Poland’s six-month-long assault on the institutional power of right-wing conservatives affiliated with the Law and Justice (PiS) party is stepping up a gear as PM Donald Tusk prepares legal task forces to go after more of his political opponents on corruption charges.
The arrest of a Polish priest, Father Michał Olszewski, this week on the grounds of allegedly pocketing funds from a PiS-adjacent slush fund has added fuel to the fire. The cleric’s lawyer says that the charges are spurious and entirely politically motivated.
In a speech defending Father Olszewski, PiS’ Jarosław Kaczyński warned that the Tusk administration is in the process of attempting to “liquidate the Polish state” and hand over control of Poland to a cabal of European—particularly German-led—liberals.
A decision to scrap plans for a €46 billion mega airport on the outskirts of Warsaw earlier this year is often cited by PiS as evidence Poland is coming under Berlin’s sphere of influence. The airport—a flagship programme of PiS—would have been one of the world’s largest, serving up to 100 million passengers a year.
The European Union remains silent, again, as Tusk and his progressive coalition government lead an unrelenting purge on bastions of PiS power and patronage in Poland, even going so far as to jail opposition MPs. They’ve sent police to crack down on the TVP state media network, as well as removed right-wing members of the judiciary from the bench. The new government is benefiting from the €137 billion cash injection of previously frozen EU funds after merely promising to clear up alleged rule-of-law issues.
Authorities have also raided the offices of Poland’s judge-appointing body, KRS, ostensibly looking for documents suggesting political control of the courts, a major bone of contention between the European Commission and the former conservative administration.
So great has been the professional and legal harassment against judges in Poland that one judge even attempted to claim asylum in the neighboring autocracy of Belarus for fear of persecution.
This cycle of repression looks only to worsen in the coming months as Poland prepares for presidential elections in May of next year, with Tusk adamant about preventing a political comeback for the under-fire PiS party. With his Civic Coalition Party, Tusk aims to consolidate power around the progressive mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski—a known advocate of LGBT rights.
Poland’s conservative President Andrzej Duda has been a thorn in Tusk’s side amid the ongoing purge by frustrating the new liberal-dominated Parliament (Sejm) to legislate for abortion with his presidential veto.
Given this, the loss of the presidency could be highly damaging to conservatives in Poland, as the Tusk government plans to accelerate plans to liberalize abortion, legalize gay marriage, and even impose hate speech laws on the country (amid a sharp uptick in mass migration).
The position of the Polish president is an office confirmed in a two-round system of voting.
