You’re a veteran politician here in Brussels. Has EU has changed a lot since you first became an MEP in 2009?
Well, I’m not sure. I think it has changed, but maybe it wasn’t very different from what we see now. Except that I didn’t see through the screen, so to speak. I still had some illusions about the EU. But one of the changes is, I think, the growth of power of the European Parliament. Initially, we thought that the European Parliament was a sort of harmless institution with no real political weight. Margaret Thatcher once called it the “Mouse Parliament.” It wasn’t quite that, but it was the weakest of all the institutions. Now, that’s not true anymore.
Is strengthening the Parliament inherently bad? It is the only directly elected EU body, after all.
It is inherently bad, yes. It’s bad because it has very little democratic legitimacy. It’s true that MEPs are elected, unlike the commissioners or the members of the European Court of Justice, but the falsehood is that it assumes there is a European demos [people], that they represent a European demos. That’s not the case.
If you have French MEPs they represent the French electorate, but some of them also pretend to represent the entire European Union. So, they have a say about Hungary, or Poland, or Slovakia and say, ‘Hey, we don’t like what is going on there.’ They may not like what is going on in Hungary or Poland, but it’s none of their business. Whereas we in Poland or Hungary don’t have the slightest possibility of influencing those guys who are going berserk from Germany, France, the Netherlands, and who managed to topple the Polish PiS [Law and Justice party] government and are making the Hungarian government’s life as hard as possible.
The whole notion of parliamentarism is that a deputy must be accountable to the voters. If the voters do not like the deputy, they will not reelect him. So, lack of accountability is the basic flaw that discredits this institution. The European Parliament shouldn’t exist at all. It’s aimed at some kind of future hypothetical reality when there is a European demos. Well, there won’t be any European demos, you can take my word for it.
Do you also feel similarly about the other EU institutions?
The Parliament should definitely not exist. But the Commission should also have its prerogatives severely restricted because it does not have any democratic legitimacy. And they must not place themselves above the national governments, which they do quite frequently, especially towards the Eastern and Central European governments.
It seems that you’re suggesting going back to a pre-Maastricht era would be ideal, before the formation of the European Union.
The Maastricht Treaty is the root of all evil. It was a grave mistake. A political union cannot exist in Europe unless it is some kind of despotic system. One obvious reason is that the member states are not equal. If you have Germany on the one hand and Cyprus on the other, or France on the one hand and Slovenia on the other, there is no way the two sides can be made equal.
There are big countries, politically, economically, and historically powerful countries, and there are small countries. So when the president of France or the chancellor of Germany says something, it is very important for all of us. When the prime minister of Cyprus says something, nobody cares. And there is no way you can build a political structure in which there will be equality. There is no treaty, no article of law that can deprive Germany or France of its power, because their power does not lie in the treaties. Their power derives from their size, economy, and history.
That’s why it was so important for smaller member states to have the right of veto in the European Council—and why some now propose to abolish the veto.
Absolutely. Veto was the only weapon they had. But this instrument was always a very difficult one to use. The pressure from the big member states was often overwhelming. It was very difficult for a small country to veto because they were immediately bullied and blackmailed. But at least in theory, it was there as a last resort. Now the veto still exists, although it’s severely restricted. Without the right to veto, we will be at the mercy of the big guys: the most powerful, usually Western European countries and the European institutions.
The process of integration, or political centralization of the EU results in the growth of power of both European supranational institutions and the most powerful member states. The losers are the smaller member states, like Poland, Slovenia, Czech Republic, and so on.
With the growth of integration, we lose our sovereignty, we lose our power. Not so in the case of France and Germany, because the only power that the European institutions have is granted to them by the big guys. So, with increasing centralization, the big guys become stronger and the small fries become weaker.
There’s also the point that my colleague, MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski often makes that the EU is not a federalist system. If you take a federalist system like America, the states are equal. All of them have two representatives in the Senate. If you changed the United States according to the European model, you would have California, Texas, and New York ruling over all the other states. This is something unthinkable in the federal system. Here the system is not federal, it is a centralized and increasingly despotic system. I see the Western world in its entirety, and the EU in particular, in a slow trend toward a new kind of despotism.
There is a push to completely scrap the veto and to create transnational electoral lists for an artificial European demos. But they would still need unanimous support to make such a treaty change. How do they plan to achieve that?
Well, they don’t care about the treaties, really. I mean, for example, there’s the Spitzenkandidat [system for choosing the European Commission president]. That’s something that doesn’t exist in the treaty, but they are still trying to make it a part of political practice. And if that case goes to the European Court of Justice, the Court will certainly okay it. The European Court of Justice is their ally because it pursues the same policy, to have more and more power. The whole idea of the primacy of European law is not in the treaties—it’s the product of the Court. The ECJ declared that EU law has priority over national law without asking us, the national parliaments.
