Poland’s return to the mainstream is a boon for the EU

The writer is editorial director and a columnist at Le Monde

Donald Tusk returned to Brussels yesterday as “a proud Pole”, “a proud European” and Poland’s likely next prime minister, having unseated his country’s hard right government in the October 15 election. As he entered the Berlaymont building, he may have remembered the bitter battle he lost there to Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker eight years ago as president of the European Council. 

In the summer of 2015, Germany was grappling with huge numbers of refugees from Syria and Chancellor Merkel wanted her European partners to help. With Juncker, then president of the European Commission, she devised a scheme where each member state would take in a quota of refugees. Tusk begged her to delay the vote, to no avail.

Back home in Poland, his centre-right party was at risk of losing power to the Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant Law and Justice Party (PiS) in an upcoming election. He knew that accepting quotas of refugees would provide that party with a powerful argument against Brussels and liberal democrats. But Merkel had her own priorities. The Polish government agreed to take 7,000 refugees, was crucified for it by the opposition and lost the election.

Poland became a persistent irritant for the EU, which took the unprecedented step of freezing €35bn in Covid recovery funds over PiS’s violations of the rule of law. This Wednesday in Brussels, Tusk talked about unlocking those funds. But his coalition’s victory this month means much more for Europe. Ending the feud over the rule of law, a pillar of the European project, will allow Poland to recover its role as a crucial actor at a time of huge challenges for the EU, deeply shaken by the war in Ukraine.

An immediate benefit should be an improvement in the Polish-German relationship, which was poisoned by enormous claims of second world war reparations from the PiS government and a vicious anti-German campaign during the election season. France will also find better prospects for its relationship with Warsaw.

A revival of the Weimar triangle — Paris, Berlin, Warsaw — even seems possible. This will not only smooth the atmosphere in Brussels; it will give new impetus to the evolving east-west dynamics inside the EU, where the war in Ukraine has empowered voices from central and eastern Europe. 

Poland has always aspired to be the leader of central Europe. It will now seek to play this role in a more respectable way, without being tied to the tantrums of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, or Robert Fico, his colleague from Bratislava, both now isolated and unable to use the Visegrád group (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia) as a springboard.

Hungary’s turn to chair the EU’s rotating presidency for six months, which begins on January 1, 2024, will now be less challenging for its partners. Poland’s return to the mainstream, after the recent electoral failure in Spain of the far right party Vox, also deprives Italy’s Giorgia Meloni of potential allies in Brussels and may encourage her to pursue a pro-EU line.  

The most consequential dimension of the political reversal in Warsaw, though, has to do with the future enlargement of the EU. Integrating Ukraine, Moldova and countries of the western Balkans is an endeavour of unseen proportions, which will require changes in the way the union is organised. Poland, bordering Ukraine, is in a pivotal position. Its own experience in joining the EU as a new member in 2004 will be precious.

The PiS government managed to ruin Poland’s relationship with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the issue of grain imports. This should change, even though the impact of Ukrainian products on Polish — and French — farmers will be another problem for the Common Agriculture Policy.

But most of all, at a time of historic transformations for the EU, the value of a pro-European government in the driving seat in Warsaw — and an administration not obsessed with settling accounts with the past — is enormous. 

In an interview with Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas earlier this year, I was struck by how differently we see the history of the EU. French children learn at school that it was founded by six nations in 1957, with Franco-German reconciliation at its heart. It is part of their DNA. But for politicians of Kallas’s generation and from her part of Europe, the EU is a far more recent adventure, counting 27 member states, going on 35. It is a very different animal, and it is now theirs as much as France’s and Germany’s. It is also for them to shape. This is why a new, open outlook in Poland matters so much.