EU member Poland ‘still’ a democracy, says foreign minister

WARSAW: Poland’s foreign minister denied Wednesday accusations his EU country is drifting towards authoritarianism amid a string of government reforms that have triggered mass protests at home and EU warnings about rule of law violations.

“We are still a democratic country,” Witold Waszczyskowski told the BBC when grilled over recent court reforms that critics insist erode judicial independence and threaten democratic standards in one of the EU’s leading eastern former communist states.

The European Commission last month warned Warsaw it was ready to launch an unprecedented procedure to strip Poland of its EU voting rights over the court reforms for alleged rule of law violations.

Accusations of “authoritarianism are wrong”, Waszczykowski said, insisting that the “commission is wrongly evaluating” the legislative actions of Poland’s populist right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government.

He insisted that Warsaw was “patiently trying to discuss and inform the commission” about its legislative moves.

“We just want to stay on a democratic course...all democratic institutions are preserved,” Waszczykowski said.

EU President Donald Tusk, a liberal and PiS arch-rival who served as Polish premier from 200714, recently warned that “Poland’s future in Europe is today being called into question” by the PiS’s legislative moves.

But Waszczykowski told the BBC there was “no legal reason for the commission to act and interfere... because there is no final solution proposed.”

Powerful PiS party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski insists the changes are designed to “de-communise” state institutions that he argues were inadequately reformed after Poland peacefully shed communism in 1989.