HASith Brussels, Berlin is the European capital which welcomed the results of the Polish legislative elections on October 15 with the most satisfaction. In Germany, the victory of Donald Tusk’s pro-European coalition against the ultraconservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, in power since 2015, fuels great hope: that of peaceful relations after years of high tensions linked to historical disputes. unresolved, to accepted political disagreements and to fueled geostrategic differences.
” Relationships [entre les deux pays] are going through their most serious crisis since the end of the Cold War”noted the former German ambassador to Warsaw (2014-2020) Rolf Nikel, in January, during a presentation in Berlin of his book Feinde, Fremde, Freunde. Polen und die Deutschen (“enemies, foreigners, friends, Poland and the Germans”, Langen Müller, untranslated).
The electoral campaign did not help anything, the PiS presenting itself as the defender of a Poland threatened by a Germany which would seek to dominate the European Union (EU) and of which Donald Tusk would be the puppet. An argument summarized in a video clip addressed to voters before the vote: “Poland or Germany, you have the choice. » Already in 2021, the president of PiS, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, had accused Berlin of wanting to transform the EU into “IVe Reich ».
The PiS “anti-German campaign”
If Donald Tusk is named prime minister, which seems most likely, Germany should stop being the target of the Germanophobic rhetoric to which Warsaw has become accustomed in recent years. It can also hope to put under a bushel a dispute which has poisoned bilateral relations for six years: that of the reparations that it should pay for the horrors committed in Poland during the Second World War.
Put on the agenda by PiS in 2017, the issue led, in 2022, to a request from the Polish government demanding from Berlin the pharaonic sum of 1,300 billion euros. At the time, Donald Tusk denounced a “anti-German campaign” carried out by the PiS for electoral purposes: “Kaczynski himself said it would take generations, so it’s not a question of money for the Poles. »
Prime Minister, will the leader of the centrist Civic Platform (PO) party go so far as to withdraw the request made by his predecessor, Mateusz Morawiecki? In any case, he will not make it his hobby horse. For Berlin, the question of reparations was definitively settled in 1990 by the “2 + 4” treaty signed on the eve of reunification by the two German states and the four victors of the war (United States, United Kingdom, France). , USSR).
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