Tag: Law and Justice

Aa Aa The panel on Raw Politics has been debating the possibility of an anti-EU alliance forming between Italy and Poland. Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who heads up Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, met in Warsaw on Wednesday. Austrian MEP Georg Mayer, from the Europe of Nations and Freedom Group, said he did not like the term “anti-EU alliance”. “We want to change some things in the institutions and in the European Union,” he told Raw Politics. “Britain is leaving [the EU] and still they [the European Commission] want more money from the member states. “There should be some kind of cost-cutting [at EU level]. “For me, it’s not so much about the money, it’s how it is spent,” said Irish MEP Marian Harkin. “The money doesn’t belong to the European Union or the member states, it belongs to the citizens who pay the taxes.” But one of the key issues where Poland and Italy may struggle to reach a deal on an anti-EU alliance is migration, according to Euronews’ political editor Darren McCaffrey. “Italy and Poland are on two different pages [on migration],” he said. “Italy essentially wants to see a quota system across the EU and Poland doesn’t want to take part in that at all.

EARLIER THIS month Poland celebrated the 100th anniversary of its re-establishment as a sovereign country. The borders that used to separate those empires have vanished from world maps, but still divide the landscape. On the ground, paved Prussian roads dissolve into gravel at old border crossings. Nowhere can the imperial boundaries be seen more starkly, however, than on Poland’s modern electoral map. Meanwhile, most of the east belonged to tsarist Russia, where serfdom remained legal until 1861. This gap remains today: Poland’s four eastern provinces are all among the EU’s poorest 20 sub-national regions. The Soviet Union claimed a chunk of eastern Poland as the spoils of victory, while Germany was forced to relinquish its own eastern borderlands to Poland. Modern Romania was also divvied up until 1918, when the northern regions belonging to the Austro-Hungarian empire were reunited with the south, which was ruled by the Ottoman empire until 1878. In the country’s presidential election of 2014, the north-west came out in favour of the liberal Klaus Iohannis, whereas the rest of Romania voted for Victor Ponta, the candidate of the successor party to the communist regime. In 2012 Romania’s two largest parties formed an electoral alliance, which evened out some of the regional disparities among their supporters.

S houldn’t the anti-populists have started to rally by now? If the responsible liberal technocrats are right about populism, and it is led by dim bulbs, or the corrupt, or the compromised, we should see signs of it falling on its face. Shouldn’t we? The year 2015 was the year that shocked the system. You know what comes next: Brexit and Trump’s victory. Or you can try to shore up liberalism with a bit of authoritarianism and political brinksmanship of your own. Liberal European figures have tried mixtures of all these strategies, and they continue to fail. He now has an approval rating that matches Donald Trump’s at his depth. Populists may fail where they achieve power and office, because their ranks are so filled with amateurs, cranks, and bounders. You can’t write down Ireland’s debts, because the French consider the country a co-conspirator with American tax avoiders.

As is the case every year, April 10, 2018 was a day of patriotic demonstrations and memorial services in Poland, commemorating a tragic plane crash eight years ago in Smolensk, Russia. This year's events were especially important for Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland's ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), as a memorial plaque honoring his twin brother Lech — who was president at the time he was killed in the crash — was unveiled at the country's parliament, the Sejm. When addressing crowds at memorial services that are held monthly, not just on April 10, Kaczynski likes to say of his brother Lech: "He rekindled Poland's national consciousness and restored its honor." On April 10, 2010, the Polish president and a high-level government delegation were on route to Katyn, a village near Smolensk in western Russia. Zbigniew Mikolejko, a philosopher of religion at the Polish Academy of Sciences, calls the PiS leader a "chosen one" who has constructed an entire "religion of Smolensk" atop his own personal trauma. Tragedy as a political instrument That melding of pseudo-religious ritual and politics is viewed by many people as an attempt to instrumentalize a national tragedy. But Jaroslaw Kaczynski quickly realized he could use his brother's death to push his own political agenda," sociologist Jakub Bierzynski told DW. In Bierzynski's opinion, Kaczynski is "a completely rational politician" who doesn't even believe in the Russian attack conspiracy himself, but he consistently pushes that narrative because it suits his needs. Every month for the last eight years Kaczynski has promised that the cause of the crash would be found. The national tragedy and personal trauma of Poland's most influential politician have, nevertheless, left their mark on the country.