A GAME WITH THE EU FUNDS
MIROSŁAW PIOTROWSKI
The opposition does not give up and because it did not manage to take control of the Constitutional Tribunal, it chose Brussels and Strasburg as the main field of a battle.
Recently, in the corridor of the European Parliament in Brussels I saw again chair-people of the Civic Platform party and the Modern party. ‘Why do they visit us so often?’- I asked a euro-deputy not from my political party. ‘Be aware – he told me – they want to frame us up in unused funds’. The actual purpose of the visit was not a secret for my interlocutor who contacts the chairperson of the EP Martin Schulz every day. The opposition does not give up and because it did not manage to take control of the Constitutional, it chose Brussels and Strasburg as the main field of a battle. It seems that here one feels more confident in one’s own country. its activist is a commissioner in the European Commission, the former chief of the Civic Platform party stands at the helm of the European Council, and euro-deputies of this formation take pride in their belonging to the biggest political group in the EP. So far the main trump of their Europeanism were not only personal political connections, patting on the back but also the EU grants. Poles’ imagination was raised by information about European funds grabbed by us. Officially, paying one zloty to the budget of the Union, we received three extra ones. Long time ago many people pointed to the fact that in practice we hardly broke even. After the change of the government in Poland the opposition scared that we would lose EU privileges. And for a few months we have been informed that this year Poland will have become the first net payer to the EU budget. The reason is to be a delay in beginning spending EU funds in a new perspective, which has lasted since 2014. And at that time our country was governed by the Civic Platform party with the Polish Peasant Party. Did they toss a cuckoo’s egg to the new authority? I think that the issue has not been solved yet and there are a lot of mechanisms started in accordance with a good will. As the English say: ‘where’s the will, there is the way’. I remember that ten years ago, when Poland was still entering the EU, the prime minister at that time, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz invited us, euro-deputies for a closed meeting in the Office of Ministers’ Council. He told us then that the prime minister of Great Britain Tony Blair, asking him for support in relation to a British initiative, assured him that he would pay it back with a particular information how to reach for EU funds granted to Poland, which had been secured in such a way so that we would find it difficult to use them. Would this security have been implemented deliberately, in order to overcome EU partners? And if so, did the game after 10 years end?
AA
„Niedziela” 11/2016