Polish government steps up anti-German rhetoric ahead of re-election bid

By Daniel Tilles

Poland’s current government “does not fit into the German-Russian plans to rule over Europe”, declared Jarosław Kaczyński, chairman of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, last month.

He warned that those plans are being supported by the domestic Polish opposition, who are “cynically counting on the fortunes they will earn by enslaving Poland”, making it “submissive to neighbouring powers”.

Such rhetoric from Kaczyński is nothing new. Last year, he warned that the EU is becoming a “fourth German Reich”. In 2020, he accused the opposition of wanting to make their country an “appendage of Germany”.

However, what has changed in recent weeks is the regularity, intensity and breadth of anti-German rhetoric from Poland’s PiS-led national-conservative ruling camp, suggesting a coordinated campaign.

“Germany wants a colonial government in Poland that will implement its goals,” said justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro in the latest outburst today. “That is why they are blocking” Poland’s EU funds as part of an effort “to return [opposition leader] Donald Tusk to government.”

“The EU needs not German leadership, but German self-restraint,” declared foreign minister Zbigniew Rau, a figure who usually keeps a fairly low profile, in an op-ed for a leading Polish daily.

Environment minister Anna Moskwa accused Germany of spreading “fake news” about an environmental disaster in the Oder river and called for some of its EU funds to be frozen.

The Polish government’s official responsible for water management suggested that the poisoning of the river could have been caused in Germany, which is now using the crisis to prevent Poland from economically developing the river.

The evening news on public broadcaster TVP, which is used as a mouthpiece by the government, declared in a headline on 31 August that “Germany wants to take away Poland’s sovereignty”.

Meanwhile, the opposition – and in particular Civic Platform (PO) leader Tusk – have been presented as tools of German interests.

TVP’s news broadcasts have played an out-of-context clip of Tusk saying “für Deutschland” (“for Germany”) around 150 times since he returned as PO leader last year. Gazeta Polska, a newspaper close to PiS, recently depicted Tusk as Hitler on its cover.

Arkadiusz Mularczyk, a senior PiS MP, noted on Friday that, during its wartime occupation of Poland, Germany encouraged Polish women to terminate pregnancies. He then asked if Tusk’s declaration of support for abortion on demand is related to that Nazi policy.

Even central bank governor Adam Glapiński – theoretically an apolitical figure but in reality a longstanding associate of Kaczyński – claimed in July that there is a “German plan to overthrow PiS and establish a Tusk government” because “breaking Poland’s resistance” is vital to “building a European state”. He repeated the claims in another interview two weeks later.

This all indicates that attacks on Germany may become central to the ruling party’s bid for re-election next year. In recent election seasons, PiS has tended to focus on a particular external enemy, which is presented as a threat to Poland’s very existence.

In 2015, ahead of parliamentary elections, it was Muslim refugees. In 2019 and 2020 – amid European, parliamentary and presidential elections – it was “LGBT ideology”. Next year, when PiS bids for an unprecedented third term, the target may be Germany.

As before, this no doubt results from Kaczyński’s well-honed political opportunism. In 2015, the migration crisis allowed refugees to be presented as a tangible threat. In February 2019, the adoption by Warsaw’s opposition mayor of a set of pledges on LGBT rights gave PiS an initial basis on which to build an anti-LGBT platform.

This year, a number of issues have made Germany an easy target.

Berlin’s tepid support for Ukraine and reluctance to take firmer action against Russia have allowed PiS to regularly criticise Germany’s approach and contrast it with its own tough line on Russia and strong support for Ukraine. It has also provided substance to the idea of a German-Russian plot.

The crisis on the Oder river, which runs along the Polish-German border, has also offered opportunities to attack Germany, with PiS keen to deflect blame for the slow response of Poland’s state authorities to the disaster.

Meanwhile, the recent intensification of a rule-of-law dispute with the European Commission – headed by a German, Ursula von der Leyen – over the release of frozen funds for Poland has provided further ammunition.

“I am convinced that, wanting to break Poland and force it into full submission to Germany, they will block these funds,” said Kaczyński in his comments last month.

Soon after, a senior PiS MEP, Zdzisław Krasnodębski, declared that Poland faces a “greater threat to our sovereignty from the West”, in the form of the EU, “than from the East”, in the form of Russia.

Many of PiS’s attacks play upon Poland’s history of victimhood at the hands of both Berlin and Moscow, which collaborated in the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and in the partitions of Poland between the late 18th and early 20th century.

When warning of the current “German-Russian plans to rule over Europe”, Kaczyński noted that “an independent, economically, socially and militarily strong Poland is an obstacle for them. From a historical perspective, this is nothing new”.

The anniversary on 1 September of the German invasion that launched the Second World War also provided further opportunities to evoke such memories. PiS-backed President Andrzej Duda recalled how “the Germans treacherously attacked, going hand in hand with the Soviets… [in] a vile brotherhood in arms”.

Later in the day, Kaczyński unveiled a report calculating war damages caused by the Nazi German occupation – amounting to $1.3 trillion – and declared that Poland would be seeking reparations from Berlin.

That report – prepared by a PiS parliamentary committee headed by Mularczyk – was completed in May 2019, with Mularczyk expressing hope at the time that it would be published later that year.

The fact that it was instead left on the shelf for three and a half years demonstrates that the issue is treated politically by PiS. Now – amid a campaign of concerted anti-German rhetoric – was deemed to be the best moment to release the report.

PiS will now be able to use the reparations issue as part of its campaign over the next year for the parliamentary elections scheduled for autumn 2023.

It will provide further “evidence” of Germany’s current ill will towards and historical crimes against Poland and of how the opposition – which is not keen to pursue restitution claims – is working in Germany’s interests.

“Poland is divided in half,” declared Patryk Jaki, an MEP from one of PiS’s coalition partners. “Half are for Poland, half are for Germany. Be clever and don’t listen to the German doormats.”

Main image credit: Slawomir Kaminski / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.