European Parliament as a new inquisition
Czeslaw Ryszka
Particular parties are gradually revealing their candidates in elections to the European Parliament to be held on 7 June 2009. The Polish Peasants’ Party selected their candidates from among almost only their members. The Citizen’s Platform has not taken final decisions yet but now and then we hear the names of some known personalities, e.g. Danuta Huebner, Jan Rokita or Marian Krzaklewski (the latter is to open the list of the candidates in the region of Podkarpacie). I think that the only reason for choosing these people is to win the elections (it is astonishing to see the name of the leader of the Workers’ Union Solidarity on the list of the party that completely ignores the demands of the workers’ union activists). The biggest opposition party Law and Justice is supposed to change its plans and most likely it will promote several of its known MPs (earlier it was said that no MPs, except for Zbigniew Ziobro, will become candidates for the European Parliament). According to me these candidates will include the popular MPs, for example Jacek Kurski, Arkadiusz Mularczyk, Pawel Kowal or Boleslaw Piecha. Certainly, many of us wonder what the position of our MPs in the European Parliament is since in fact, we know very little about their activities, about the bills to be voted (there are old jokes about the candidates discussing the shape of bananas or cucumbers, the length of painter’s ladder or the colour of stable walls). Our ignorance about their activities is justifiable since most of the EU decisions are taken in the European Commission, the Council of Europe or in the Council of the European Union. The European Parliament itself plays the role of the fig leaf for most non-democratic EU procedures. Perhaps this is the reason why elections to the European Parliament do not attract many voters. However, it would be good to have among the fifty Polish Eurodeputies those who are dedicated to their homeland, who defend Poland’s interests. It will be especially important if the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified and as the result the state called European Union will replace the European community. Some people do not remember that the Treaty of Maastricht signed in 1992, which gave birth to the present form of the European Community, was called ‘the Treaty on the European Union’ and not the treaty of the Union. Only now the Treaty of Lisbon states that ‘the Union replaces the European Community and is its legal successor.’ Undoubtedly, the post-Lisbon European Union, receiving the status of legal person, becomes an international organisation following the pattern of a state, the head of which is president of the European Council. There will also be the post of the high EU representative who in practice becomes a minister of foreign affairs. The European Union will also have its independent legislative, executive and judicial authorities, which will decide about the majority of laws of the 27 member states. In this context the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon keeps the Eurocrats awake at night. Without the treaty one cannot transform the present European Community into one state and one cannot establish a new legal order in the EU, i.e. to give it a constitutional form of supranational federation, completely unlike the present Community, but resembling such federations as the USA or Germany. I am not an opponent of the EU. It is good to have the EU but it should be a democratic structure governed by people elected by societies and not by the non-elected and yet those who govern. But is democracy on the level of 27 federated countries possible? That’ why, despite these objections it will be extremely important what candidates we elect for the European Parliament in June 2009. Will these be honest Poles, having strong characters, who are not attracted to big European money, but those who are also patriots, adhering to the national tradition, knowing the Polish interests and promoting them in every situation? I pose this question because one cannot manifest national solidarity in the European forum. One cannot create national fractions but only ideological clubs. Unfortunately, the most influential are the fractions of the European liberals and the left-wing that uses the European Parliament to pass anti-family bills. An example of this is the hunt against Prof. Rocco Buttiglione whom the Italian government proposed as a candidate for an EU commissioner. During the hearing in the European Parliament nobody questioned his competences but the socialists, the liberal democrats, the green party and the communists decided that he was not worthy to take this function because he said what the Catechism of the Catholic Church wrote about homosexualism, that it was a sin. If such a criterion had been used in the past neither Adenauer nor De Gasperi nor Schuman could have been European commissioners (after all non-discrimination of homosexuals as persons is different than creating privileged conditions for homosexualism as a style of life – and this is what the European Parliament continually requires from the state members). Speaking briefly, candidates for the European Parliament should realise that they go to the institution that is a kind of a new inquisition that is not interested in one’s conscience but aims at establishing some kind of a new atheistic religion of the Union. As Prof. Buttiglione evaluated it rightly ‘for this new atheistic religion there is only one truth, namely that no truth exists.’ The Scottish martyr from the 17th century Prince Gordon when he was proposed to save his life and be free if he denied his faith he was to say that it was easier to separate his head from his body than to separate his heart from his Lord. Could the Polish Catholic Eurodeputies as well as the candidates for the European Parliament utter similar words? We should ask them about the matters of conscience and values during the election campaign that is about to be launched because the biggest threat for Europe is not Islam but nihilism, fear or shame of mentioning the name of God in the preamble to its constitution.
"Niedziela" 14/2009