Poland’s deputy head of government and PiS boss railed against the “modern submission” of his country to the EU.
The Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has accused Germany of wanting to convert the EU into a “Fourth German Reich”. There are countries that are “not enthusiastic about the prospect of building a fourth German Reich on the basis of the EU,” said the head of the right-wing nationalist ruling party PiS in an interview published on Friday with the right-wing extremist Polish daily “GPC”.
The term “Fourth German Reich” was “nothing negative,” said Kaczynski, “because it is not about the Third Reich, but the first”, that is, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
If the Poles “agreed to such modern submission”, “we would be degraded in various ways”. Kaczynski also attacked the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which it believes is “the fundamental tool used” to enforce federalist ideas.
“Utopia and Dangerous”
During the inaugural visit of the new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) to Warsaw last week, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki criticized the goal set in the coalition agreement of the traffic light parties to develop the EU into a “federal state”: this vision reverberates in Polish ears “Bureaucratic centralism – that is a utopia and dangerous”.
The EU has been at odds with Warsaw since 2017 because of its controversial judicial reform. The PiS is accused, among other things, of installing judges loyal to the government at the constitutional court and of having set up a disciplinary chamber to discipline critical judges. The EU Commission had therefore initiated various infringement proceedings, some of which resulted in lawsuits before the ECJ.
(WHAT/AFP)