Since the death of his notorious twin brother in the Smolensk air crash, former Polish Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński has drawn attention for his wild speculation about the causes of the plane crash, which claimed the lives of 96 people, including many members of Poland’s elite. Indeed, many Poles have become increasingly tired of his paranoid rhetoric.
Now, Jarosław Kaczyński has grabbed the headlines with a whole new batch of conspiracy theories. And this time he’s writing about Poland’s neighbor Germany.
Among the wild claims in his new book, The Poland of Our Dreams, Kaczyński suggests that Berlin would like to annex the areas in western Poland that used to belong to Germany until the end of World War II. “(German Chancellor Angela) Merkel belongs to a generation of German politicians that would like to reinstate Germany’s imperial power,” writes Kaczyński. “A strategic axis with Moscow is part of that.” Poland can only be an obstacle in that respect, he continues, adding that Germany would need to “subdue our country, one way or another.”
He also expressed his opposition to German investment in western Poland. “We could wake up to a smaller Poland one day,” he warns.
Most outlandishly, Kaczyński also insinuates in the book that the feared East German secret police, the Stasi, could have helped Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, gain power. “I don’t think that the awarding of the chancellorship to Angela Merkel was pure chance,” he writes — conveniently ignoring the fact that Merkel became chancellor in 2005, some 15 years after the Stasi ceased to exist.
When asked about the claim in an interview with the Polish edition of Newsweek, Kaczyński cryptically remarked that Merkel “knows what I want to say.” When pressed by the interviewer, he suggested they “drop the subject.”
The comments have raised eyebrows in Poland. “It’s a very strange statement, because Chancellor Merkel won democratic elections,” said Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski. “I believe Kaczyński is showing that he no longer really believes that he will be prime minister again.” The comments, he said, would make it impossible for Kaczyński to “function normally in European politics.”
“The suggestion that some kind of dark forces were behind the election of the chancellor in a neighboring country, and not the votes of the electorate, is not only an insult to the chancellor herself, but also to the German voters,” wrote the left-leaning newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza in an editorial.
A Return to the “Cold War” of 2005–2007
The new broadsides seem like a return to the days of 2005–2007, when Kaczyński’s conservative Law and Justice party were in power and ties between Poland and Germany suffered a major setback. Politicians and media on both sides traded insults, including the famous depiction of the Kaczyński twins as potatoes by Berlin’s notoriously irreverent left-leaning newspaper Die Tageszeitung.
Relations between the two countries have recovered since Donald Tusk became prime minister in 2007. Kaczyński criticized that development during his election campaign, accusing Tusk’s government of having “raised the white flag.”
“The Germans Want to Take Our State Away”
Kaczyński has recently intensified his anti-German rhetoric. In an interview, he declared the European Union and Germany to be political adversaries of Poland. “The Germans want to take our state away,” Kaczyński said, according to Deutsche Welle. He accused the EU of trying to subjugate Poland through so-called reforms. Brussels, he claimed, is using financial leverage and alleged rule-of-law mechanisms to erode Poland’s national sovereignty. France, he added, is also among the actors. “Everything that began after World War II is supposed to end with a great German victory in the form of a new empire,” Kaczyński stated.
Prime Minister Tusk countered during a visit to Kraków: “I will certainly not allow anyone to quarrel Poland with Europe. Our place is in Europe.”
In a fiercely contested campaign, Kaczyński’s anti-German rhetoric serves as a tool to mobilize the conservative electorate. Yet it also risks alienating moderate voters and ultimately isolating Poland on the European stage fueling extreme paranoia in Polish society. The question remains open: whether Germany, after such aggressive moves, will genuinely act on its imperial ambitions.
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