Poland’s leaders relishing Trump’s, world’s attention
Government sees president’s visit as boost to standing
WASHINGTON — Poland hasn’t really had a turn in the world spotlight since the 1980s, when all eyes were on the drama of the Solidarity labor movement’s perilous but ultimately successful struggle against Communist rule.
President Donald Trump’s stop in Warsaw, where he arrived Wednesday night on his way to the Group of 20 meeting in Germany, focuses attention on a country viewed by many as having come full circle since those days.
Poland’s right-wing government views the visit as an enormous boost to its prestige, and has worked to ensure that Trump-friendly crowds turn out for a U.S. president known to relish shows of public adulation.
U.S. allies in Western Europe, however, worry that the president’s visit is in effect stamping a seal of approval on the Polish leadership’s aggressive moves against democratic institutions such as the courts and the news media and that Trump could be seen as offering an implicit endorsement of the government’s populist, stridently anti-immigrant stance, which is reminiscent in someways of his own.
Still colored in many ways by the sorrowful legacy of the 20th century, including the deaths of about one-fifth of its population in World War II, Poland has strong U.S. ties, personified by a large diaspora in the United States. Americans of Polish ancestry number nearly 10 million and have left an indelible mark on cities including Chicago and New York.
NATO ally Poland also hosts a contingent of about 900 U.S. troops and has for many years contributed to U.S. and NATO missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it spends more of its GDP on military expenditures than most of its North Atlantic Treaty Organization neighbors, a subject Trump publicly lectured the alliance about in May.
Trump’s public events in Poland were scheduled for Thursday.
Here’s some background about the first stop on Trump’s second international trip as president. Who runs Poland? Trump’s Polish counterpart, President Andrzej Duda, shares some common policy ground with the U.S. president, including prospects for energy dealmaking, a shared mistrust of Muslim immigrants and refugees and a degree of disdain for the European Union. But the country’s most powerful political figure is Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the nationalist minded ruling Law and Justice party, which won 2015 parliamentary elections.
What do Poles make of Trump? Within Poland, support for Trump tends to break down along urban countryside lines, with less enthusiasm for his policies and rough-edged political style in cosmopolitan Warsaw.
In a recent Pew Global Attitudes study, Trump’s ratings in Poland and neighboring Hungary were higher than in most of the rest of Europe, but still low in terms of his leadership qualities. According to the survey, only 23 percent of Poles trust the U.S. president to do the right thing in global affairs. What are Warsaw’s worries these days? As in most countries, domestic issues are the biggest day toconcerns for most people. When it comes to foreign policy, Russia overshadows everything. Polish officials are keenly aware that they have Trump’s ear as he heads into bilateral talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday on the sidelines of the summit in Germany.
Is Poland out of step with the rest of Europe? Its government has feuded with the European Union over a variety of topics, including immigration quotas and a fray over the government’s attempt to derail an EU leadership role for former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, now seen as an adversary of the ruling party.
Poland’s leaders are thought to be using Trump’s visit to make at least symbolic inroads into Germany’s powerhouse status on the continent.
How has history shaped Polish attitudes? Poland has a long history of being caught between powerful warring empires. Even before Poland’ s oppressionhaunted decades as part of the Soviet bloc, the country’s dead in World War II amounted to 6 million, about 20 percent of the prewar population. Outside recognition of past suffering is well received; Trump’s main public event is a speech in the capital’s Krasinski Square, near a monumentto the 1944Warsaw Uprising. The president’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said in a pre-trip briefing that Trump would praise “Polish courage throughout history’s darkest hour, and celebrate Poland’s emergence as a European power.”