Poland is heading to national elections that will decide the next government in October, and the subject of foreign interference in domestic politics is becoming a key issue, with the governing national conservatives identifying themselves as the party that will push back against globalist diktats.
A blunt election advert has made waves in Poland and abroad — and particularly in Germany — as it portrays the leader of the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PIS) party Jaroslaw Kaczynski receiving a telephone call from Germany instructing him to change government policy. He firmly denies the request, while also making clear it is something his political opponent — Poland’s former Prime Minister, Eurocrat, and now candidate-again Donald Tusk — would agree to.
A defining feature of Poland’s recent membership of the European Union has been increasing demands by the German-dominated bloc that Warsaw change its government programme, give up on post-Communist reforms, and accept mass migration.
These have been resisted by Poland reasonably well until now, a record PIS is playing to in the coming October election, while also playing up the involvement of Germany in particular in the attempts to force Poland to conform more to Brussels’ ideals. The issue of war reparations — a demand that Germany repay Poland for the enormous damage inflicted on it by the Nazis in the Second World War — has also become a convenient and effective shorthand to assert that Poles owe no fealty to Berlin.
Hammering home these sentiments, before Kaczynski picks up the phone a section from Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle briefly plays, before the caller, in a translation offered by Germany’s Deutsche Welle says: “Guten Tag, I am calling from the German embassy and I would like to speak to the Chancellor about… the retirement age in Poland.”
The German caller goes on to say Poland should not be permitted to make changes, and that things should remain as they were under the former government of slavishly Europhile Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Tusk, after he was rejected at the ballot box in his own country, went on to form a second career in the European Union itself as President of the European Council, becoming a major figure in Brexit talks and a foe to British leave voters.
Tusk is now returning to the fray in Poland, and is attempting to lead a catch-all coalition to bring down the PIS government. in October’s national election
Responding to the request in the campaign video, Kaczynski responds simply that such things are for the Polish people to decide, and that “Tusk isn’t here anymore, and those habits are finished”.
While the tone of the election ads has turned heads in Europe — Britain’s Europhile, left-wing newspaper The Guardian calls the language of PIS “unbridled” — the rhetoric is by no means new. As previously reported Kaczynski has long accused Germany of trying to push the European Union towards becoming a federal superstate, which he characterised as a “fourth reich” which would “subjugate” the Polish people.
In 2021, Kaczynski said it was the wish of Poland that it would remain an EU member state, but to do so it would have to remain a sovereign nation cooperating, with, not being ruled by, its neighbours.
Poland will go to the polls on October 15th, and will also ask the Polish people several referendum questions on the same day. The four questions will take the national mood on the privatisation of state assets, on changing the retirement age, on border control, and on mass migration.
Opponents of the government have accused PIS of staging the referendum on the same day as the election as a cynical ploy to boost turnout and their own support. Opposition leader Donald Tusk has said democracy itself is under threat if the ruling conservatives are allowed to win again.
