Detached as he may be from political reality outside Poland, the leader of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) must have known he had no chance of blocking the pro-European former prime minister’s path to a second term, least of all by putting forward a bruising MEP who has never been a head of government or even a full minister. [...]
This might have been an attempt to split the EU and pull it in a more nationalist direction after Britain’s vote to leave the union. Kaczyński has had some success in reviving the Visegrad Four group of central European countries — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — as a vehicle to rebuff Germany on the issue of migration and to resist censure from Brussels over his government’s emasculation of the constitutional court. [...]
But even some right-wing commentators usually sympathetic to PiS criticized the government for waging a hopeless fight, arguing it had damaged the prospect of building an axis of eastern countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Adriatic under Polish-Hungarian leadership as a counter-weight to the Franco-German dominance of the EU. Some also argued that the debacle showed Kaczyński’s ineffectiveness outside Poland.
If Kaczyński were a more skilled player of the EU political game, he might have used opposition to Tusk’s reappointment to extract concessions from Germany on issues of money or power. But German officials say the way the Poles handled the matter, despite Merkel’s political gesture of going to meet Kaczyński, who holds no official government position, when she visited Warsaw last month, has removed any inclination in Berlin to take a conciliatory line towards Poland.
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