing ruling party Burgerplattform (PO) had also decided on a comprehensive rearmament in view of the Ukraine crisis (Patriots for the Skies over Poland), which the PiS wants to expand even further.
And also "Smolensk" is at the top of the agenda for the historian. For him, the crash of the Topolev in April 2010 with then-president Lech Kaczynski on board was an attack, a "Declaration of war" to Poland. Especially here there is potential for conflict with the Russian neighbor.
Macierewicz was not always so radical; he worked as a publicist in the Polish trade union Solidarnosc, where he collaborated with liberals such as the current editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Adam Michnik. In the nineties, however, he already belonged to the right and in 1992, as Minister of the Interior, published a list of actual and alleged agents of the communist service "SB", Jan Olszewski’s government was deprived of confidence in the parliament.
Drawing up lists of agents became his passion. Also under the first government of "Law and Justice" (PiS), Macierewicz, as deputy defense minister, dealt with the dissolution of the WSI military intelligence service, which, according to party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, was the center of post-communist networks.
Cleaning up the mess
He is considered one of the closest confidants of the distrustful party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who pulls the strings in the party and now also in the government. That is why Mariusz Kaminski is to be reinstated as Minister for Intelligence Coordination. From 2006 to 2009, Kaminski was the head of the "Anti-corruption bureau", a kind of special police for uncovering post-communist cronies. He was eventually dismissed and sentenced to three years in prison for an alleged document falsification intended to induce a political opponent to commit an act of corruption.
Before the ruling became effective, President Andrzej Duda ied it in a coup d’etat on Tuesday evening, which some lawyers consider illegal. The political apparatus under Jaroslaw Kaczynski will hardly be stopped in transforming the judiciary and the executive in his favor.
According to the liberal news channel TVN24, some leaders and high-ranking officials of the services have already been sorted out their letters of resignation, though Kaminski has a "Reform, not revolution" announced. The exact nature of this reform he will announce later, but every affair in the PO’s reign is to be accounted for by means of the reformed services.
In this task will also play a role Zbigniew Ziobro as Minister of Justice. He had already held the post from 2005 to 2007. He is accused of illegal interception and other forms of spying in this function during this period. In 2011, he and other Kaczynski deputies were removed from the party for advocating more democracy within the party and founded the right-wing minor party "Poland in solidarity".
In the meantime, he has re-established himself with the party leader and is back on the old hardline track. According to this, judges and public prosecutors are to be punished, where it "credible evidence of corruption" was given – with a prison sentence of at least three years. With little prospect of a pardon from President Andrzej Duda. In addition, Ziobro is once again claiming the post of Prosecutor General for himself as Minister of Justice, a dual function in which he was already feared during the first PiS government phase.
"There will be no revenge", but justice will be done, as party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has repeatedly announced. Tomasz Lis, the outgoing host of a political talk show on state television TVP and the journalist most antagonized by PiS politicians, fears that Poland will soon see something like a "just revenge" is practiced.