OPINION:
As President Trump hosts Viktor Orbán this week, the European Union is threatening to suspend Hungary’s voting rights in the EU. In just the last few months, we have seen the most popular politician banned and imprisoned in France, the presidential election annulled and the all-but-certain winner canceled in Romania, the largest opposition party in Germany about to be delegalized, and, across the channel, in the UK, thousands of ordinary citizens arrested for social media posts and even silent prayers.
Nowhere, however, has this anti-democratic assault been as systematic and severe as in Poland, America’s staunchest ally on the continent, where, in December 2023, Donald Tusk’s left-wing coalition, allied with Brussels, unseated the conservative Law and Justice party after eight years in power. In an act of crude retributive justice, Mr. Tusk and his cronies have immediately engaged in a series of radical policy reversals and a brutal, wide-ranging campaign of repression and persecution of their political opponents.
During their time in government, Law and Justice reformed the judiciary, refused to submit to the European Union’s policies of centralized control, open borders, mass migration, woke ideology, and radical gender dogma. This earned Polish conservatives the enmity of the EU. Rejected by the Polish electorate, Mr. Tusk and his allies collaborated with Brussels to launch an unprecedented media and international court harassment campaign against the Polish government. For the first time in the history of the EU, Article 7 proceedings were invoked to suspend Poland’s voting rights and its EU funding was withheld.
Perhaps not coincidentally, this was all reversed when Mr. Tusk, with EU backing and support from U.S. Democrats and USAID, became prime minister.
Mr. Tusk’s crackdown on civil liberties began with the forceable takeover of opposition media, including an armed assault on the public television station. Then came the illegal impeachment of the chairman of the National Broadcasting Council, a vocal critic of the EU digital censorship plans and defender of free speech and media pluralism. The unconstitutional capture of the prosecution and the judiciary brought the courts under government control.
Silencing opposition media and the independent judiciary wasn’t enough. The nation’s largest opposition party was defunded just as the country was gearing up for a heavily contested presidential campaign. All these actions were carried out in contravention of a series of binding orders issued by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal.
Mr. Tusk himself does not dispute the illegality of his actions. In a speech to the Senate, he explained that Poland was transitioning to a “militant democracy” using an “iron broom” to sweep away the opposition. He conceded that while his decisions “might not be strictly speaking legal,” they are “necessary to achieve political goals.”
The government’s vendetta against its opponents has been as aggressive as one would expect from a regime unconcerned with the legalities — reports of the treatment of political detainees include accusations of torture and the denial of counsel.
When faced with the threat of an imminent arrest, Marcin Romanowski, Poland’s former Deputy Minister of Justice, a member of parliament and one of the most outspoken critics of the Tusk regime, decided to flee the country last December and continue the fight in exile. Upon his arrival in Hungary, he was quickly granted political asylum – making him the first political refugee from Poland since the fall of Communism in 1989.
Mr. Romanowski’s freedom and safety still hang in the balance. His flight prompted Mr. Tusk’s ally Leszek Miller – a one-time member of the Central Committee under Communist rule – to excoriate the police for their failure to arrest him and suggest that they should “bring him back to Poland, [p]referably in the trunk of a car.” In a recent interview, Mr. Tusk’s Minister of Justice endorsed that idea and explained that a new “shadow hunters” police unit would be able to “pursue just such fugitives.”
In the borderless European Union, this is no idle threat. Top EU officials who spent eight years trying to return Donald Tusk to power in Poland are unlikely to object to any of his methods, regardless of how questionable they may be.
The United States can help. President Trump can grant Marcin Romanowski political refugee status in the United States before the Tusk regime makes good on its threats to bring him back to Poland to face weaponized justice. Neither Mr. Tusk nor his allies in Brussels fear censure from Western mainstream media. Still, the direct intervention of the United States has the power to protect this European Union dissident.
• Anna Wellisz is the President of the Edmund Burke Foundation
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