Election Brings Poland Closer to EU

Bronislaw Komorowski, the candidate for the Civic Platform Party, was elected the new president of Poland on July 4, setting Poland up for a cozier relationship with Europe and Russia, and signaling frostier relations with Washington.

Komorowski, Poland’s acting president and parliamentary speaker, won 53 percent of the vote in the runoff elections. His opponent, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, twin brother of the late President Lech Kaczynski, won 47 percent of the vote.

The result may herald a shift for Poland away from the United States and toward Europe. The office of president is a largely ceremonial position, but the president can veto legislation. Lech Kaczynski previously used this veto to keep Poland from moving toward Europe.

Komorowki is from the same party as Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk and therefore is unlikely to obstruct Tusk’s shift toward Europe and Russia. He “shares Tusk’s vision of a Poland firmly anchored in the EU, working closely with Germany and trying to improve long-troubled ties with Russia,” writes Time.

Despite Europe’s economic turmoil, Komorowski wants Poland to adopt the euro as its currency. His views are broadly in line with younger, city-dwelling Poles who see Poland’s future in Europe.

Komorowski is also less supportive of the U.S. In the election, he promised to pull Polish troops out of Afghanistan by 2012.

Since he took office in 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama has sidelined America’s former staunch ally. “The European policy of the Obama administration is overtly focused on western Europe, France and Germany in particular, while Central and Eastern European states are treated with what amounts to diplomatic neglect,” writes the Center for European Policy Analysis, an independent, non-profit research institute. “While President Obama visited western Europe six times during his first year in office, he has yet to make it to Poland; and he blindsided the Poles with his Russia ‘reset’ policy.”

With the Civic Platform Party controlling both the major offices in Poland, Warsaw will no longer slow down European integration, nor be an obstacle for European (especially German) rapprochement with Russia.

In 1976 Mr. Armstrong wrote, “The cover story of this week’s Time shows many Eastern European nations within the ‘Iron Curtain’ of communism, looking at Western prosperity, becoming more and more dissatisfied with Russian domination. This sets the stage for some of these Communist nations—possibly East Germany, Poland, Romania, etc.—breaking with Moscow in the event of the resurrection of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ and coming into the new United Europe” (co-worker and member letter, April 22, 1976).

These nations have already broken away from Moscow. The Trumpet, and its predecessor the Plain Truth, have long forecast that 10 nations will dominate Europe—probably five from the west, and five from the east—in a kind of United States of Europe. The first part of these forecasts have come true: The eastern nations of Europe have broken away from Russia. Now watch for five of them to develop especially close relations with western Europe. For more information on this prophecy, see our article “Is a World Dictator About to Appear?”