Call it treason

Just over a month ago, Morawiecki announced that Poland and Hungary had parted ways. It sounded credible. A country that supports a struggling Ukraine as best it can — by sending tanks and howitzers and providing shelter to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees — cannot fraternize with a country that is close to Putin.

Now, however, Morawiecki has apparently changed his mind, announcing in the pages of the weekly magazine funded by the state treasury, that he is returning to cooperation with Orban.

Orban is Putin's Trojan horse in the European Union and he does not hide from it.

This phrase is not accidental. The European Commission has taken a hard line against Poland and does not want to disburse billions from the reconstruction fund until the conservative PiS party-led government begins to respect the rule of law.

Therefore, in July, PiS party leader Jarosław Kaczyński announced a tougher course toward the European Union. "The end of playing nice," he said.

Zdzisław Krasnodębski, PiS's chief expert on EU policy, said he considered the West, or European Union, to be a greater threat to Poland than Russia. Such indiscriminate rhetorical attacks on the democratic community during the war against the Russian regime must be called by name: it is treason.

Morawiecki eyes Le Pen

After Russia's attack on Ukraine, the quieting of the anti-European trend in the politics of the PiS lasted only for a while. Kaczynski and Morawiecki are returning to the positions they held in December 2021, when, despite American warnings of an imminent attack, they received Putin in Warsaw with the same honors of any European allies.

It remains to be seen if, after Orban, Morawiecki reaches out to the leader of the French far right, Marine Le Pen, to whom Russia has lent money for election campaigns, or to the leaders of the Italian far right, who are allied with the Kremlin.

Kaczyński is right, the stakes of next year's elections are enormous. The Poles will choose whether they want to stay in the European Union or, together with Orban and other allies of Putin, inevitably drift towards Moscow.

Looking back, the announcement of Prime Minister Morawiecki that Poland and Hungary had parted ways, offered real hope. It had sounded so plausible.