Waitergate Strikes Warsaw — Again

WARSAW, Poland — Last June, the weekly news magazine Wprost dropped a bombshell on Polish politics when it reported on fragments of conversations between top government officials secretly recorded at exclusive Warsaw restaurants in which they discussed controversial political, economic, and international matters, often in crass and crude terms. A year later, the explosions continue.

On June 8, files from an investigation into last year’s tape scandal by the state prosecutor’s office were published on Facebook by Zbigniew Stonoga, an anti-establishment businessman. The material consisted of almost 2,500 pages of documents. The juiciest snippets of the conversations had already been published last summer. But the resurgence of the Waitergate scandal, as it is sometimes called, still could cost the ruling Civic Platform party its grip on power as a parliamentary election in October looms.

The party is already reeling from the shock of the election last month of Andrzej Duda, the socially conservative Law and Justice opposition party’s presidential candidate. The 43-year-old Duda, previously a little-known member of the European Parliament, ousted the government-backed incumbent Bronislaw Komorowski, who began the race as the clear favorite.

Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz was ready to grit her teeth and rally her party and its supporters over the summer ahead of the election in the fall. But the resurgence of the wiretapping scandal has added to tensions within her party, where morale was already low after the presidential defeat. Speaking to the daily Gazeta Wyborcza after the , one of her close colleagues likened the situation in Civic Platform to “a fire in a brothel during a flood.”

Kopacz responded to the latest leaks quickly, announcing two days later the resignation of a series of senior officials who were implicated, including three ministers and three deputy ministers. It was a pre-emptive measure. “We decided together that we cannot wait any longer,” she said at a press conference, citing the approaching campaign season and how the opposition might try and use the resurgence of the tape scandal against her government.

The recently-elected Duda, who will be sworn in on Aug. 6, was quick to dismiss the resignations as no more than a “euphemistic reshuffle.” Seizing on the revived scandal to score political points for the Law and Justice party, he said that “soap operas like the tape scandal […] compromise the Polish state, political class and prosecutor’s office.”

The most prominent casualty of the scandal is Radoslaw Sikorski, the former foreign minister, who stepped down as speaker of parliament. Sikorski played a starring role in last year’s tape scandal, famously dismissing Poland’s alliance with the United States as “worthless,” and telling a confidant, over a lavish meal at a Warsaw restaurant, “We’ll get into a conflict with the Russians and the Germans and we’ll think that everything is super because we gave the Americans a blowjob.”

His words, leaked shortly after President Barack Obama visited Warsaw and while he was still foreign minister, raised eyebrows internationally. But back in Poland, some were more aghast at the price of the meal: 1352 zloty (around $450) — roughly the minimum net monthly wage.

A year ago, Sikorski was still being tipped as a possible candidate for a role as the EU’s foreign policy chief. For Sikorski, the months after Waitergate were punctuated by minor political scandals unrelated to the tapes. When Kopacz became prime minister, she moved him from the foreign ministry to parliament, appointing him speaker — one of Poland’s top political posts, but with limited opportunity to pursue his passion for diplomacy.

As he stepped down on June 10, Sikorski said he was doing so out of concern for his party. “[Civic Platform’s] chances in the elections are more important to me than personal ambitions,” he explained. Still, his career in Polish politics may not be over yet. In announcing his resignation, Sikorski said that he would be heading Civic Platform’s parliamentary list in his native Bydgoszcz, in northwestern Poland.

Civic Platform will need all the help it can get if it wants to win in October. Its longstanding rival, Law and Justice, which is conservative on social issues but leans left on economic matters, is hungry to win after eight years in opposition. The victory of its candidate Duda in last month’s elections has boosted the party’s confidence — and ratings in the polls.

At the same time, Civic Platform faces a new threat in the form of Pawel Kukiz, a former rock star who came third in the first round of the presidential election with 21 percent of the vote, running as an independent. Recent polls suggest that if he sets up a political movement it will take more votes than Civic Platform in October. A recent poll gives a potential anti-establishment movement led by Kukiz 24 percent of the vote, behind Law and Justice’s 30 percent but ahead of the ruling party’s 19 percent.

These trends in Polish politics have less to do with an ideological shift toward the right than with voters’ dissatisfaction with Civic Platform. For its first few years, the party was able to get by with its mild, centrist stance that avoided controversial topics and focused on gradually improving living standards, aided by EU funds. But today many Poles feel they are not getting their share of this economic success.

Though Kopacz has been prime minister since last fall, her predecessor Donald Tusk is still lurking behind the scenes. Last year, he just about succeeded in sweeping the tape scandal under the carpet before jetting off to Brussels to become president of the European Council last autumn. A poll conducted shortly after the first recordings were leaked last year found that almost one in two Poles thought that Tusk and his government should resign because of the tapes. And yet Tusk was able to keep his government intact.

Since leaving Warsaw, Tusk has become a sort of “wise old man” of Polish politics, watching his old party’s decline from afar. A widely-shared meme shows him sitting at an EU meeting with his face buried behind his clutched hands, with the caption “I only left them alone for a moment.” Yet observers suspect that Tusk was not quite as detached as he made out; one Polish tabloid suggested that he advised Kopacz on which ministers should lose their jobs.

Either way, Civic Platform’s time may be running out. Kopacz’s response to the leaks was “both hurried and delayed,” says Leszek Jazdzewski, a liberal commentator and editor-in-chief of the journal Liberté!. The “safe but unimaginative” new ministers she announced on June 15 “will not give Civic Platform the fresh start it so needs.”

As Kopacz struggles to contain the mess from the latest leaks, her party’s rivals may find that they have a fairly lazy summer ahead of them. In the presidential election, energetic campaigns by both Law and Justice’s candidate Duda and anti-establishment rocker Kukiz paid off. But as the parliamentary election draws closer, the best thing for them may be to sit back, pour themselves a cool drink and watch Civic Platform sink further into the quagmire.

Photo credit: EPA/PAWEL SUPERNAK