Across the board, German political and media circles breathed a big sigh of relief after the defeat of populist Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski by Donald Tusk, leader of the pro-EU and market-friendly Civic Platform party, in early parliamentary elections on Sunday. Until two weeks ago, the older of the identical Kaczynski twins (his brother Lech currently serves as Poland’s president) still seemed poised to win another term in office with an aggressive election campaign based on the fight against post-Communist corruption as well as rather obsessive friend-or-foe thinking, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy. Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s fate was sealed, however, after he lost a high-profile TV debate against Tusk and when Poland’s young, educated, urban, and increasingly mobile population (more than 1 million Poles have moved to the UK since 2004) turned out at the polls in record numbers to get rid of a government that had left the country often completely isolated within the 27-nation EU bloc on issues ranging from EU institutional reforms to the death penalty. In the end, it was, essentially, only elderly, conservative Catholic voters from Poland’s poor rural areas who remained faithful to Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party, thus underscoring the country’s growing deep cultural and political divide. Since coming to power two years ago, the Kaczynski twins and their political allies have repeatedly launched aggressive political attacks on the German government in Berlin, using bellicose rhetoric and conjuring up memories of the Second World War in an effort to deflect attention from their mounting political problems at home. From the Germans’ perspective, it was disappointing to see that a country they had sponsored for entry into the EU (and NATO for that matter) was now using membership as a way of settling old scores. For sure, former Chancellor Schroeder’s cozy relationship with Russian President Putin and their planned Nord Stream gas pipeline bypassing Poland certainly sounded alarm bells in Warsaw. However, since taking office in late 2005, Merkel has repeatedly tried to allay Polish fears over the Russian-German project, which Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s hawkish former defense minister Radek Sikorski (who subsequently fell out with the twins and decided to run for Donald Tusk’s party on Sunday instead) even compared to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to partition Poland. It is unfortunate that Merkel’s repeated overtures to Warsaw, which also included an invitation to join the consortium by building an additional spur of the pipeline from the Baltic Sea to Poland, were rejected by the two hard-line twins, who insisted that Russia and Germany scrap the deal altogether.
It is indeed remarkable how cool-headed German Chancellor Merkel remained in the face of the tough, primarily domestically-motivated, foreign policy attacks coming from Warsaw over the past two years. Wherever possible, she either tried to accommodate Poland’s demands or, where that was not possible, attempted to build bridges and work out a compromise solution that provided the Polish government with a face-saving exit strategy from the political dead-end and isolation it had repeatedly managed to maneuver itself into. For example, at the EU Summit in Brussels in December 2005, barely two months into office (and just days before Lech Kaczynksi assumed the Polish presidency), Merkel managed to pull off a last-minute deal that secured the EU’s budget during 2007-2013. In total, the ten new member states that joined the EU in 2004 will receive aid transfers from Brussels worth more than a €100 billion ($140 billion) in the next seven years. Poland, the largest among the 2004 newcomers, will get nearly €60 billion. Since Germany is the EU’s biggest net contributor, a big chunk of the development aid for Poland will be indirectly paid for by German taxpayers. In the end, faced with Polish ultimatums that the EU increase its aid transfers for the new EU members or risk an embarrassing failure of the entire budget summit, Merkel agreed to pay an additional €100 million to Warsaw; EU structural funds that were initially earmarked for the economically weak regions of her own native former East Germany. And when talks got tough at the June 2007 EU summit in Brussels, held under the rotating German presidency, Poland invoked its WW II war-time dead to justify a higher voting share than its current demographic weight would suggest: “If Poland had not had to live through the years 1939-45, Poland would be today looking at the demographics of a country of 66 million” (rather than 38 million), and would warrant a much higher quota of votes in the EU, Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski told Polish radio. Most politicians from other countries would probably have been tempted to respond rather harshly to the Kaczynski twins’ aggressive rhetoric and political stubbornness. But Chancellor Merkel rightly concluded that German-Polish relations are too important and historically too complex to leave them to the populists. Despite rather strained bilateral political relations, the two countries’ economic ties are excellent, with bilateral trade in 2006 increasing by 26.4 percent to total almost EUR50 billion, making Germany Poland’s most important trading partner. It remains to be seen how much the substance of Polish foreign policy can and will really change following Donald Tusk’s election victory. Most German political analysts believe that it is, above all, the political tone and climate between Berlin and Warsaw that will be significantly different. The Kaczynski’s political grand-standing and narrow-minded friend-or-foe thinking has already sowed the seeds of defeat for the older of the twins. Donald Tusk, the next prime minister, speaks fluent German and English, qualities that will allow him to be a much better diplomat in Europe and beyond than either of the Kaczynskis, both of whom speak no Western foreign language. However, one must not forget that President Lech Kazcynski, whose current terms expires in 2010, will still play an important role in shaping Polish foreign policy (he shares that responsibility with the prime minister, though the exact division of labor is not clear) and has already indicated that he will fully use his constitutional veto powers to block any pieces of legislation he (or his brother Jaroslaw, the future opposition leader in parliament) does not like. One can therefore only speculate whether the unprecedented 2005-2007 period, where two identical twins held the two highest elected offices in a key EU and NATO member country, will amount to nothing else but a quirky footnote in Polish history.
