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Andrzej Duda
Andrzej Duda pledged to tighten already highly restrictive laws against abortion, campaigned against what he called ‘LGBT ideology’. Photograph: Marcin Bruniecki/REX/Shutterstock
Andrzej Duda pledged to tighten already highly restrictive laws against abortion, campaigned against what he called ‘LGBT ideology’. Photograph: Marcin Bruniecki/REX/Shutterstock

Andrzej Duda's re-election set to intensify Poland-EU tensions

This article is more than 3 years old
Europe correspondent

Duda expected to further erode judicial independence and democratic norms during second presidential term

Andrzej Duda’s second five-year term as president looks certain to intensify Poland’s standoff with Brussels, as the conservative’s allies in the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party pursue changes to the judiciary, media and other areas that the European commission says subvert democratic norms.

Duda squeezed past his Europhile rival, the liberal Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, to win re-election by 51.2% to 48.8%, official results showed on Monday, after a bitter campaign laced with homophobic language and accusations that Trzaskowski would sell out Polish families to “Jewish demands”.

Poland’s incumbent president, Andrzej Duda, wins knife-edge election – video

Trzaskowski’s team have said they are looking into election irregularities, and the result could still be challenged at Poland’s supreme court. Experts have also said the narrowness of Duda’s victory means PiS may face a more confident opposition.

Most observers, however, see the incumbent’s win as giving the conservative-nationalist government clear continued control over Poland’s key institutions, allowing it to further erode judicial independence and democratic norms, and clearing the path for further clashes in its battles with the EU.

Since coming to power in 2015, Law and Justice has argued that far-reaching changes to the judiciary are necessary to remove communist-era judges.

Piotr Buras and Pawel Zerka of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) said Duda’s win “does not simply mean the maintenance of the status quo: it will lead to further deterioration of the rule of law in Poland”.

The result - which leaves Duda in office, and able to veto legislation put forward by an eventual opposition government after parliamentary elections in 2023 – “paves the way for a complete state capture by Law and Justice, letting it dismantle the country’s already damaged system of checks and balances in a similar way that has already happened in Hungary”, the analysts said.

Observers now expect the ruling party to push ahead with its efforts to bring the Polish courts under tighter political control and, having already turned Poland’s state-owned television into its mouthpiece, step up efforts to tame the private media.

The justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro confirmed late on Sunday that the party could push on quickly with its conservative agenda and push for change in private media ownership towards outlets more favourable to PiS.

Issues of culture dominated the campaign, with Duda campaigning on traditional “family values” and PiS denouncing LGBT rights as a foreign import that threatened Polish identity. Duda pledged to tighten already highly restrictive laws against abortion, campaigned against what he called “LGBT ideology”, likening it to a new form of communist brainwashing, and vowed to create “gay-free zones”.

Tapping into old antisemitic tropes, Duda’s campaign and the pro-government state media also repeatedly cast Trzaskowski as working on behalf of a “powerful foreign lobby” linked to George Soros and the Bilderberg group,

International observers from the OSCE said after the election’s first round that the campaign had been marked by “inflammatory language by the incumbent and his campaign that was at times xenophobic and homophobic”, adding: “In the run-up to the election, the public broadcaster became [his] campaign tool, while some reporting had clear xenophobic and antisemitic undertones.”

Poland was once one of the most pro-EU of the bloc’s ex-communist eastern states, but critics say the commission and member states have failed to do enough to prevent a more recent slide in the rule of law, despite initiating a sanctions process known as Article 7 against both Poland and Hungary that could in theory lead to the suspension of their voting rights in the European council.

A bitter row broke out last month after it emerged that Poland, one of the EU nations least affected by the coronavirus crisis, was set to become one of the biggest recipients of the bloc’s pandemic recovery fund despite its government’s attacks on the judiciary and LGBT community.

Several governments reportedly lobbied the European council president, Charles Michel, to rethink the distribution of EU money and toughen its conditions, with some calling for EU funding to be denied to municipalities that declared themselves LGBT free.

“Poland is making a mockery of our values and gets rewarded for it,” one senior EU diplomat said. “That is unacceptable. Southern Europe bears the brunt of the Covid crisis, the migration crisis and the climate crisis, but somehow ends up empty-handed.”

The European commission pledged last year to stop democratic backsliding, promising that member states would be vetted annually on their adherence to the rule of law in a bid to stop governments interfering with the integrity of their courts by firing independent judges.

Despite their criticism of the EU, however, neither Duda nor PiS is likely to call for Poland to leave the bloc: a majority of Poles remain in favour of the EU, which in 2018 allocated more than €16.3bn to Poland in structural and development funds – the equivalent of 3.4% of the Polish economy.

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