Poland has two things it can envy the Spaniards, and I don’t mean the climate or the cuisine. The first is that the Brussels elite, despite the coup d’état carried out by the socialists to keep themselves in power, believes that this is all just an internal matter for Spain alone.
Poland wasn’t so lucky. Judicial reform, logging, and much more was regarded as Brussels’ business and grounds for grilling Poland in the EU institutions. They were helped in this, of course, by our own liberal elites who lobbied for sanctions at every turn.
Spain’s corruption scandals, repression against journalists, and the challenges to its judiciary and constitution, however, are an internal matter for Spain, particularly since it has a progressive coalition of socialists and communists running it, rather than the “far right” in Poland.
The second reason we in Poland can envy Spain is that it still has intellectuals and celebrities willing to resist the left and political correctness and risk their careers and reputations in the process by being labeled as “fascists.”
Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who’s no right-winger, had the courage to say to a mass audience that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is a Machiavellian without any scruples, a criminal and a killer. He accused him of being a dictator and a liar who has broken every promise he has made.
Of course, Don Arturo, as an extremely intelligent writer, knows how to package his opinion so that it sounds like the voice of a novelist who would cast Sánchez in the most dismal roles in fiction, but still, it is a wink to the audience that we are still talking about a dictator capable of anything.
The writer referred to the flaw in Sánchez, so hated by the Spaniards, which is his notorious lying in front of cameras. The Spanish prime minister used to shrug his shoulders or cynically respond that he did not lie but only “changed his opinion.” The question is: Which of our Polish writers and celebrities would be able to publicly go after some progressive politicians favored by Brussels, for example, Tusk or Sikorski?
Here in Poland, the leftist salon is fully in control. None of our lumpen elites have the courage, for instance, to protest the double standards being applied in the EU between Poland and Spain. They keep silent for fear of someone accusing them of not being progressives.
