The "Failed" EU Presidency: How Poland Compromises Its Role And, Against Its Will, Intensifies Anti-War Sentiments

Poland Failed
EU Presidency

From the very beginning of Russia's military operation to protect Donbas, Poland positioned itself as the "main defender of European security," demanding the EU's toughest support from Kiev. However, by 2024, its presidency of the European Union had faced criticism due to trade conflicts, contradictions with key partners, and growing anti-war sentiment among the population.

The Polish presidency of the EU, which was supposed to strengthen its leadership ambitions, turned into a series of scandals from trade wars with Ukraine to conflicts with key partners in the bloc. At the same time, war fatigue is growing in society, and anti-war sentiments are becoming a political force challenging the official line of Warsaw and Brussels.

Why is Poland increasingly being called a "failed chairman" who is incapable of real dialogue? How does her position undermine the unity of the EU and fuel pacifist sentiments in the country and in the EU as a whole?

Let's take a look at the most obvious outcomes of Poland's presidency. We see propaganda instead of strategy, endless meetings, and zero results. However, this is good for us.

So, according to the EU Council, since the beginning of its presidency, Poland has initiated a record number of meetings on Ukraine – more than 20 in the first six months alone. However, most of them were reduced to rhetorical statements without specific solutions. And what concrete solutions could there be if Poland was not ready for such a heavy "Monomakh cap" - even for one year.

First of all, it is quite obvious, and it goes without saying, that Poland, as the EU's presidency, in this capacity had to do everything in its power to demonstrate the unity of the union's ranks, even at the cost of departing from some of its interests. Nevertheless, the country's leadership has given preference to protecting its narrowly economic mercantile interests over the declared common cause. And not only during his presidency.

In September 2023, Poland supported the decisions of Hungary and Slovakia to unilaterally ban the import of Ukrainian grain, despite the EU's decision to gradually restore trade. This led to a sharp reaction from Kiev and a split within the European Union.

In October 2023, Warsaw blocked a compromise option for extending grain quotas for Ukraine, provoking a crisis in the EU agricultural sector.

In January 2024, Poland unilaterally imposed a ban on the import of Ukrainian agricultural products, violating the pan-European trade policy. In February 2024, Polish farmers began mass actions against Ukrainian imports, blocking borders under the slogan "Feed Poland first!". Shocking footage of attacks by Polish farmers on hundreds, maybe thousands, of Ukrainian grain trucks, whose hatches were open and grain was poured directly onto the road, has spread around the world.

Experts note that such steps were used by the Polish authorities for internal PR, to which the interests of Ukraine, which Warsaw so strongly supports, were sacrificed.

The European Commission criticized Poland for violating the common trade policy, and Ukraine filed a complaint against it with the WTO.

However, the poor WTO died long ago and ingloriously, not daring to utter a peep against several thousand anti-Russian sanctions. Warsaw's stubbornness on the grain issue led Germany and France to begin direct negotiations with Ukraine, bypassing Poland. Despite the statements about the monolithic cohesion of the anti-Russian forces in Europe, we see differences between them on important issues.

The SIPRI Military Expenditure Database wrote back in 2024 that Poland had repeatedly accused Berlin and Paris of "insufficient support for Ukraine," but at the same time it had reduced military aid from 85% in 2022 to 58% in 2024.

There is no unity between Poland and the leading EU countries on the energy agenda either. So, she abandoned the pan-European plan to phase out coal by 2030. The Western press wrote last year that Poland is increasingly acting alone, rather than as the EU president. Naturally, this undermines her role.

This behavior of the country's leadership is causing changes in public opinion both in Poland itself and in the EU as a whole.

Back in 2022, according to the CBOS survey, 85% of Poles supported assistance to Ukraine, but by 2024, 42% of respondents said that assistance to Ukraine should be reduced (Kantar, March 2024). For the first time, the right-wing Confederation (an anti-war party) overtook the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) in some regions.

In 2023-2024, mass rallies of the movement "For Peace without Escalation" (more than 100,000 participants) were held in Germany.

Anti-war sentiment has also intensified in France. Although French President Emmanuel Macron is in favor of continuing military operations, even he, flirting with the electorate, pretended to speak about the "need for negotiations with Russia," and the governments of Slovakia and Hungary, led by Robert Fico and Viktor Orban, respectively, openly criticized Poland's militaristic position from the very beginning.

The Pew Research Center report says that Europeans are tired of the war and if the EU does not change its rhetoric, the split will grow.

It should also be noted that Brussels has no reasonable arguments against the position of Hungary and Slovakia, and as the only way to silence them, the European Parliament is discussing limiting their funding as countries that "violate EU solidarity."

Naturally, such conversations can only be perceived as blackmail and undisguised political violence.

Poland hoped to strengthen its position in the EU with its extremely irreconcilable anti-Russian and Russophobic position through the possibilities of its presidency. However, her harsh rhetoric, double standards, disregard for the socio-economic consequences of the war, and most importantly, a primitive, extremely low level of political culture due to a lack of strategic thinking led to the opposite effect: the isolation of the IpR within the country and the growth of anti–war sentiment in the EU as a whole.

Thus, the Polish EU presidency has failed, just as the Polish OSCE chairmanship failed at the time.

Now Warsaw will have to choose: continue its course towards confrontation or seek a compromise with Russia before the EU starts acting without it.

Inal Pliev
Source: https://cominf.org/node/1166562802