WARSAW — Konrad Szymański, Poland’s Europe minister and one of the most moderate members of the country’s nationalist government, is leaving the cabinet, he announced on Wednesday.
The move comes as the government takes on an increasingly anti-EU tone and sharpens attacks against Germany. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki underlined that harder edge this weekend, when he traveled to Madrid to take part in a meeting of nationalist leaders that included former U.S. President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
There, Morawiecki railed that Brussels bureaucrats must not be allowed to create a “transnational beast without real and traditional values, without soul.”
The worsening tensions between Brussels and Warsaw are one of the reasons for Szymański’s departure.
The relationship has been fraught ever since the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party took power in late 2015 and embarked on a project to radically reshape the Polish justice system and, critics allege, bring judges under tighter political control.
In response, the EU has not released roughly €36 billion in grants and loans — part of the bloc’s €800 billion recovery fund — until Warsaw agrees to a series of measures to undo changes to the court system. Poland also faces a €1 million a day fine from the Court of Justice of the EU dating back to late October for failing to comply with an order to suspend its controversial disciplinary mechanism for judges.
Szymański called the clash over rule of law a “fundamental dispute” between Warsaw and Brussels. The key issue is “how to implement the rule of law in member states and who has the right to decide … how this principle should be implemented,” he told Poland’s Polsat television.
Szymański was a member of the European Parliament from 2004 to 2014 for PiS, and was well-regarded in Brussels. After returning to Warsaw he was seen as a technocrat with a deep understanding of how the EU functioned — which often put him at odds with the more strident tone adopted by party boss Jarosław Kaczyński and increasingly Morawiecki.
In the Madrid meeting hosted by Spain’s far-right Vox party, the Polish prime minister spoke alongside Trump and Orbán, who gave video addresses, as well as Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy and the country’s first female prime minister-in-waiting, and Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest EU ally, the Hungarian leader told the rally: “We must continue to defend our traditions and our sovereignty against the Brussels bureaucrats.”
“We have to make sure that we protect our borders and do lots of very good conservative things,” Trump said in a short recording. However, Trump has in recent days underlined the need to come to a peace deal in Ukraine to avoid the risk of nuclear war.
“We must demand immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in World War III and there will never be a war like this,” he said at a U.S. rally over the weekend. “We will never have had a war like this and that’s all because of stupid people that don’t have a clue.”
Backlash
Morawiecki’s speech caused a furor in Poland, where the opposition saw it as yet another act of cozying up to Moscow-liking European far-right parties against the interests of Poland, which is a key Ukrainian ally supplying both military hardware and other aid.
“Russia is brutally attacking Ukrainian cities while Morawiecki is raving at a rally of pro-Putin parties about the European Union as a ‘transnational beast.’ It doesn’t get worse,” tweeted Donald Tusk, a former Polish prime minister and president of the European Council who now leads Poland’s biggest opposition party, Civic Platform.
“Geopolitics moved Poland strongly toward Ukraine and against Russia,” said Anna Siewierska-Chmaj, a political scientist from the University of Rzeszów. “But in terms of ideology what you can hear from PiS leaders is not that much different from what you hear in Russia — all that talk about immoral West and gender ideology.”
Law and Justice is engaged in a frantic effort ahead of next year’s parliamentary election, when it hopes to win an unprecedented third term in office. However, the party has been slipping in opinion polls against the opposition. In response, it’s trying to shore up its right-wing and nationalist base by adopting an increasingly anti-EU and anti-German tone.
That leaves little place in government for a moderate like Szymański.
“This is a dispute that has been going on for a very long time, brings a great deal of dispersed costs, and it would be good to end it,” he said of the rule of law clash.
