What changes to expect in post-election Poland
Oct 26th, 2011 | By Shalva Dzidziguri | Tags: Eastern Partnership, elections, EU, Euro crisis, Poland, Tusk
© European Union, 2011
In his blog entitled “Why Poland’s new old government is good news for the EU” David Grodzki set forth a handful of prognoses foretelling the future drifts of Polish political-economic affairs domestically as well as on international arena.
In essence, I share the overall optimistic spirit of the article and fully agree on the estimation that the Polish electorate made a clear choice “between more Europe and less Europe” by giving its majority vote of confidence to the incumbent Prime Minister’s political party and his allies.
And, truly enough, Europe’s “Enfant terrible”, Jaroslaw Kaczynski made a surprisingly short-sighted pre-election offensive against Germany by issuing statements insinuating that Angela Merkel’s ascension to the Chancellorship had been linked to the helping hand of the East Germany’s secret police, which gravely decreased the chances of the Law and Justice party to win the 9 October elections. Also, Kaczynski’s ultra-nationalist statements, denouncing Germany’s “imperialist politics” towards Poland and accusing the Silesians’ irredentist aspiration undermining his country’s independence, largely predetermined his failure. Along the way, he traditionally kept hard-line anti-Russian stance over the Smolensk tragedy claiming his brother’s life, among other political elite, and ensuing controversial Russian investigation of the case, which yielded him zero political dividends.
Nevertheless, the blog left me concerned about the feebleness of some arguments provided, which are in an obvious need of further evidence or plea for better marshalling. Now, I will bring only two of them to the readers’ attention.
Will Poland keep enlargement alive ?
Poland acts as a guardian angel of its self-initiated project of May 2009 – the Eastern Partnership – and thereafter, has been vigorously striving to make it a top item of the EU’s foreign policy agenda. However, with a sole exception of Germany, all leading EU member-states have committed scanty enthusiasm to deepen relationship with their eastern neighbors. Accordingly and quite understandably, the recent EU summit in Warsaw fell short to achieve tangible results on the Belarusian issue. Ukraine, Moldova and all South Caucasian states unanimously stepped off to join the declaration aiming to impose more restrictive measures on Belarus’ pariah president. Concurrently, the Yulia Timoshenko case strained a relationship with another neighbor, Ukraine, resulting in a cancellation of the EU–Ukrainian Summit scheduled on October 20th.
It is noteworthy to remember, that Poland also failed trying to include a membership perspective in the Eastern Partnership EaP at its initiation process, which substantially downgraded attractiveness and future effectiveness of this project. Cautiously, but stubbornly Poland still raises an issue of absence of membership opportunity on various EU forums to give a second birth to the EaP, but other member-states constantly turn their deaf ears to the plea.
If Poland cannot achieve success during its EU presidency, it is hard to foresee a breakthrough in the EaP in coming years. This in turn is likely to increase frustration among EaP participating states and prompt them to seek alternative by reverting – for example to the Russian orbit (Russia’s Prime Minister and soon-to-be (again) president, Vladimir Putin, recently voiced his ambitious plan to create the EU-like free trade zone in the space of former Soviet Union).
Surely, integration process eastward will not be fully extinguished. However, obviously enough, its pace will fall far behind from the pre-2004 expansion level. More important, Poland will likely contribute its intra-EU and outside diplomatic clout and will waste energy only to keep the EaP alive and revitalized, at least to save own political prestige. It should hope that the EU economic peril as well as the Arab revolutionary storm will blow off sooner than later and the other member-states will finally spare a warranted attention to care more about its eastern neighborhood. And, this is where my position defers from David Grodzki’s, who states, “Poland will play a crucial role to ensure that the EU will continue to grow” – an overly optimistic forecast to me.
Continued support for common currency and closer ties with EU ?
Apart from the Katzynski’s irrational pre-election campaign, a tremendous role in Donald Tusk’s victory played his government’s splendid economic policy outshining all the EU member states by keeping annual 4% economic growth.
Economists argue one of the key reasons why Poland averted severe global recession is that it does not belong to the euro zone, thus has not been inflicted by the long-standing external economic-financial turbulence from default-prone countries like Greece. For this reason, against the background of the euro zone crisis the Polish newly elected government will likely be forced to slow down deeper integration process within the EU and delay Euro adoption, slated for 2015, for long. Besides, recent public opinion polls also demonstrated reticence and lukewarm attitude of the polish citizens towards a planned replacement of the Zloty and possible vulnerabilities emanating from that change.
At the same moment, the Zloty is also devoid of stability and undergoes fluctuating high inflation. The top economists of the Tusk’s government are under increasing pressure to develop such an effective monetary policy, which will ensure the continuation of the country’s economic growth. Quite a daunting task to fulfill! The mounting challenges implying to consider any measurements to balance the inflation should not impact the consumer basket, which will inevitably lead to the immediate down-rush of population’s support to the government, makes the task even harder!
While making prognoses on the economic development trends in 2012, Andrzej Bratkowski, member of the Polish Monetary Policy Council, evinced Poland’s cautious reflection on Euro-adoption as quoted in the Guardian: “So I expect a gradual, though not too strong strengthening of the zloty (…) though, taking into account that the euro zone is under great pressure, we cannot rule out moves in the opposite direction”.
Given all this, it does not appear feasible and reinforces my view that drastic changes should not be expected in the context of the EU–Polish relationships after the elections.
