Poland upset with EU over budget

Bloomberg

The Polish government is getting increasingly upset with European Union efforts to add conditions to budget funding, but the issue isn’t enough for them to consider quitting the bloc, a deputy minister said.
While Hungary and Poland have long flouted democratic values that other European countries hold dear, officials in Brussels have struggled to discipline them as each can veto punishments against the other.
That changed with a recent initiative tying development cash to rule-of-law standards, prompting the pair to threaten to block the EU’s seven-year budget, including $900 million of pandemic aid.
“Poles are wise and they don’t blame the whole EU,” Waldemar Buda, deputy minister in charge of EU funds, told TVN24 private television. “They understand that it’s only a group of leaders who are absolutely liberal and left-wing and impose their views on all countries.”
Government officials in Warsaw have long said that talk of a “Polexit” is merely “political fiction,” even as Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said this month that being in the bloc “sometimes benefits Poland, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
With a deadline looming to approve the spending plan, Hungary and Poland wager the EU will bend. The countries, which stand to receive more than 180 billion euros in the coming years, call the new rules an attack on their sovereignty.
But despite the health crisis and last-minute wrangling over a Brexit deal with the UK, the EU is adamant it won’t cave, and has ratcheted up the rhetoric in a similar fashion. EU government envoys in Brussels were expected to discuss the stalemate on Monday.
One EU diplomat said Hungary and Poland are moving
towards deeper isolation. France’s ambassador to the bloc warned the quarrel could signal a “fundamental rupture” that raises questions about the EU’s very future, according to people present at a meeting of envoys in Brussels last week.
The clash has been building since Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban began cracking down on independent media and bringing the courts under political control a decade ago. The EU objected but found itself largely powerless to stop him.
Instead, he has spurned the bloc’s values on everything from education to immigrants, likened the EU to the Soviet Union for meddling in Hungary’s affairs and painted his country as a victim of a liberal plot to undermine Europe’s “Christian heritage.”