By Independent News Roundup
New Polish President Karol Nawrocki was poised to meet with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary a day after this week’s next Visegrad Group meeting there but canceled on the pretext that Orban just returned from a meeting with Putin in Moscow. The head of Nawrocki’s foreign affairs office claimed that the energy deals that Orban sought to strike there broke with the principle of EU solidarity towards Russia, ergo Nawrocki’s cancelation of their meeting in protest, but this is a false pretext.
None other than Trump, the leader of Poland’s top patron, granted Orban the one-year sanctions exemption that was the reason behind his meeting with Putin. Not only that, but Nawrocki himself met with Trump in early September around two weeks after Trump hosted Putin in Anchorage. Prior to that point, neither Russia nor the US made any secret of their desire to clinch mutually beneficial megadeals upon the end of the Ukrainian Conflict, the details of which the Wall Street Journal recently described.
Nawrocki’s pretext for canceling his planned meeting with Orban is therefore false, thus raising the question of what he wants to achieve through this faux drama. The earlier cited head of his foreign affairs office referenced the late Lech Kaczynski’s vision of European solidarity against Russia so perhaps Nawrocki wanted to play to his base, which is mostly supporters from Kaczynski’s (very imperfect) conservative party with whom he as a formal independent is allied. There might be more to it though.
He just shared his “vision of the direction in which the European Union should go” during his inaugural trip to Czechia in late November, the essence of which mirrors Orban’s in the sense of leading practical reforms for restoring the bloc’s original function as an economic union of sovereign nations. This can’t succeed without support from Hungary and vast network of like-minded populist-nationalists that Orban has built over the past decade, however, so Nawrocki is proverbially shooting himself in the foot.
The US-backed revival of Poland’s lost Great Power status, which readers can learn more about here and here, seems to have gotten to his head. That’s the only semi-cogent explanation for why he’d sabotage his own newly declared grand strategy that was supposed to inspire the Central & Eastern European countries of the Polish-led “Three Seas Initiative” to rally behind Warsaw for collectively reforming the EU. Simply put, Nawrocki and his backers might be jealous of Orban, whose role they want to replace.
Third-place presidential finisher Slawomir Mentzen, who leads the populist-nationalist Confederation party whose supporters helped Nawrocki eke out his narrow victory earlier this year, expressed dismay at this canceled meeting and concisely argued that it contradicts Poland’s national interests. Former Prime Minister Leszek Miller shared more detailed criticisms of it that can be read here. By contrast, incumbent liberal-globalist Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the Ukrainian Foreign Minister were pleased.
Their praise, the first’s subtle and the second’s explicit, is concerning. As a relatively young leader who’s formally independent of the conservative opposition with whom he’s allied, Nawrocki has the chance to reform some of their failed policies such as the one towards Hungary, whose leader they’ve shunned and insulted since 2022 due to his pragmatic foreign policy. It’s therefore incredibly disappointing to see him toeing their line at the expense of Poland’s national interests just for approval from that party’s leaders.
.svg){kind=logo}
