This personal attack was unprecedented, but it came only days after an eye-catching speech in the Polish parliament by Prime Minister Beata Szydło. Dredging up the fight over the relocation of refugees across the EU from 2015, she called out “the Brussels political elites … blinded by political correctness” and promised Poland won’t be “blackmailed” by the EU. To a standing ovation from the Law and Justice party caucus, she added, “We will not participate in the madness of the Brussels elites. We want to help people and not the political elites.” [...]
From Warsaw’s point of view, there seems to be little downside to continuing to pick this fight. At least the Law and Justice party appears to think so. The spitballs have kept coming even after Warsaw’s debacle at the EU summit in March, when it lost a fight over the reelection of Donald Tusk to a second term atop the European Council. No one, not even illiberal Hungary, backed Poland’s opposition to native son and PiS rival Tusk. The episode seemed to only revive Tusk’s political fortunes and give his until then demoralized Civic Platform a boost in the polls. “Today there is a clear crisis of principles in Europe,” Szydło said after the Tusk outcome in Brussels, which Waszczykowski attributed to “Berlin’s diktat.” [...]
As Czarnecki suggests, PiS is aware of the EU money on the line and the generally deep support among Poles for the EU, currently near record numbers — at 78 percent according to a March poll by IBRiS or 88 percent in an April CBOS poll, one percentage point below the recorded high in 2014. [...]
By a pragmatic reading of all this, PiS will keep up the harsh rhetoric in public — and, with a view to keeping the EU money coming and in light of the strong popular support for Europe (and the recent trend away from populist parties on the Continent), be open to accommodation and dialogue with Brussels in private. Some EU diplomats say they’re picking up signs of that.
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