Jaroslaw Kaczyński sporting a Polish and Ukrainian flag on his jacket during his visit to Kyiv.
The Polish President will not meet Viktor Orbán during his Thursday visit to Hungary, announced the chief of President Nawrocki’s foreign bureau. But what lies behind this act of unbridled disrespect and contempt towards the leader of a host country, widely considered as Poland’s most ardent historic ally? Or more precisely, who is behind this ill-advised decision?
The fact that the president of one of Hungary’s closest EU, NATO and historic allies in general has decided to snub the head of the Hungarian government on Hungarian soil is all the more bewildering that Mr. Nawrocki’s is rocking the horse under one of his fellow European conservatives only months before the parliamentary elections in Hungary. Yet for avid observers of Polish-Hungarian conservative relations this decision did not come as a surprise. Relations between the Polish and Hungarian left have been frosty ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, a certain decorum has rightly been maintained between both sides, making sure that Donald Tusk’s hard-left government does not take advantage of the rift.
As to the person behind this scandal, Nawrocki’s spokesman’s statement has given us a hint. The statement says, “Referring in his policy to the legacy of President Lech Kaczyński, who emphasized that Europe’s security depends on solidarity, including in the field of energy, in connection with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s visit to Moscow and its context, President K. Nawrocki decided to limit the program of his visit to Hungary exclusively to the summit of the Visegrad Group presidents in Esztergom.” The legacy of former President Lech Kaczyński, who has tragically died during the 2010 Smolensk air crash, seems to be the key to understanding the above decision. His twin brother, co-founder and president of Poland’s Law and Justice Party, Jaroslaw Kaczyński, has ever since kept spreading theories about the crash being a result of explosives on the plane planted by the Russians, despite numerous investigations, including a very thorough one by the Americans, concluding that it was caused by pilot error.
Nevertheless, woe to those who, in Mr. Kaczyński’s eyes, would not support his personal crusade against the Russians.
Prime Minister Orbán would not. The Hungarian government’s decision to refuse military support to embattled Ukraine after the Russian attack has only hardened Mr. Kaczyński’s anti-Orbán stance to the point where it started to stifle the cooperation among the Polish and Hungarian right on the international scene. A typical gesture of hostility was the invitation of the Romanian nationalists (AUR), known for their attacks on the Hungarian minority in Romania, to the ECR group in the European Parliament. The gesture has made it impossible for the Hungarian governing party, Fidesz, to join the group, even though the establishment of the Patriots for Europe bloc, joined by representatives of Kaczyński’s domestic rivals, Konferederacja, has outmaneuvered the resentful PiS President.
The current decision to cancel Karol Nawrocki’s meeting with PM Viktor Orbán has been interpreted by insiders to have been inspired by Jaroslaw Kaczyński’s circles. But the justification that refers to the Hungarian PM’s recent visit to Moscow for energy talks is merely a fig-leaf covering a longer trend. The conservative President of Poland has been in office since August and has already visited ten countries. Hungary was not among them. So far he has not so much as referred to Hungary or a cooperation between Polish and Hungarian conservatives. The snub has been duly noted by Budapest, but a diplomatic decorum was maintained as not to give munition to the European left, and especially to their respective domestic rivals both in Poland or in Hungary. This truce has now been broken by the Law and Order party’s leaders, and that in a manner not seen in Polish-Hungarian relations in living memory.
Of course even right-wing sovereigntist politicians are entitled to have a critical view of Mr. Orbán’s meeting with President Putin on the basis of a principled stance on foreign alliances. Yet given the fact that Mr. Nawrocki had no issues with walking the red carpet with politicians, who have banned national conservatives from participating in elections, such as President Macron of France, or advocating banning conservative parties in their country, such as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the narrative of a principled value-based presidency evaporates quickly as far as Mr. Nawrocki is concerned. Only last week he has shown a complete entente cordiale with Czechia’s globalist President, Petr Pavel, who is currently blocking the nomination of the democratically elected Prime Minister, Andrej Babis, himself incidentally considered a national sovereigntist politician, something that Mr. Nawrocki claims to be.
As things currently stand, the Polish President, and the Jaroslaw Kaczyński lead Law and Justice party’s political allies in Hungary are not Fidesz, but Péter Magyar’s foreign-sponsored opposition Tisza Party. And they have just given a gift to Péter Magyar’s election campaign.
76 years old Jaroslaw Kaczyński’s re-election at the helm of PiS in June this year did not bode well not only for the cooperation within the Visegrad 4 alliance, but also for Polish Conservatives. The party has lost the elections to arch-Europhile Donald Tusk in 2023, and has since lost some 6-7 percent. Other Polish conservative movements, both named imaginatively as Conferederation, both highly critical of PiS’ Ukraine policy, have doubled their popularity.
Among them, Polish Konfederacja MEP, Ewa Zajączkowska-Hernik has harshly criticized the decision to cancel the meeting between Karol Nawrocki and Viktor Orbán. In a social media post she said that “President Karol Nawrocki should not cancel his meeting with Prime Minister Viktor Orban! It is a mistake. In the fight for normality in an increasingly tyrannical EU, we must build strong alliances with everyone who defends the sovereignty of nation states! We must not succumb to the propaganda hysteria of Tusk’s coalition, which delights in calling everyone who does not fawn over Ukraine and does not want to give them everything for nothing “Russian agents.” Orbán met with Putin? So did Trump! Should meetings with him also be canceled? Of course not. Let us not fall into the absurdities resulting from their pathetic propaganda, let us put Polish interests above it all and finally start building our strong international position! Courageous partners such as Viktor Orban are important because the EU pseudo-elites, led by Ursula von der Leyen, are increasingly tightening the screws with their madness and going beyond the treaties. … In this frenzy of anti-national lunatics from the EU, Prime Minister Orban has maintained his common sense from the outset and opposed it.”
The entire ill-advised snub will not only play into the hands of the European left, but it is already used to attack Prime Minister Viktor Orbán by the Hungarian opposition and their media empire. Yet the one to come out of this sad affair worst could be Poland’s new president, Mr. Nawrocki himself, who has been coaxed into a position in which he snubbed, and tried to humiliate Poland’s only genuine friend on the world stage, conservative Hungary. This speaks volumes about his lack of autonomy as president, and could undermine his perceived authority as the international voice of conservative Poland. In this he is indistinguishable from his domestic foe, Donald Tusk’s globalist political circles. Neither of them can serve Polish national interest by joining the European self-destructive left in their anti-Hungarian crusade.
With “conservatives” like this, who needs liberals?
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Featured Image: Office of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Wikimedia Commons
The post Meet the Man Who Cancelled the Orbán-Nawrocki Meeting appeared first on Hungary Today.
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