Mayor of John Paul II’s city channels rage at right wing
Poland’s move toward authoritarian rule has incited backlash
Mateusz Klinowksi is the mayor of this birthplace of Pope John Paul II. He is an atheist, a motorcycle-riding blogger with a punk-rock attitude and a corruption watchdog. He campaigns for legalization of marijuana and other drugs.
Klinowksi is a thorn in the side of Poland’s right-wing government.
“My ambition is to get rid of them all, push all the people that are now in power, the entire political class, out of the way,” said Klinowski, 38, who has been mayor of his hometown since 2014.
Underneath a black, zip-down, hooded sweatshirt, he wore a Tshirt with a picture of a sloth in military uniform with an alienstyle head.
“These could be our leaders,” Klinowksi said, pointing to his Tshirt. “The guys in our current government, they should be jailed for what they are doing to Poland, and I believe eventually they will be. My rage against the machine is what brought me into politics.”
Poland has moved in an authoritarian direction since 2015, when its Law and Justice party became the first right-wing governing majority since the fall of communism here in 1989.
Like other countries across Europe, Poland has lurched to the right amid a string of problems besetting the continent, including terrorist attacks and a huge influx of refugees.
Since coming to power, President Andrzej Duda has tightened the government’s grip on state institutions and companies, including the judiciary and media, increased its powers to spy on its citizens, imposed new taxes and fines and supported socially conservative, church-friendly measures such as a proposed near-total ban on abortion in a Catholic country that already has some of Europe’s most restrictive female reproductive laws.
“On these kinds of issues, as a Catholic, I follow the teaching of the bishops,” Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the Law and Justice party, said recently.
“The government is deeply challenging the way in which the Polish system developed after the collapse of communism,” said Tomasz Pietrzykowski, a legal expert at the University of Silesia in Katowice.
Before returning to academia, Pietrzykowski held a senior post in the Law and Justice government.
“According to Kaczyński, after 1989, the country went in the wrong direction. He thinks the economic reforms weren’t right and oligarchs got too much power. The problem is that it’s difficult to define precisely what the government is trying to achieve longer term. It’s much better at saying what’s wrong right now and what it wants to change,” he said.
President Obama, who met with Duda on Friday in Warsaw, where he attended a NATO summit, urged Poland’s leaders to be careful to “sustain Poland’s democratic institutions.”
The European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, opened an investigation this year into whether changes to the way Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, its top court, rules on legislation amount to a breach of the bloc’s democratic standards. Poland says they don’t.
Marek Magierowski, a spokesman for President Duda, declined comment.
“My ambition is to get rid of them all, push all the people that are now in power, the entire political class, out of the way.” Mateusz Klinowksi, mayor of Wadowice, Poland