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POLAND-POLITICS-CENTENARY
Poland isolated, divided on centenary of independence
WARSAW, Nov 9, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Poles mark a century of independence on
Sunday in a deeply polarised country, isolated within the European Union, as
a march organised by far-right groups in the capital Warsaw risks casting a
shadow over celebrations.
Underscoring Poland’s growing isolation in the bloc since the rightwing Law
and Justice (PiS) party took office in 2015, no senior foreign delegations
are expected to visit on Sunday.
Although the centenary ceremonies coincide with ones in Paris set to draw
60 world leaders for commemorations marking the end of World War I a century
ago, analysts believe this is not the primary reason behind the snubs.
“The absence of foreign delegations is the result of the PiS’s behaviour in
Europe. Nobody wants to come here anymore,” Stanislaw Mocek, a Warsaw-based
political analyst, told AFP.
EU President Donald Tusk, a former Polish prime minister, is the exception.
He declined an invitation to the ceremonies in France to be in Warsaw amid
speculation that he may run for Poland’s presidency in 2020.
“I don’t want there to be an impression that Poland is completely alone,”
said Tusk, a liberal whom powerful PiS party chief Jaroslaw Kaczynski sees as
his arch-rival.
Widely regarded as Poland’s de facto powerbroker, Kaczynski has played a
key role behind the scenes in shaping both domestic and foreign policy since
the PiS took office.
The PiS government, meanwhile, has put Poland on a collision course with
the EU by introducing a string of controversial judicial reforms that
Brussels has warned pose a threat to judicial independence, the rule of law
and ultimately to democracy.
Tusk on Monday also warned that PiS policies posed “the deadly serious
risk” of a “Polexit”, which would see Poland crash out of the EU despite the
bloc’s popularity among Poles and Kaczynski’s many assurances that his party
has no such designs.
– Chaotic centenary –
Chaos has engulfed hasty official preparations just days ahead of the
centenary.
PiS-allied President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on
Wednesday called a last-minute official march in Warsaw, just hours after the
capital’s liberal mayor banned one planned by far-right groups for the
occasion, deeming it unsafe and inappropriate.
Those groups, however, won an appeal against the ban in court on Thursday
and have vowed to proceed regardless of the state march that Duda is due to
lead at the same time along the same route.
An independence day march organised by far-right and nationalist groups
last year triggered international outrage and condemnation after some of its
participants shouted racist and anti-immigrant slogans and displayed banners
with a similar message.
The annual independence day event was organised in part by the National
Radical Camp (ONR), a group with roots stretching back to an anti-semitic
pre-World War II movement.
The organisers have said they expect between 100,000 and 250,000
participants after last year’s march drew around 60,000.
While many participants denied sympathy for extreme right groups, the event
also drew representatives of far-right parties from Britain, Hungary, Italy
and Slovakia.
Speaking to the foreign press corps on Thursday, Morawiecki vowed that
authorities would provide a heavy security presence and act “decisively”
against far-right symbols or actions displayed in public, something that is
banned by law in Poland.
“There is a clear red line between patriotic behaviour and nationalistic or
chauvinistic (behaviour), or neo-Nazis,” he added.
– ‘Most successful’ –
While robust economic growth coupled with the PiS government’s generous
social welfare measures and conservative stance have garnered it support,
especially among more conservative voters, its judicial reforms have also
sparked outrage among centrists and liberals, giving rise to a deeply
polarised nation.
“The country is torn apart. We’re talking about two separate Polands: one
liberal, worried about the free market and civil freedoms, and the other,
conservative, statist, wanting to control everything and everyone,” Mocek
told AFP, adding that “nobody in Poland is able to unite a simple majority of
Poles under the same flag”.
Local elections held last month, the first since the 2015 parliamentary
election that handed the PiS an unprecedented parliamentary majority, saw it
gain some ground in regional councils in rural areas but lose in all but six
of 107 mayoral races nationwide.
“These are… two enemy tribes, fighting each other by all means,” Mocek
notes.
But Norman Davies, an Oxford historian and a renowned authority on Poland,
insists that despite the recent turmoil “Poles have never had it so good”.
Before 1918, Poland did not exist at all for 123 years, carved up between
the Prussian, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.
“From all those countries (that regained independence in 1918), Poland has
been the most successful… not only in economic terms, but also in terms of
political stability, constitutional consensus and geopolitical security”
within NATO, Davies said, speaking at a recent security conference in Warsaw.
BSS/AFP/MRI/0842 hrs