Polish PM joins Trump, Meloni and Orbán in addressing right-wing rally in Spain

Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has joined figures including Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán in addressing a global right-wing rally in Spain.

“The EU wants to turn its back on tradition…the Brussels bureaucrats are expanding their powers…to create a transnational beast without true and traditional values, without a soul,” said Morawiecki, who had been welcomed onto the stage by Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s Vox party.

“For years there has been a silent war in Europe against the values on which our civilisation was built,” added Morawiecki, quoted by the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

“We are all children of Christian civilisation, we cannot forget it…I will not apologise for the fact that I am a Pole, that I am a Christian, that I am someone attached to such supposedly outdated values as the truth, freedom, solidarity and law and justice,” he continued.

The Polish prime minister called on “those who spread various strange ideological experiments throughout Europe” to “be kind enough not to impose your ideas on our families” and to “let us live a normal life”.

“I am glad that many nations are rising and they are starting to understand that Europe should be freed and safe from its gravediggers, the bureaucrats,” Morawiecki declared. “We must give power back to the real creators of today’s Europe, to its peoples…We will protect our homes and our values. We will protect our home countries.”

While Morawiecki spoke in person at the event, other leaders sent video messages. In his 40-second recording, Donald Trump declared that “we have to make sure that we protect our borders and we do lots of very good conservative things”.

“Long live the Europe of patriots!” said Giorgia Meloni – who is expected to shortly become Italian prime minister after her Brothers of Italy (FdI) party won recent elections – in another video message.

After Meloni’s election success last month, her FdI received messages of congratulations from Morawiecki and other leading figures from Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. The two parties sit in the same European grouping.

In recent years PiS has been forging closer relations with right-wing and far-right forces across Europe, including France’s Marine Le Pen and Italy’s Matteo Salvini.

It has faced some criticism for doing so given the links of those figures to the Kremlin, which stand in contrast to PiS’s strongly anti-Russia line. PiS has argued, however, that building relations with such groups can help them understand the dangers Russia poses to Europe.

Speaking in Spain today, Morawiecki declared that “the Kremlin acted like a drug dealer – it sold gas cheaply, but today we see the real price of this gas in inflation, high prices and bloodshed in Ukraine”.

“But it is not the elite who pays the price for these mistakes, it is not the Brussels elite, it is the ordinary people, ordinary families in Poland, Spain and all over Europe,” he added.

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.