Members of Donald Tusk’s government have made it onto the candidate list for the European Parliament election, including Minister of State Assets Borys Budka, Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński, and Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, who has already announced his resignation as Minister of Culture “in connection with the approval by the National Council of the Civic Platform of the lists of candidates for the European Parliament.”
These three ministers played a major role in scrutinizing the former conservative Law and Justice (PiS) governments in recent months. Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz was responsible for putting public media into liquidation.
Political scientist and historian from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University (UKSW), Prof. Antoni Dudek, speaking to Gazeta.pl, harshly criticized the ministers’ behavior. In his opinion, it is “completely unserious.” He stated that it is a “classic example of degrading political standards.”
“When someone is appointed to the government and that government has a stable majority, they commit to a four-year mission. They treat the office as a temporary holding pen that allows them to survive until the European Parliament elections,” he said.
According to the expert, the Civic Platform (PO) may lose out on this move. “Voters should punish this arrogance. I’ve been saying for a long time that both PiS and the Civic Platform have become ideologically bankrupt parties in power,” he stated.
He noted that from PiS, Mariusz Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik will run. In his opinion, when they become MEPs, the political dispute they are central to “will become baseless because not even PiS claims that mandates for the Sejm and the European Parliament can be combined. This shows the ocean of hypocrisy among the main political players in Poland,” the political scientist added.
Dudek also recalled an interview with the Polish edition of Newsweek in which Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz referred to the European Parliament as a “graveyard of political elephants,” and he later denied that he would stand in the European elections.
“I would add that it’s a luxury graveyard. This is unserious,” the expert concluded.
