The commission is not working anyway, because at the end of November 2023 the parliament dismissed all its members and did not appoint new ones. It could have done so by resolution, and President Duda has no way of forcing the reinstatement of the former members appointed by PiS. Either the Sejm will not elect anyone and Lex Tusk – as this law was called when the commission was created – will remain a dead letter. Or it will elect people who correspond to the current majority, and not to the presidential camp. At the same time, a new team has been created by government regulation to investigate the influence of Russia and Belarus.
The only thing the president achieved with his veto was an embarrassing attempt to use agreements with Russia to attack Tusk’s government between 2007 and 2014. This was from the beginning the almost explicit objective of the act, hence the public’s nickname “lex Tusk”. The administrative offensive of the commission was accompanied by a propaganda offensive by TVP, in the form of the series “Reset” – so unreliable that the experts who spoke in it distanced themselves from what they saw on the screen.
The president pretends he doesn’t know what’s going on
The law was passed by the Sejm thanks to the PiS majority last year, shortly before the parliamentary elections. PiS did not even specifically hide the fact that its aim was to present the party’s opponents as people acting under Russian influence and thus posing a threat to Polish security.
The president has behaved strangely towards this bill from the very beginning. The first version of the law gave the commission clearly unconstitutional powers: for example, it could effectively revoke the right to hold public office of those it considered to be under Russian influence. At most, this decision could be appealed to an administrative court. According to lawyers, this did not give people deprived of their rights by the commission sufficient tools to defend themselves. There were voices that introducing the law in this form would give the government majority a tool to eliminate political opponents by administrative means.
The president, although he was supposed to theoretically act as the “guardian of the constitution,” signed the “lex Tusk” in this form. What’s more, he did so almost immediately after the bill reached his desk. And then, within a few days, he changed his mind and introduced many significant amendments to the law that were supposed to eliminate the most offensive provisions. It all seemed simply not serious: one might wonder whether the president only understood what he had signed after the fact, or whether he withdrew under the influence of phone calls from allies concerned about the state of democracy in Poland.
Now the president is not serious either. Justifying the veto over several pages, he explains that Russian influence is a significant problem in Poland. While it must be acknowledged that all parties to the political dispute recognize this, the currently operating team was created only on the basis of a regulation and not a law, which gives it a weaker legal basis and makes it dependent on the government.
Meanwhile, the Commission has not yet completed its work and the recommendations set out in its interim report must be implemented. In particular, as the presidential document emphasises, those concerning the activities of the secret services, the review of Polish energy policy in the field of cooperation with Russia, the analysis of Russian disinformation in Poland and the influence of this country on Polish non-governmental organisations and our foreign policy.
The justification for the veto is bureaucratic and concerns state authority. However, it is difficult to take them seriously when the president pretends not to understand the purpose of the commission he is defending: to accuse PiS’s political opponents of supporting Russia. The main point of the partial report is not the recommendations regarding Russian disinformation, but the recommendation that politicians such as Donald Tusk, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz and Tomasz Siemoniak should not be entrusted with positions related to state security, due to the agreement that Poland signed with the Russian Federal Government during their previous governments. It is obvious that the commission that issued such a recommendation is not suited to examine Russia’s influence on an agreement between the parties.
This way Russia can easily play against us
In a sense, for purely political and psychological reasons, the president’s veto can be understood. If the president had signed the law, he would have admitted that the “lex Tusk” was a terrible law – and not only had he signed it, but he had also authored the amendment that gave the law its final form. The president had also just signed a number of acts adopted by the Sejm and given his consent for Piotr Serafin to run for the post of Polish European Commissioner. So perhaps he felt he needed to do something to mark his distance from the government.
The problem is that we should not expect anyone but the head of state to be able to overcome partisan logic. All the more so because the problem of Russian influence in Poland is real and we will not be able to deal with it as long as both sides of the political dispute use it to delegitimize their opponents.
PiS is incomparably more guilty here, a party that has “lex Tusk” in its books and has already used the tragedy in Smolensk to argue that Tusk’s collusion with Putin is somehow mysteriously to blame for the downing of the presidential plane. Since adopting the “lex Tusk”, PiS has not changed its attitude at all. This was visible in the reaction of the party and its media base to the Pablo Gonazles/Paul Rubtsov affair. Jarosław Kaczyński’s party treated it as an opportunity to launch thoughtless attacks on the journalistic and activist community, especially those who criticised PiS’s policy on the border with Belarus, which it tried to reduce to acting in favour of and under the influence of Russia. PiS had nothing to say about how to protect the public sphere and opinion-forming institutions from the penetration of Russian agents.
In Jacek Kaczmarski’s song “Rejtan, or the Ambassador’s Report”, the lyrical subject – Tsarina Catherine’s ambassador to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Sejm Partition – reports to St. Petersburg about the political situation in Poland: “playing with them is not politics, it is mass child-rearing.” If, instead of actually building mechanisms that ensure Poland’s immunity from various hostile actions by Russia or its allied capitals, such as Minsk, the political class accuses each other of acting under Russia’s influence, the current ambassador will be able to safely send similar reports to Moscow.
