The Polish minister for European Affairs in the last Conservative (PiS) government has said the growing hostility towards the European Union among the Polish Right could lead to the country leaving the EU.
Ex-minister Konrad Szymański comes from the wing of PiS led by former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, which opposes any moves towards “Polexit”.
In an article for Polish daily Rzeczpospolita published on March 14, he warned that the PiS may be about to repeat the process that befell Britain’s Conservative Party and led to Brexit.
Szymański argues that the PiS currently has no plans for “Polexit” but is being affected by a process of what he calls “radicalisation”. That is caused by the PiS losing support to right-wing parties that are highly critical of the EU.
This has led the PiS leadership to adopt a more Eurosceptic tone.
According to Szymański, for many years, “ the PiS has seen European integration purely in terms of EU funds rather than seeing it as a broader political and economic project”.
When debates later turned to climate policy and migration “many voters reacted with surprise and resentment and reacted that ‘this is not the Union we joined’”, he added.
Szymański perceives the dispute over the rule of law as the key turning point during the lifetime of the last PiS government.
That conflict centred on judicial changes which made a key judicial body accountable to parliament rather than judges and introduced tighter disciplinary procedures within the judiciary.
The domestic conflict around the issue led Brussels to side with the then-liberal opposition and led to the freezing of Poland’s post-pandemic EU funds.
That, plus the fact that these funds were unblocked immediately on Prime Minister Donald Tusk leading a centre-left coalition government after the 2023 parliamentary election, has made the PiS much more hostile towards Brussels than before.
It has argued that its judicial reforms were introducing a system similar to that which operates in Spain and Germany. Poland was catching up with the fact that there had been very little judicial reform in the years following the end of Communism, according to the PiS.
Szymański also claims that information bubbles, often driven by online algorithms, have become “dominated with anti-EU messaging” with what he alleges were distorted claims about EU policies with regard to energy, migration and agriculture, and sight was lost about “the benefits of Polish membership of the EU”.
The former European affairs minister warned that the PiS is “losing the ability to defend EU membership in rational terms, even when most of its leaders understand in private how important that membership is”.
He claims European issues are being driven by “political emotion rather than strategic calculation”.
Szymański’s remarks came after PiS allied-President Karol Nawrocki and Przemysław Czarnek, the party’s candidate for prime minister, called for Poland to leave the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), the bloc’s carbon market.
Such a move is impossible under EU law even though Poland’s constitutional court has decreed that the ETS violates Poland’s Constitution.
Nawrocki and the PiS have also cited the EU’s conditionality mechanism, under which the last PiS government’s EU funding was blocked, as a reason why Poland should not access the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) loan for defence.
Szymański warned that the PiS may be following in the footsteps of the British Conservatives, which attempted to build on criticism of the EU and then lost control of the issue to political forces to its Right.
The ex-minister argues that “if Britain, with its long-established democratic system, could not stop Brexit then Poland, more polarised and more vulnerable to emotional politics, may find it even harder to resist a slide toward a Polexit”.
Recent polling on attitudes towards the EU have shown a rise in those now favouring Poland leaving the EU, from less than 10 per cent a decade ago to around 25 per cent today.
The polls have also shown voters opposing EU climate and migration policies and consistently baulking against Poland joining the European single currency. Poland’s accession treaty commits the country to adopting the Euro but provides no timeline for doing so.
Tusk has of late been arguing that the next parliamentary election, scheduled for autumn 2027, will be fought around the issue of Poland’s continuing membership of the EU. He has portrayed all the right-wing opposition parties as advocates of Polexit.