Related posts:
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November 28th, 2012 - Why Poland’s new old government is good news for the EU
October 18th, 2011 - Will the Lithuanian foreign policy change after the parliamentary elections?
September 30th, 2012 - The future of Europe from an Italian perspective
February 19th, 2013 - Shale gas II: Shale gas fever in the EU
May 18th, 2011
Hey Shalva,
nice article. I really enjoyed reading it and I am grateful for your critic. Finally somebody is willing to cross-reference to other articles and take a less amicable position [though I guess most simply don't feel like commenting at all]. Also, and that’s the last comment before I reply to your critique: Welcome to EST.
EU Enlargement
You referred to the EaP and Poland’s role in trying to keep it alive. Indeed, there is little support from any of the most powerful member states and this is not really surprising, as it rivals a similar framework for the Mediterranean which certainly is more important to at least three of the big six – France, Spain, Italy. Especially in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and the on-going turmoil in the near Middle East, this region will continue to be the focus of European leaders for a while. I believe that’s perfectly all right, as many of the major problems France, Italy or Spain face are directly related to the situation in the southern neighbourhood – such as low living standards, high unemployment, undemocratic and thus dangerous political systems.
As far as Germany and the UK go, they are currently preoccupied with other issues.
However, just as Germany was pushing for the Eastern Enlargement because it would benefit the most from it, so Poland will continue to do the same with regards to Ukraine and Belarus. Obviously the situation is different as Ukraine and especially Belarus seem to lack the necessary requirements to meet the Copenhagen criteria and it seems likely that for quite some years no substantial changes with regards to the membership number will take place.
I have argued before that there seem to be a number of reasons why Ukraine (and Belarus) are not going to join the EU any time soon – probably not before 2020 and most of them are related to the anxiety of the big and most powerful states in the EU that fear that a Central-Eastern-European bloc might arise that would force them to shift their priorities towards the East. Ukraine’s population of 46 million would set it on par with Spain and Poland, and could thus decisively alter the power relation in the EU insofar in that the current “new” member states would suddenly gather around two powerful players. Also, as long as the EU continues to rely heavily on Russian energy, it will not dare risk upsetting Moscow too much, which is why support for the democratic forces in Belarus, as well as support for a speedier integration of Ukraine remains unlikely. (Not to mention the current disharmony over the Tymoshenko case).
However, I did not say that Poland was going to push only for the integration of the EaP countries – some of which, as you might know, do not even want to join – but it will continue advocating enlargement as such. It seems very reasonable to push for further integration of the Balkans – Croatia and Montenegro are only the first – and I do not think that enlargement will be removed from the agenda until at least the whole western Balkans are integrated.
Besides and that should be the last comment on enlargement. I do believe the EU would be better off with Ukraine inside instead of outside the Union. Ukrainian membership in the EU would ensure the country says democratic whilst increasing the EU’s leverage vis-á-vis Russia. Also, it would increase the EU’s energy security as it would remove the most important transit country from the current equation. It opens new markets to the big companies in the EU and provides motivated and young labour force to the increasingly old labour markets in the west.
I am aware that any new membership would come with financial responsibilities of the old EU for the new partner, but in the long-term everybody benefits from it.
The financial and economic situation
You are right that Warsaw has decided to postpone the introduction of the Euro and I believe that was the right decision. Even though the economy is growing – which is partly because of EU monies but also because Poles tend to invest more in the domestic market than abroad (this also saved the country’s banking sector from facing a similar situation banks in Spain or Italy) – it will still take a few years to align the wage-structure in Poland to what’s being earned in the old EU member states. The fact that the country has been outside the Eurozone during the crisis has been a godsend and was very lucky indeed, however, other countries outside the Eurozone have been dragged into troubles, whereas Poland stayed out. I guess one cannot simply say it was only because of it not having the Euro that the economy is still doing fine.
As far as I am concerned I would worry less about the economy which I believe is going to develop very well and should make Poland the by far strongest economy amongst the new member states, as many of its companies have the potential to develop very well – such as TP (telecommunication), PKN Orlen, PGNiG, Lotos (all in the field of energy, petroleum and gas), Asseco (IT).
What I consider more problematic is that the government has so far not dared to touch the pension system and the health sector, as both are outdated and need to be reformed, otherwise they might actually turn into a bottomless pit that will cost the state billions.
However, nonetheless I am positive that the Tusk government will continue to play a constructive and good role in future EU affairs and will ensure the interests of the new member states are taken into account
Dear David,
Thank you very much for your warm welcome on EST
I went through the previous blogs posted here and it seems quite likely to me that we’ll engage in discussions again, not necessarily always with critical remarks, as we share some common areas of interests related to the EU. I absolutely agree with you that constructive and argumentative debates will help us to advance our base knowledge and make blog posting more exciting and challenging task. Hence, let’s hand off a baton of relay to other bloggers and encourage them to follow suit.
As for your comment, I understand that limited space does not always allow to make a full reflection on the topic and delve into more detail. Now your position is more clear to me.
Dear Shalva,
you are most welcome at EST. I am always happy to engage in a fruitful discussion and I am delighted to see that this might happen more often in the future. You say you and I share common interests. This is great.
The limitations of the blog post make it indeed rather difficult to express in length what one’s position is on certain issues, and even though I understand it, I certainly hope that there will soon be the possibility to extent the length of articles.
I am looking forward to your next article!
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