14 minute read
There Will Be No Leniency
Jan Truszczyński, former Polish ambassador to the European Union (1996-2001), talks to Witold Żygulski.
The Polish government claims that the European Union has already accepted the National Recovery Plan (KPO) and that the inflow of EU money will take place at the end of the year; at the same time, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has stipulated that payment will only be possible after Warsaw fulfills the so-called milestones...
The content of the National Recovery Plan has been agreed. The document is almost 500 pages long, devoted mainly to investments improving the competitiveness of the Polish economy and its resilience, and modernizing it. It is about keeping pace with the green revolution and the digital revolution. The agreement includes many commitments from Poland on ongoing reforms and their modification. One of these commitments is to act for greater independence of the courts and judges. These are three specific milestones that have been the focus of attention for the Polish opposition and public in recent weeks. The content of these commitments to be fulfilled by Poland is described quite precisely. I am not sure how great the discrepancy is between what the Polish government commits to in the milestones and what
is contained in the amendment to the Supreme Court Act abolishing the Disciplinary Chamber and creating a new disciplinary system in the Polish judiciary. What will count in the future is Poland’s fulfillment of the obligations contained in the KPO. If they are not fulfilled, there will be no money. Either the first tranche of funds will be paid out, or the EC will wait until the milestones are met. This is the legal and factual situation today.
A few days after the EC’s decision conditionally accepting the Polish KPO (which, by the way, took place against the backdrop of opposition from several commissioners, which in itself was unique), its attitude was criticized by the European Parliament... Indeed, it is difficult to find a similar example in the recent history of the functioning of the most important European institutions. It is understandable to me that some MEPs criticize the EC, believing, as do some critics in Poland, that we should have waited to agree on the final content of the KPO until we knew the final shape of the law abolishing the Disciplinary Chamber. I am not sure that this is the way to look at it. What is crucial is what the authorities in Warsaw have agreed to, i.e. the essence of the Polish commitments in the KPO plan, what the Polish side must do to receive the money under the first tranche. The legal and statutory obligations must be fulfilled by the end of the second quarter of this year. If this does not happen, there will be no money. If these obligations are only partially fulfilled, there will be no money either, until the milestones are fully met. Verification will be swift and precise. Of course, one can speculate today whether there is any margin for interpretation of these commitments; perhaps when the Polish government says that it has fulfilled 100 percent and the EC considers that, in its opinion, it is 96 percent, for example, it will agree to pay out the funds. So, I can imagine a scenario in which incomplete fulfillment of one of the milestones is nevertheless considered sufficient. But if we look at the provisions of pages 200206 of the annex to the KPO implementing decision, they seem to be precise enough for someone acting in good faith to give the EC an easy task in verifying their implementation.
In the future, the government in Warsaw must provide evidence of the implementation of all the milestones, not just the three I have just mentioned. As we know, the EC has up to two months to verify not only the paper but also its implementation in practice, to check to what extent Poland’s declarations conform to reality. It is no coincidence that several additional officials have been employed at the level of the local EC representative office, as I have heard in Warsaw, to handle cooperation within the KPO framework, i.e. to analyze whether Poland achieves the “target values”, namely the legal and actual status corresponding to the declarations included in the draft National Recovery Plan that was submitted and accepted. In short: it is by no means the case that the EC has thrown in the towel and told the Polish authorities “now do what you want.”
According to some politicians, Poland can now count on the EC turning a blind eye because of the role our country has played and continues to play in solving the problem of refugees from Ukraine; do you think this opinion is justified?
In my opinion, there is no question of any leniency, there will be no indulgence. Poland simply must implement everything that the EC demanded during the many months of negotiations. The demand to improve the independence of the judiciary was already formulated as a recommendation of all the EU member states for Poland starting in 2019.
Indeed, there is a lot of speculation today around a supposed softening of EU institutions’ stance toward Poland. However, I am not aware of any public statement by any of the commissioners that would give sufficient grounds for such interpretations.
