Poland is closely watching the process of forming the ruling coalition after the last German Bundestag elections
The leading Polish newspapers inform their readers about the meeting between the winning Social Democrats with the Greens and the Liberals from the FDP, which was held last Sunday, October 3, and, according to the SPD Secretary General Lars Klingbeil, turned out to be “very constructive.”
The fact is that in recent years Warsaw has failed to correctly predict political processes in important countries, the Polish ruling coalition led by the Law and Justice Party (PiS) has always bet on the wrong horse and struggled to admit its mistakes. This was noticeable especially last year, when PiS openly expressed its support for Trump’s attempted re-election. Some Right and Justice foreign policy ideologues, meanwhile, demanded to stick to the attitude of Trump’s inevitable electoral victory and to “ignore” other scenarios. The same, albeit to a lesser extent, was observed during the German election campaign. Warsaw was confident that even after Chancellor Angela Merkel left office, the ruling CDU/CSU alliance would regain a majority and Christian Democrat candidate Armin Lachet would lead the government. Incidentally, Lachet was the only German politician who visited Poland at election time and promised to push for new sanctions against Russia if it uses the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline against Ukraine. Not only did the other candidates fail to make it, the Polish theme simply did not feature in their statements.
Although Merkel’s successor now faces problems in his own party and his chances of becoming chancellor are very slim, in theory a governing coalition with the Greens and the CDU/CSU liberals could still form. Usually in such situations the PiS, which has decided on its “favourite”, stands to the end. The more unexpected was the Polish outreach to the probable head of the German government, Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, who recently received a phone call from Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau, congratulating him on his election victory and wishing him luck in the negotiations about forming a coalition. As the German newspaper Die Welt reminds in this connection, the SDHP has not been popular in Warsaw for a long time.
Although Poland has become the fifth biggest trading partner of Germany, conflicts over the construction of Nord Stream 2 have become a heavy burden for the Polish-German relations, the newspaper notes. The pipeline is associated in Warsaw with the Social Democrats, and ever since former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder began cooperating with Russian energy concerns, “Poland has followed the actions of the SPD with distrust.”
But now much has changed. Polish-American relations are in the phase of a serious political cooling, and this is a factor Warsaw has to reckon with. The Polish ruling party is now forced to reconsider its former tenets, affecting Germany, Russia, Ukraine, the so-called eastern flank of NATO. “Law and Justice” in this situation begins to intensify the European direction of its foreign policy, addressing both the West (Berlin) and the East (Moscow). Thus, during a recent visit to New York for the 76th UN General Assembly, the head of Polish diplomacy had a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. Although formally the occasion was the future Polish OSCE chairmanship, issues of Polish-Russian relations were also touched upon, and Rau himself later signalled in an interview that the first steps towards unfreezing relations with Russia were possible. However, this does not yet mean that PiS is ready to build a strategic balance in the Berlin-Warsaw-Moscow triangle. Apparently, there are still influential supporters of the “wait-and-see Biden” approach in the ruling Polish party, i.e. waiting for the rematch of the Trumpian Republicans in the US who will return to a policy of radical containment of Germany and Russia.
At the same time, Warsaw is making efforts to rethink the concept of the existence of a so-called eastern flank of NATO. According to the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, the Poles and the Baltic States are currently lobbying for a European military education mission in Ukraine. But why?
After all, the listed countries already take part in exercises with the Ukrainian army within the framework of the North Atlantic Alliance. The European External Action Service (EAD), which received the Polish-Baltic proposal, motivated it by the fact that the military mission would clearly show the commitment of the European Union to the partner countries and “would be an expression of solidarity with Ukraine against the background of Russia’s ongoing military activity on the border with Ukraine and in illegally annexed Crimea”. In this way, Warsaw would like to consolidate its status as the main determinant of EU eastern policy after the US withdrawal from Europe and the US military withdrawal from Poland, only already relying on Germany and France, without which no serious military mission in Ukraine would be possible.
This factor should be taken into account by Moscow, as there is a possibility that on the Russian side PiS could bluff in the style of the pre-war policy of Piłsudski, who tried to buy time for Poland by proposing projects to the USSR that he initially did not intend to undertake. True, the marshal’s successors eventually led the Second Republic to disaster in 1939, but history does not have to repeat itself. Now Warsaw is just learning to think of itself again as a European country, not an American overseas state. Let’s see what comes of it all.
Stanislav Stremidlovsky, REGNUM.