The conservative (PiS) Law and Justice opposition to the Tusk government has begun its European parliamentary election campaign by announcing senior MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski as its candidate for EU commissioner.
Saryusz-Wolski told PiS supporters at the party’s conference in Warsaw there was a need to be aware of the Tusk administration’s attempt to turn Poland and the rest of Europe into a superstate “that will not be ‘super’ but an oligarchy and undemocratic hegemony.“
“If this battle is lost our children and grandchildren will once again have to fight for a free Poland,” he warned.
The senior Polish lawmaker reminded the audience that he participated in the work on EU treaty changes conducted in the European Parliament. “I’ll tell you what this diabolical plan is. I was the rapporteur, and then the counter-rapporteur on the report, a diabolical plan that came out of the European Parliament and is now in the hands of the European Council.”
He went on to argue that the left and the liberal center are hiding their real intentions for the time being, as they know the people would not accept the kind of treaty changes that had been supported in the European Parliament. What is being proposed is a “radical change in the nature of the EU, which was being hijacked into becoming a centralized and essentially authoritarian superstate,” he said.
He also warned that it would be a state that would not be a union of free peoples but rather one in which there was a hegemonic power in the shape of Germany and smaller states as its satellites. This would mean the end of independence and sovereignty for Poland.
According to Saryusz-Wolski, the EU has fundamentally changed during Poland’s 20 years of membership. “What is happening is that the competencies of the member states are being sucked into the center with the proposed treaty changes as a means to legalize the creeping changes and interference in member states’ affairs.”
“What is at stake is democracy, freedom, and the very existence of nation-states, all of which are to be aided and abetted by a wave of migration to destroy national identities.”
He further accused Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk of lying when he said he did not want EU treaty changes, claiming his party has “backed the treaty changes in a multitude of votes in the European Parliament.”
He concluded by saying that Germany was interested in a Euroasia from Lisbon to Vladivostok, which would mean that Poland was sandwiched between Russia and Germany, which would suffocate it. “Polish statehood is at stake,” he warned.
Jacek Saryusz-Wolski has been an MEP since 2004 and was a minister of European affairs who conducted Poland’s EU accession negotiations back in the 1990s and 2000s.
PiS’s move to put him forward as its candidate for EU commissioner is unusual, as it is the current government that is entitled to put forward Poland’s candidate for the post of EU commissioner in the next European Commission. However, legislation passed during the lifetime of the last PiS government has obliged the government to clear the appointment of a Polish EU commissioner with President Andrzej Duda, a PiS supporter.
