Poland post-vote turmoil: Polish president 'shocked' after arrests of lawmaker allies
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Transcript
00:00 Hello there Armin. Tell us a little bit more about who these men are that have been arrested
00:06 and what's the overall context of this showdown?
00:09 So these two men are senior members of Law and Justice, that's the party that was in
00:14 power in Poland for eight years until last month. They had been convicted, then pardoned
00:22 by President Duda in 2015, but that pardon was basically undone two years later by the
00:29 Supreme Court, but then there was another twist where the Constitutional Court said
00:34 that the pardon was actually okay. So it was a very long-running legal drama, but what
00:41 this speaks to now, Charlie, in this very polarised Polish society that you have at
00:47 the moment is essentially kind of two parallel legal and political universes. And you see
00:54 that reflected in, for example, the dual interpretations of the presidential pardon, but also two heads
01:01 of public TV, doubles in the Constitutional Court, this constant duality, legal and political,
01:09 because of these two very divided camps, the camp of the Conservatives and the camp of
01:14 the Liberals, led by Donald Husk, who's just come back as Prime Minister after many years
01:19 out of power. And of course, he has an agenda to try to, what he says is to depoliticise
01:25 the courts, the institutions, the state-run companies, and there's obviously attempts
01:30 by the former government to try to slow that down.
01:34 Right, because the former government had, many people saw it, sort of stacked the deck
01:39 in their favour when it came to the legal system, media, so many areas of public life
01:45 there. So you said that Donald Tusk, you know, he recently returned to power as Prime Minister,
01:51 but are political crises like these just going to keep happening as he tries to put his new
01:56 agenda in place?
01:57 Well, you mentioned President Duda, Charlie, in your introduction. He's a key person to
02:03 watch because he actually has a lot of power. The Polish presidency is not just some, you
02:07 know, symbolic thing. He can veto certain things, he can send things to the Constitutional
02:14 Court where they would be struck down, at least as the court is constituted now, and
02:19 presidential elections are not until 2025. So for anyone that is hoping for an entire
02:25 kind of Tusk-aligned political system, that clearly is not going to happen for another
02:31 couple of years. And then on the international front, yes, we've seen some changes in tone
02:37 when it comes to EU summits that Donald Tusk has come back to. He himself, of course, a
02:42 former president of the EU Council. So yes, a different tone, which is welcoming to some
02:48 of his EU partners. But on the more ambitious EU reforms, you've got to remember that Tusk
02:53 leads a coalition at home. And like with all coalitions, we've seen this with the German
02:58 coalitions. There are significant differences and nuances. Some members of his coalition
03:03 want to go much further on things like EU treaty reform. Others don't. They're a bit
03:08 more conservative about EU reforms. So it's not a monolithic thing. And then, of course,
03:16 on the key issue of trying to improve Poland's relations with Ukraine, which have taken a
03:21 nosedive over the last year, that's also proving very difficult. Tusk faces seemingly some
03:26 forces that are beyond his control. He wants to improve those relations. But Polish truckers
03:31 and farmers have in the last few weeks defied him. So he's kind of caught between the demands
03:38 of his own truckers, particularly, and farmers, and his desire to improve relations with Ukraine.
03:44 All right. A very dramatic story. We'll definitely be keeping our eye on it here at France 24.
03:49 Armin Djordjian, our Europe editor, thanks for bringing us the latest.
03:52 Thank you.