Poland: An anti-Russia witch hunt threatens free elections
Poland just took “a giant step toward authoritarianism,” said Bartosz Weglarczyk in Onet (Poland). President Andrzej Duda last week signed a law creating an Orwellian commission to investigate anyone suspected of being too pro-Russia. The commission, with a chair appointed by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, will have the power to ban politicians from public office for 10 years, with no right to appeal. Anyone might fall under suspicion, but the measure is being called “Lex Tusk”—the Tusk law—because everyone knows it is aimed squarely at Donald Tusk. The former president of the European Council and a champion of the kind of EU norms that PiS has trampled, Tusk is the opposition politician who poses the biggest threat to the ruling party in this fall’s elections. PiS has long tried to discredit Tusk by claiming that he gave sweetheart oil and gas deals to Russia when he was prime minister from 2007 to 2014. Now it wants to use that pretext to drum him out of Polish politics entirely—which would render the next election a farce.
How ironic that the law pretends to be aimed at Russian influence, said Wojciech Przybylski in Visegrad/Insight (Poland). If anything serves Vladimir Putin’s interests, it is this kind of “openly scandalous” attack on the democratic opposition. Warsaw is tearing a page right out of the “Kremlin’s playbook” by giving the new commission carte blanche to “suspend the public freedoms of citizens.” This is the kind of autocratic behavior we’ve come to expect from PiS, said Jedrzej Bielecki in Rzeczpospolita (Poland). Duda signed the law, but the real instigator was PiS party co-founder Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who has been propping up Putin allies like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán for years. Led by Kaczynski, the PiS has also “undermined the rule of law” in Poland by stomping on the free press and asserting political control over the courts. The EU is already blocking millions of euros in Covid recovery funds over Poland’s democratic backsliding, and it’s now threatening further action.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should have been an opportunity for the PiS government to “restore its image” in the EU, said Piotr Buras in Le Monde (France). And it was off to a good start with its “unwavering support for Kyiv,” taking in 1.6 million Ukrainian refugees and sending weapons. But with the PiS’s grip on power on the line as elections drew closer, the party began to panic. Losing control of government would have “serious consequences” for the rather large number of PiS politicians and civil servants “implicated in scandals of corruption, abuse of power, and above all, flagrant violations of the Constitution.” Yet by creating the commission on Russian influence to steamroll its opponents, it has only confirmed “the hold of the ruling party over the state.” The EU won’t look kindly on that. This power grab may also backfire politically, said Eliza Olczyk in Wprost (Poland). Tusk is supremely popular among European bureaucrats, but less so at home. Going after him, though, could turn him into a martyr in the eyes of voters. “And nothing helps a politician like a little martyrdom.”