Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has accused the European Union of wielding a “propaganda bludgeon” against his country like the communist regime of old.
National conservative-led Poland and Hungary are currently locked in a dispute with the EU establishment, George Soros, and their allies in the international press over their decision to veto the EU’s proposed multi-annual budget, which included a substantial coronavirus relief package, because provisions requiring member-states to follow so-called “rule of law” and values provisions had been attached.
The Poles and Hungarians are being blamed for the budget’s failure to pass because of the veto, but they argue that it was not their decision to politicise it by attaching the aforementioned provisions — which they believe would be used to deprive them of funds for refusing to submit to compuls0ry migrant redistribution quotas, or for going ahead with judicial reforms which the EU opposes.
“The rule of law has become a propaganda bludgeon in the EU,” said Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, of the Law and Justice Party (PiS).
“We know the use of propaganda bludgeons very well from communist times,” he recalled, adding that a European Union “in which there is a European oligarchy that punishes the weaker and pushes them into a corner is not the EU that we joined.”
“This is not an EU that has a future,” he warned.
Other members of the Polish government were equally robust, echoing arguments previously advanced by Brexit campaigners in the United Kingdom.
“The establishment in Germany and Brussels is trying to carry out a revolution and create a single European state based in Brussels or maybe Germany,” warned Zbigniew Ziobro, a member of the United Poland party which governs alongside Law and Justice who serves as Minister of Justice.
Prime Minister Morawiecki also bristled at suggestions that, because Poland is a net recipient of EU funding, Poles must “get on their knees” and accept being dictated to.
“If our partners do not understand that we do not agree to unequal treatment of states, to a stick that will always be used against us simply because someone does not like our government, we will indeed use [our] veto,” he said.
The Poles and Hungarians do have some reason to believe that the EU’s dominant powers intended to use any “rule of law” in the budget to interfere in domestic politics, with European Parliament vice president Katarina Barley, of Germany, having suggested they should be “starved financially” if they do not govern in a way Brussels approves.
“In Brussels today, they only view countries which let migrants in as those governed by the rule of law. Those who protect their borders cannot qualify as countries where rule of law prevails,” Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán observed after the budget veto.
“Once this proposal gets adopted, there will be no more obstacles to tying member-states’ share of common funds to supporting migration and use financial means to blackmail countries which oppose migration,” he warned.