Is treaty change and scrapping the veto truly necessary to prepare for EU enlargement? The Commission says that they need to happen simultaneously for the EU to remain functional.
No, it’s not. If you look at the history of enlargement, you don’t see any reason for making this argument that the more members there are, the more power should be given to the big guys. On the contrary! The more members there are, the more the European Union should be cooperative. Inclusive. I hate this word, but I think it applies here.
Let me make a larger point, more general. European integration is essentially the West European idea. It started with France and Germany. Recently, I read a lecture by Winston Churchill and he clearly said that it was a Franco-German project.
So, when in 2004 Eastern Europe joined the EU, we joined them as junior partners. And even we presented ourselves as junior partners, the sort of poor cousins. ‘We are poorly educated, and we want to learn how democracy works, so we hope you will teach us.’ It was the perfect opportunity for the European institutions to increase their power. They couldn’t increase their power vis-à-vis Western Europe. But here you see all these barbarians coming from the eastern part of Europe, and then you can show how powerful you are. And then you have all those Barrosos and Junckers and Timmermans, who are teaching us a lesson. And then you have this conditionality mechanism [which allows the Commission to suspend payment of funds to member states it accuses of violating the EU’s rule of law], also approved by the European Court of Justice.
So it was a very good opportunity for the European institutions to acquire more power and to show off their strength. Some say, and I tend to agree with them, that this is a new form of colonization. Not in the traditional sense of the word, of course. But this colonizing impulse is still there in Western Europe. It’s an internal colonization, so to speak.
When people look at Poland now, they see two completely different pictures. One version is that liberal prime minister Donald Tusk is restoring the rule of law and democracy, and the other version is that he is carrying out blatant constitutional violations. What is really happening?
We live in a lie. The fact that the EU mainstream seized almost the entire political spectrum, not only politically, but also through the media, universities and so on, results in the fact that we live in a bubble of lies. One message spreads and no other information is available. Now, if everybody from The New York Times to the Frankfurter Allgemeine, BBC, and Ursula von der Leyen all say that Tusk is the good guy because he’s restoring democracy, the average consumer of information would think that then it’s probably true, you cannot have the situation where they all lie. Well, they all do. I will say that they all lie.
Poland has come to resemble a banana republic. Tusk doesn’t care about the law or about the constitution at all. He rules through parliamentary resolutions and ignores statutory law. There are laws that regulate the media, the prosecutor’s office, the Supreme Court, and so on. And he just doesn’t care about it at all. Since he has a majority, any resolution would be in his favor. So why bother about statutory law? Why bother with the Constitution? Nothing. I mean, nothing.
So what’s the aim? The aim is to eliminate from public space every person and every project that has some links to the Law and Justice (PiS) party. Ultimately, I think, Tusk wants to surround it with a cordon sanitaire completely. To take control of everything.
There are two methods he uses. The first is what I said, making decisions on the basis of resolutions. And the second method is, whenever this is impossible, he just ignores those institutions like the Constitutional Tribunal or even the president. The president issues a pardon to PiS MPs? So what, they will go to jail. That’s why I said, it’s a banana republic. Never ever before have such things happened in Poland.
How can the Polish people allow this? The voters for Tusk’s Civic Coalition are not the majority.
They are not the majority, but the government is still in the honeymoon phase, so to speak. And there will be a public backlash, but for the time being some approve of it and some just don’t care.
The EU Commission suddenly unblocking over €100 billion in frozen EU funds is also helping Tusk win over the people, right?
Well, the Commission has been helping Tusk’s opposition for a long time, of course, and they admitted that all this blocking the money was not because the PiS did something illegal or unlawful, but because we were what we were. And now that the PiS government has been toppled, no more problems. This would also happen in Hungary, but the conservative government there is still in control and not likely to lose any time soon.
The whole rule-of-law debate is always portrayed as a legal issue that’s about judicial independence, but it’s obvious that it’s truly about values. About national identity through the migration debate and about traditional family values through the LGBT issues. The EU doesn’t make a distinction between laws and values?
No, it doesn’t, because their agenda is leftist. Even the European People’s Party (EPP) capitulated. Recently they had second thoughts and made some noises about how bad the Green Deal was, but they supported it all along. The point is that the EU agenda is a leftist agenda. And as all leftist agendas ever since the Enlightenment, it is directed against the nation-state, against national sovereignty, and against the family. Against institutions that carry traditions from one generation to another.
The Left has always been against heritage, collective experience, continuity. They always strive for a revolution. And if you think about it, what’s happening now is a revolution. If you abolish the distinction between men and women and replace it with 50 genders, that is a revolution. Some of us may laugh at it, saying ‘It’s a farce, it’s not serious.’ It’s deadly serious and it has widespread ramifications.
