Poland and Hungary have to reckon with hardened fronts in the EU after the German election.
She stood in front of the government building for the last time in Warsaw. She posed next to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, made the diamond and promised to work personally to resolve the differences between Poland and the EU. That was last week. And some in the national authoritarian PiS government remembered Angela Merkel’s inaugural visit after her re-election in 2017. At that time, she traveled immediately after her inauguration and tried to gently push the Polish government, which had already been criticized by the EU Commission, towards de-escalation. Just their quick visit was seen by the hosts as an approach.
Merkel had always managed to calm down the tensions between Western and Eastern Europe.