By Olivier Bault.
This article was originally published in the French daily paper Présent.
Poland – As we might have expected it, the Liberals and particularly the ones of the Civic Platform (PO) of Donald Tusk, did not even waited until the funeral of the Mayor of Gdańsk who was murdered on the 13 January before trying to make the PiS government responsible for it. According to some PO politicians and to the media of the same tendency, the PiS would have established a climate of hatred that should have lead perforce to a political assassination.
Although the first investigations about the dubious enrichment of Adamowicz were lead in 2012 and he had been officially indicted in March 2015 by the prosecutors for some “omissions” in his assets declaration, i.e. before the PiS came to power. And although Adamowicz had left the PO and the latter had presented a candidate against him in the first ballot of the municipal elections in the last autumn: a candidate (a son of Lech Wałęsa) who did not hesitate to attack him on those suspicions of fraud during the campaign, even if the PO then supported Adamowicz for the second ballot against the PiS candidate.
Apart from the still unclear motivations of the murderer who was recently released from prison and had been treated for years for problems due to paranoid schizophrenia, one might say a few words about this infamous “climate of hatred” that is supposed to prevail in Poland since only three years.
This is indeed from 2005 and not from 2015 that the PiS and the PO that were expected to form a coalition of the Right after a period of social-democratic governments that were dominated by the former Communists, have become enemies very rapidly. And when we hear for now more than 13 years (and not only three!) some excessive words from politicians and journalists of both sides that are also sometimes full of scorn and hatred, one must acknowledge that the Liberals have developed under the impetus of Donald Tusk and his successors with the help of the big private media friendly to them, as well as the State television they took under control in 2010-11, a genuine strategy of demonisation and discredit through scorn against the PiS in the same kind of the one the French Front National has been confronted with for years. With the victory of the PiS at the elections in 2015, this strategy has become a “frontal” opposition in virtue of which the Liberals do endeavour to give the impression to the Poles and to the Europeans that Poland governed by the PiS would be a kind of dictatorship that should be overthrown by all means.
If there is a climate of hatred nowadays in Poland, the Liberals and first of all Donald Tusk himself, are significantly responsible for it. An illustration of this fact is given by the results of a recently published poll that was realised between 2018, September 24 and the November 28, by the Centre for studies about prejudices of the University of Warsaw, and shows that the supporters of the opposition parties do nourish explicitly more hatred against the supporters of the PiS than the latters against them, and that the Liberals rather tend to deshumanise the Conservatives than inversely.
But is that really specific for Poland?
Translate by the Visegrad Post.
