“You’re a Russian stooge! – No, it’s Tusk who’s the real Russian!”
Szmydt also denounced the Polish authorities for “pushing for conflict with Belarus and Russia under pressure from the UK and the US”. He then accepted a cameo part in the Russo-Belarusianpropaganda circus, appearing on a show with Putin’s most venomous TV star, Vladimir Solovyov.
Szmydt’s defection caused panic in Poland’s United Right. It was during their rule (as junior ally to the government of Law and Justice, PiS) that Szmydt had roles first at the justice ministry and then in the new, politicised (and so unconstitutional) National Council of the Judiciary, the body that is supposed to uphold the independence of Polish judges.
He was also found to have abetted online attacks on judges who had antagonised the government. He did itdirectly from his perch in the Zbigniew Ziobra-led justice ministry, according to well-sourced media reports. When this “hater scandal” was revealed, Szmydt changed tack and began to use the press – generally unsympathetic to PiS – to smear his former government colleagues. That explains why PiS is now seeking to portray him as a “judge of the current regime”.
Unsurprisingly, the current regime is unhappy to have been handed the hot potato of “traitor judge Szmydt”, and is doing its best to remind the public which political camp the judge owed his career to over the past eight years.
Who is Putin’s man?
Neither side of Polish politics – the government of Civic Coalition (KO, liberal, led by Donald Tusk), or PiS (conservative populist, led de-facto by Jaroslaw Kaczyński) – wants to talk about the Szmydt case. But they also accuse each other of being pro-Russian, of having ties with Russia, and of pushing Putin’s strategic goals. Politics is increasingly turning into a shouting match: “You’re a Russian stooge! No, it’s Tusk who’s the real Russian!”
Tusk, speaking in parliament, attacked Kaczynski’s party for having “paralysed the state services” during his rule, thus rendering them helpless in the face of cases such as that of Szmydt. “When your civil servants – because you were in power – started to understand that something was amiss in the ties between the PiS government and eastern governments […], investigations were cut off”, he claimed.
Tusk also blamed PiS for “disarming the Polish armed forces” and “flooding Poland with Russian coal”, and accused Kaczyński of having meetings in the 1990s with KGB agent Anatoly Wasin. Finally, he claimed – paraphrasing the veteran politician Leszek Moczulski’s words addressed to the post-communist left in the parliament – that the acronym PiS could be read in a similar way as PZPR (acronym of the former communist ruling party): “paid traitors, lackeys of Russia”.
In response, Mariusz Kaminski, who was minister in charge of the security services in the PiS government, alleged on X-Twitter that Tusk’s government harboured a minister who had long been in the services’ sights because of his ties to Russia. For his part, former PiS prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki posted a flurry of crude attacks on Tusk for his links to Putin. One of them shows a photo of Tusk bowing his head and shaking hands with Putin, which Morawiecki captioned with the comment “Did you, too, polish Putin’s shoes?”
But Tusk can give as good as he takes, and for the past few days the prime minister’s activity on X-Twitter has been in much the same style as his PiS antagonists. One post has a photo of a demonstrator from Georgia holding a banner “No to Russia, yes to Europe”, with the caption, “Georgians have something to tell PiS”.
The prime minister also announced the resurrection of a special commission to investigate Russian influence in politics. This body was set up before the 2023 election by PiS with the apparent brief of smearing Polish foreign policy in 2007-15 (i.e. the Tusk government’s) for allegedly pursuing Russian interests. Even before the commission got to work, Poland’s public television – then controlled by the United Right camp – had aired a special series, named “Reset”, which presented a similar narrative. The series was so heavily manipulated that some of the foreign experts it featured felt the need to dissociate themselves from it a short while after the broadcast.
This is no way to build democratic resilience
In their political communication, both PiS and KO are reaching for the same narrative. Tusk knows that his key problem is the apathy of pro-government voters. So he wants to mobilise them by talking about the alternative: either you vote for the governing parties and so guarantee Poland’s place in Europe, or you choose PiS, the party of the “Russki mir”, the Russian World.
PiS, in turn, is using the Russian scarecrow to demonise Tusk, just as it had previously tarred him as a “de facto German politician”. Of course, basing its campaign almost exclusively on the demonisation of Tusk may have cost PiS its power in the 2023 election. But today Kaczyński no longer needs to win over all the parties in the governing coalition: even a half-percentage-point gain would be enough for him to beat KO and declare victory again.
The problem of Russian influence in Poland is real, but for Poles to call each other out as Moscow’s stooges is to lower the issue into the intellectual basement. PiS stoops lowest of all, for it is impossible to portray KO as a “Russian party” without sliding into absurdity. The policy of Tusk and his foreign minister Radek Sikorski in 2007-15 was never “pro-Russian”. It was rather based on an understanding that the USA and Europe were seeking a reset with Russia, and that Poland had no business rowing against that current since doing so would not change their policy and would only risk self-harm. Today, at a different political juncture, the same people are pursuing a policy of rallying Europe to ward off the Russian threat.
Conversely, PiS, by manoeuvring to weaken the European Union, by allying itself with right-wing populists and by attacking the EU Green Deal, is pursuing a policy in line with Russia’s strategic objectives. In their mindset, many of PiS’s leaders are closer to the “Russian myriad” – that cocktail of authoritarianism, ossification, state-sanctioned homophobia, militarism, and cult of national victory – than to the modern West. The party does have some odd links with Russia, and quarrelled with Kyiv before the 2023 election – probably for electoral purposes. But the policies of PiS in the first months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine show that it cannot seriously be depicted as “pro-Russian”.
The biggest problem with these mutual recriminations is that they reinforce polarisation and they erode trust in the state and the political class. That is, they are achieving exactly what the Russian security services are busy doing in Western Europe.
Not since the height of the Cold War has the Russian threat been as real as it is today. Western democracies, especially frontline ones like Poland, need to become more resilient against hybrid operations calculated to generate confusion, rancour and political chaos. It will be difficult to do that as long as Poland’s main opposition is a party as populist and irresponsible with words as is Law and Justice. None of this changes the fact that the government needs to try harder.
Translated by Voxeurop
