Maciej Kisilowski writes that it is wrong to think that European far-rights have differences in attitudes towards Russia under Putin.
Maciej Kisilowski is an associate professor of law and strategy at Central European University.
As more than a dozen far-right parties Join hands Promotion of EU integration in early July General knowledge These parties still have serious differences on many issues. Presumably, the key to this is the attitude of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
This conventional wisdom is wrong. Among the signatories to the July statement, except for one political party, everyone else firmly supported Putin, and one adherent—Poland’s ruling PiS—may just have a subtle change in attitude.
In June, Ryszard Terlecki, one of the leaders of PiS, was even shocked Conservative media In Poland, a vicious Twitter attack was launched against the leader of the Belarusian Democratic Opposition Sviatlana Tsihanouskaya (Sviatlana Tsihanouskaya).Last week, news Broke About the talks between Polish billionaire Zygmunt Solorz-Zak and the Hungarian state-owned energy company MVM and its Russian counterparts on the possible construction of a nuclear power plant in the Russian enclave Kaliningrad.
It is said thatThe Prime Minister of PiS, Mateusz Morawiecki, has fully understood the situation.If completed, the project will basically replicate the controversial Russian-Hungarian Empire II Development, coupled with the additional twist of outsourcing factories to the EU border.
Polish independent journalists have long defendant Some PiS politicians with suspicious ties to Moscow and Russian security agencies helped plan Political scandal in mid-2010 This paved the way for PiS’s 2015 election victory. But it is not these so-called dark relationships, but the completely transparent changes in the political destiny of PiS may push the party to form an unstable alliance with Vladimir Putin.
Joe Biden’s election victory in the United States left PiS severely isolated on the international stage. Just as the head of PiS, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, signed the European far-right manifesto, his party proposed a bill that would effectively expropriate the major independent television station TVN.However, TVN is Found company The State Department’s response has been intense. If this major American media group is really driven out of Poland, it is hard to imagine how far the relationship between Warsaw and Washington will drop.
Relations with Western European partners are also at a low point.Last week, Poland’s grotesquely politicized Constitutional Court AnnounceIn a clumsy ruling, according to Polish law, a large number of cases of the European Court of Justice were unconstitutional.Last month, Angela Merkel Reportedly rejected Meet with her Polish counterparts to celebrate the anniversary of the historic border treaty between the two countries.
However, politically, PiS may have no choice but to accelerate its autocratic process, even if it widens the rift with Western partners. Especially in the COVID era, the inherent contradiction between supporting a rapid economic recovery and catering to religious fundamentalists who oppose vaccination can only be resolved by silencing independent journalists who raise sharp questions and forcing judges to take a tougher stand against the opposition.
The failure of Donald Trump in 2020 highlights the stakes of populists during the pandemic. If PiS destroys TVN, the only privately-owned TV station with national significance will be Polsat, a broadcasting company increasingly popular with the government, owned by the aforementioned billionaire Mr. Solorz-Zak, who worked on the Kaliningrad power plant project.
At a deeper level, Mr. Kaczynski and Mr. Putin are natural allies because their political visions fit almost perfectly. Although Victor Orban was a rather unconvincing latecomer to the Christian fundamentalist camp, Kaczynski has for decades supported the vision of a retrogressive state supported by the Polish nationalist Catholic Church.This vision and Role The Russian Orthodox Church supported by the Kremlin. The two types of church-state relations have produced exactly the same list of convenient enemies, the first being LGBTI people and feminists.
Kaczynski must understand that the mainstream West will never accept that his retrogressive vision is compatible with European values.Although the EU has been slow to respond to technical violations of the rule of law, it may take action Much faster When basic human rights are threatened.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, those who underestimate the possibilities of the PiS-Putin alliance do not realize the unique way in which right-wing populists understand the concept of “alliance”. The liberal democracies of the 20th century and even the communist dictatorship were international in their vision. Their geopolitical alliance depends at least on the appearance of friendship.
Right-wing populists have created a new possibility for themselves through their Darwinian narrative of world relations, namely, alliances, no friendship, or even superficial hostility.
Donald Trump opened the way here. On his foundation, Trump portrayed his Russia policy as a coalition in the traditional sense, not even a reconciliation, but a ruthless real politics based on the universal insistence that “we don’t want to be fools anymore.” Throughout his tenure, he was almost obsessed with a narrow view that Putin is a “strong leader” in “a system I don’t like.” His contacts with Putin always start from the very pragmatic national self-interest. “We will see how it works,” he said at a rally in 2016. “Maybe we will maintain a good relationship. Maybe our relationship will be bad.”
Other dictators borrowed from this script. “No country can change the address,” Victor Orban said bluntly during Vladimir Putin’s visit to Hungary in 2019. “Every country is located where God created it. For Hungary, this means being in the Moscow-Berlin-Istanbul triangle.”
Unless he is overthrown by the dual influence of COVID and Donald Tusk’s revival of the democratic opposition, Kaczynski may follow the same path. If the liberal West takes more active actions to reject authoritarian and intolerant peripheral countries, such as the PiS paranoid base Poland, they may accept that Putin may be the worst of their enemies in a world without friends.