From the beginning of 2021, when the member states started sending Brussels the drafts of their national recovery plans, their ideas on how to use the money from the EU recovery fund, the EC ran them through 11 filters, assessing their coherence and realism, and whether the plans had a proper structure and adhered to legal standards. Individual elements of the national plans were given EU qualifications; an A meant that everything was in order, a B that it was not perfect but could still be considered satisfactory, and a C that the element was only fit to be discarded. In the third case, the whole plan was returned for further work in the given member country. The cooperation with Poland did not differ from that with other countries applying for EU money. The qualitative criteria were identical. Poland dragged out the negotiations on its national recovery plan for one reason, obvious to all: its name is Zbigniew Ziobro [Poland’s minister of justice and attorney general] and his party [junior coalitionist Solidarna Polska (United Poland)]. If there had not been this impossibilism in the bosom of the ruling socalled United Right, if Ziobro had not been handled with kid gloves, if they had simply said goodbye to him and his party many months ago [polls today show that Solidarna Polska would have received less than 1 percent of the vote if it had stood alone in the elections], the KPO would have been approved long ago. The deal would have been on track, the first tranche of EU funds from the recovery fund would already be in Poland, and if the talks had gone well and the negotiations had been finalized last year, we would have already received a 13-percent advance of EUR 4.7 billion. This would have been a powerful impulse for the economy. It did not happen, and the sole reason for this was the Polish government.
Zbigniew Ziobro
Today those in power very loudly accuse Polish MEPs from opposition parties of allegedly acting to the detriment of their own country in connection with voting against the acceptance of the Polish state of law or organizing debates in the EP about the state of the Polish rule of law; is this a typical occurrence in EU institutions?
It is no exaggeration to say that the European Parliament is the same as the Polish Sejm [lower house of parliament] or any other parliament of a member state. It is our parliament; if it discusses issues arising from the activities of a given country’s government, it is understandable that the point of view of the opposition parties may be radically different from that of the government. In disputes over what European law should look like, this difference is plain to see. Country representatives are in different groups, different factions of the EP. The situation we are talking about is therefore absolutely nothing new in the history of European parliamentarism. The accusations of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) against opposition MEPs are therefore completely absurd. This is clumsily simplistic argumentation, a propaganda cannonade targeted at the party’s own supporters, at people who are guided by the instinctive impulse of “they are beating up our people, we need to close ranks.” I think it is a typical feature of sovereigntists and nationalists, and PiS is a clinical example of such a party.
Ursula von der Leyen with Mateusz Morawiecki
Poland has been in the EU since May 1, 2004. For many years it was treated as a reliable, rational partner, a member of the European community, accepting its ideas and aspirations; has this situation changed over the last seven years?
In my opinion, rebuilding trust in Poland will take much longer than it did following the previous period of rule by PiS and its coalition partners [2005-2007]. If the current Polish opposition parties win the next parliamentary elections [scheduled for autumn 2023] and form a sensible governing coalition, they will have to demonstrate a strategic vision and, what is more, their ability to translate that vision into the language of European diplomacy. They will have to put forward ideas and initiatives themselves, work on persuading representatives of other member states, build coalitions not against anything but for some proposal, modernization, or reform of the Europe- an Union. This will not be achieved in three months or six months, it requires strenuous and persistent work, proving not only the ability to come up with new ideas, but also the ability to present them to European partners and the ability to hold constructive discussions. This is how the EU works: nothing can be done on one’s own, you need to look for like-minded allies, and the more of them there are, the better. It is also necessary to be able to join – not just with one’s signature – in projects that others are developing and presenting. I would like to underline once again that none of this can be achieved just by changing the label from PiS to Civic Coalition (KO) or some other three- or four-party coalition of today’s opposition. Any new government will have to prove itself.
To what extent do Poland’s current uneasy relations with the EU influence the smaller political alliances in the CEE region that have been promoted over the years? Do such institutions as the Weimar Triangle, the Visegrad Group, or the Three Seas Initiative actually exist?
