Warsaw, 20/12/2011 (Agence Europe) - There have been rumblings on the political scene in Polalnd since the speech at the European Council in Brussels by the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, and the foreign secretary, Radoslaw Sikorski, about saving the eurozone. The EU's leaders said they want closer economic integration and financial discipline and 23 member states, including Poland, endorsed a budget pact.
Polish politics reacted violently to their country, which currently chairs the EU, being involved in the eurozone bailout because Poland is not yet in the euro. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the opposition Polish conservative party PiS, Law and Justice, said that Donald Tusk's government had signed away a large amount of Polish sovereignty in Brussels, particularly in the financial field. This is the final institutionalisation of client status, he said.
Back home in Poland, the debate between europhiles and eurosceptics has taken off again. In the online political review Wprost, the editor Sebastien Stodolak acts as a spokesman for PiS, saying that the European summit's decisions deprive the member states of some their sovereignty and it is easier to understand now what Nobel Prize Winner for Economics Vernon Smith meant when he said recently during a visit to Poland that he didn't understand why a country aspiring to freedom and independence is so keen on joining the eurozone. Stodolak said he knew for certain that the eurozone was an organisation of political desperados who are capable of sacrificing the rights of their members on the altar of the EU to save what are perhaps noble ideas. The review describes itself as liberal-conservative, supporting a free market economy and Christian morals. The PiS party says Poland joining the bailout of the eurozone amounted to joining a club of bankrupt countries, as Wprost describes it, accompanied by equally critical articles on “violation of the euro constitution” or “Sikorsi, the traitor.”
At question time at the Polish parliament, Prime Minister Donald Tusk justified the line he took in Brussels, saying that the precondition for Polish sovereignty is as much financial security as possible and just because Poland is not in the eurozone, it does not have to be a country in the second or third zone even. It would be risky to have two opposing ideas of Europe. He said that saving the eurozone was in Poland's interests because events in the eurozone, the relationship between the euro and the dollar and the credit rating of EU countries have a real impact on Polish borrowers who have loans in Swiss francs, for example. This speech last Thursday is the complete opposite of the ideas of the leader of the PiS, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who said that nothing would happen if the eurozone were to collapse.
On 13 December, the opposition PiS party, organiser of the March for Independence and Solidarity (a national holiday commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the victory against martial law imposed by General Jaruzelski) called on the Polish population to defend their national sovereignty after the foreign minister called for stronger European integration in Berlin at the end of November. One of the marchers, ex-presidential candidate Andrzej Hadacz, called for Donald Tusk's government to resign, saying that strange things were being said by the foreign minister, such as that he wants to give some of Poland's national sovereignty away to Brussels so that they can govern the country from there. He said this was scandalous and had to be punished. (VW/transl.fl)