Panelists:

MALWINA TALIK, Research Associate at the Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe, Vienna
MACIEJ KISILOWSKI, Associate Professor of Law and Strategy, Central European University
ARTYOM SHRAIBMAN, Belarusian Political Analyst; Contributor to Carnegie Politika
OLENA KHYLKO, Researcher at the Comenius University in Bratislava

Moderation:

MARYLIA HUSHCHA, Researcher at the IIP

Content:

In the lead-up to its 2023 parliamentary elections, Poland has faced a dramatic period, with hundreds of thousands of citizens marching on the streets of Warsaw on October 1st to show their opposition to the current government. Poland’s government has been run by the conservative nationalist party Law and Justice (PiS) since 2015 and has acquired a reputation as a troublemaker within the EU. The PiS government has been accused of the illegal capture of Poland’s courts and other independent institutions. In 2021 V-Dem Institute declared Poland as the world’s ‘most autocratizing country’. That year, Poland breached the principle of the primacy of EU law when its Constitutional Tribunal ruled that several articles of the foundational EU Treaties were incompatible with the Polish constitution. This led the European Commission to file a lawsuit against Warsaw at the European Court of Justice in February 2023. Even if it finishes first in the elections, PiS might be out of government after October 15, as there may be no party with which it can enter into coalition. The opposition, on the other hand, seems to be united. Nevertheless, PiS is employing various methods to avoid an opposition victory, including by combining the parliamentary elections with a referendum that includes questions that could potentially serve as a boost to PiS’s own political campaign. In addition, the government’s control over a major public broadcaster could tilt the election results in PiS’s favor.

The results of the Polish election are significant to the EU for several reasons. With its constant fights with the European Commission, the Polish government has become one of the leading Eurosceptic forces inside the EU, alongside Hungary under Viktor Orbán. With the opposition in charge, this might change. Moreover, despite its quarrels with Brussels, Poland – under the PiS government – has proven to be one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, accepting the largest number of Ukrainian refugees and supplying Kyiv with arms earlier than any other EU member state. However, the incumbent government has recently questioned its support for Ukraine, thereby endangering the EU’s unity as well as potentially undermining Poland’s own attempts to establish itself as an alternative center of power within the EU.

Apart from Poland’s central role on Ukraine, it has been a major supporter of the Belarusian democratic movement and a consistent critic of Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s regime in Minsk. Not least because of this position, Warsaw has faced a migration crisis on its border with Belarus that has been artificially generated by the Belarusian authorities. A question about building a wall on its border with Belarus has been included in the referendum – possibly in the hopes of generating more votes by playing on voters’ fears of uncontrolled migration.

This panel will discuss the results of the election as well as its significance for the EU in terms of Poland’s ambitions to shift power to the east and the EU’s own external policies, especially regarding its Eastern Neighborhood. Finally, the experts from Ukraine and Belarus will respectively analyze Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Belarusian relations as seen by Poland’s interlocutors from these two countries.