The Weimar Triangle does not actually exist. Its last document, drafted about a year and a half ago and signed in Paris during a summit with the participation of the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland, otherwise quite sensible, did not result in any further actions of the governments of the three countries in any significant areas. It did not have any positive consequences.
As for the Visegrad Group, we can all see what has been happening to it in recent months because of Budapest’s attitude toward Moscow’s policy. I see virtually no possibility of a revival as long as Hungary under Viktor Orban continues to act the way it does, as long as the Czech Republic and Slovakia remain distrustful of Warsaw and Budapest’s often-shared attitude on issues other than the war in Ukraine.
The Three Seas concept, in turn, boils down to mere infrastructural projects, some of which are needed and desirable, mostly implemented with European funds from the Connecting Europe Facility. If there was no political label involved, such as Poland has been trying to attach to these initiatives for
years, nothing would change, these projects would continue to be implemented, only without the Three Seas framework. Without EU money this whole concept will become just an empty political idea without any practical consequences.
To sum up, I see no political configuration in which Poland governed by PiS could sensibly use its not all that small geopolitical potential and economic potential built during last 18 years of our EU membership. It would be good to use it wisely, effectively and farsightedly, to enable Poland to play in the European first division, as it did during the rule of the Civic Platform (PO) [2010-2014]. That is how things were then, but today Poland is far below its potential because of the parochial nationalism guiding today’s rulers from the United Right.
How would you comment on the recent shocking words of former President Lech Wałęsa that the EU should be dissolved and founded again, but without Poland and Hungary?
These kinds of ideas, desperate ones indeed, have been circulating in academia and think tanks for a long time as one of the ways of dealing with countries that do not respect basic European principles and values, especially the rule of law. It is impossible to get rid of them, because there is no way to expel them from the EU since there are no treaty mechanisms for this. One of the ideas on how to get out of this is to create a new organization next to the EU, duplicating the existing fundamental and secondary rights that are binding in the EU, even duplicating EU institutions, and then enrolling most current EU member states into this new organization. Such ideas are theories only, and even then they are not dominating trends. In themselves, however, they are symptomatic; there is a feeling of helplessness about the behavior of Hungary and Poland within the EU, and from this feeling arises the thought that maybe it is possible to come up with a legal recipe to circumvent these countries acting to the detriment of all. However, I do not attach much importance to such thinking; there is not enough critical mass in the EU countries for such a solution, or even for such a discussion between the governments or political parties of the member states.
Once upon a time there was a lot of talk, and this topic keeps recurring, about the idea of a “two-speed Europe,” a situation in which the leading EU countries would speed up the transformation process while the others, reluctant to pursue further and deeper integration, would be left behind; if only because of its visible opposition to EU climate policy or its reluctance to introduce the euro, can Poland really find itself politically marginalized?
I think that first we should expect further strengthening of cooperation within the eurozone, which should grow from 19 to 20 countries in January, after the accession of Croatia. This is undoubtedly a functioning zone of European integration, in which the countries remaining outside the common currency will be increasingly marginalized. This will not be a rapid or abrupt process, but it will progress. Secondly, there is a great deal of interest in taking advantage of the possibilities that already exist in EU law for groups of countries to act collectively under what is known as enhanced cooperation. This is an option that has existed for a long time, but so far has not been used much at all. I am not saying that it will suddenly start functioning with redoubled force, as part of building the EU’s strategic autonomy and its strength as a partner in international relations, but impulses of this kind might already appear in the second half of this year, using the achievements of the recently concluded conference on the future of Europe. I do not expect any revolutionary changes, any qualitative leaps, anything that would surprise us, but nevertheless I do expect a more energetic approach to broader cooperation within a group of fewer than 27 countries, in coalitions of countries willing to go faster and further. This has been talked about for a long time and, admittedly, there are no special effects, but I do not rule out that, under the influence of geopolitical changes that we have witnessed in recent years and especially in the last year, not only France, Germany, Italy or Spain, but also a number of other medium-sized countries will show an appetite for such action. If such a process starts to materialize, Poland under PiS rule may find itself on the margin, with all the consequences this implies. It is not out of the question.
