Radek Sikorski is a member of the European Parliament.
These positions are a matter of record. But I mention them here as a way of letting you know: When the current government in Warsaw announces that it’s investigating my activities as a Russian agent, as I fully expect it will soon, that will be only the pretext for a crude political attack on a member of the opposition.
And I won’t be the only one. The ruling Law and Justice party, with an eye to the parliamentary election set for this autumn, recently passed a law establishing a so-called Committee on Russian Influence, which would target any opponents it deems fit.
Even though this committee will operate outside of proper parliamentary and judicial oversight, it will be able to order surveillance and obtain data from the security services, state institutions and private companies. It will have the power to summon witnesses who can turn into suspects in the course of a single hearing. Those summoned will have no right to a lawyer, no right to remain silent and no right to present evidence. The committee’s chairman, already granted immunity for any potential breaches of the law, will function as both prosecutor and judge.
Oh, and I forgot to mention — the architects of the law have never troubled themselves to define what constitutes “Russian influence.” Whatever the committee decides it to be, apparently.
Does this sound like the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, which led to so many Cold War excesses in the United States? Yes, except this version will have the power of a criminal court: The idea is to start work soon and finish in September with a list of rival politicians who will be excluded from government service if found guilty. One fine day in Warsaw, you can be forced to attend as a witness and emerge a few hours later, after a cursory cross-examination, as a Russian stooge, barred from holding office for a decade. The law theoretically allows for appeals, but they will go to courts that are dominated by Law and Justice loyalists. And although Polish President Andrzej Duda has proposed amendments to soften the law, even if adopted they will not prevent the committee from fulfilling its intended purpose of vilifying the opposition.
Why is the ruling party doing this now? The answer is clear: The election is just a few months away, and Law and Justice is slipping in the polls. Poland has one of the highest inflation rates in Europe, and the economy is slowing. Even the party’s core base of mostly older, mostly rural, mostly devout-Catholic voters has noticed unprecedented levels of corruption and nepotism.
Law and Justice has learned a lesson from other authoritarian populists: If your opponents are causing problems, just disqualify them. So one of the first targets of the law is likely to be former prime minister Donald Tusk, the leader of the main opposition party, Civic Platform (to which I also belong). State media, cowed by the ruling party, accuse Tusk of excessively close German ties. A clip of him saying two words in German in an address to a meeting of the Christian Democratic Union party in 2021 has now been shown more than a hundred times in prime time on state TV. (State media have been attacking me, too, with similar obsessiveness.)
Poland’s support for Kyiv in its fight against Russian aggression and the Polish people’s generosity toward Ukrainian refugees have drawn attention away from the ruling party’s long-running assault on democratic institutions. The security services spy on opposition politicians and seek to discredit them. Prosecutors are at the beck and call of the government, harassing the opposition while protecting corrupt officials. The constitutional tribunal has been packed and paralyzed, enabling lawmakers to effectively change the constitution virtually at will.
Trust me: Just because the idea of Tusk or me as a Russian stooge is absurd doesn’t mean that Law and Justice won’t act upon it. The would-be autocrats in Warsaw have already brushed aside the toughest statement from the State Department on the state of Polish democracy in many years. Nor are they deterred by the loss of tens of billions of euros in E.U. funds that have been blocked by Brussels because of Warsaw’s continued breaches of the rule of law. Members of the ruling party fear not only the loss of power but also the likely consequences of years of riding roughshod over Poland’s constitution. They will do almost anything to avoid being held accountable.
We will go on fighting to defend our democracy. But it would certainly help if our friends in Europe and the United States could keep reminding our government that Poland was invited into Western institutions with the understanding it would remain solidly democratic — and that reneging on the deal can get you suspended. As we fight together for Ukraine’s right to choose its own democratic future, we need to be all the more vigilant in protecting democratic norms in our home countries, too.
