WARSAW: Poland’s parliamentary election on Sunday could make Warsaw a more difficult ally for the United States if Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski loses power.
At stake are not only the presence of Polish troops in Iraq and the siting of part of the planned US missile shield in Poland, but how the former communist state fits into a long-term relationship between the European Union and Washington.
Opposition leader Donald Tusk has indicated his centrist Civic Platform party, which is mounting a strong challenge to Kaczynski’s ruling conservatives, would not want so close a relationship with Washington.
“It is not clear how much the opposition has really thought out its relations with Washington,” said Zbigniew Lewicki, a former head of the Americas department at Poland’s Foreign Ministry.
“We have to see if the recent questioning of Poland’s alliance with the United States by Tusk is just election rhetoric or whether it will translate into a real shift.”
Since coming to power in 2005, Kaczynski and his twin brother Lech, the president, have turned Poland’s already close ties with the United States into the plank of their foreign policy, combining it with distrust of the EU.
They have kept troops in Iraq, boosted Polish forces in Afghanistan and have all but pledged to host the anti-missile shield despite Russia’s anger and doubts of some EU partners.
Surveys show most Poles want their troops out of Iraq and oppose the ‘missile shield’ but both issues have until recently failed to capture voters’ imagination.
That changed with an attack on the Polish ambassador in Iraq last week, just days before Kaczynski faced Tusk in a key televised debate.
Tusk lambasted Kaczynski for extending the Iraq mission without any clear benefit for Poland, one of many points he scored in the debate experts saw as a turning point of the election campaign.
Some polls show support for the Civic Platform surged after the debate, pushing Kaczynski’s Law and Justice into second place and reducing his chances of staying in power.
Iraqi insurgents attacked Polish troops again on Monday.
US officials say a Civic Platform victory is unlikely to mark a dramatic shift in Polish-US relations even if it speeds up a Polish withdrawal from Iraq.
“Washington knows that the election will have consequences for Iraq, but this will not be a radical shift like in Spain,” a senior US diplomat in Europe said, referring to Spain’s pullout from Iraq after the Socialists won a 2004 election.
The Civic Platform and its potential coalition partner, the Left and Democrats, originally backed the Iraq invasion and would under certain conditions agree to host the shield.
But the Platform made clear it would bargain hard to get the United States to lift its visa requirement for Poles and to provide state-of-the-art air defence systems in exchange.
“We have reached a stage in the Polish-US relations where the Polish public must see something in return,” said Radek Sikorski, Kaczynski’s former defence minister who now sides with Platform.
Despite the tough rhetoric over Iraq, the Platform shares the view that the United States remains the pillar of European security and guarantor of Poland’s sovereignty from former overlord Russia.
But unlike the eurosceptic brothers, the Platform would draw confidence from its EU membership and ensure that Poland is no longer seen as having traded allegiance to Moscow to become a US client state.
