Poland's ruling camp doing its best to get EU recovery funds says leader

Poland's ruling United Right coalition has been doing everything it can to secure billions of euros in EU funding, the leader of the major coalition partner has said.

Poland is due to receive EUR 23.9 billion in grants and EUR 11.5 billion in cheap loans from the EU's post-pandemic Recovery and Resilience Facility.

But the EC has blocked Poland's access to the funding due to a rule-of-law dispute, despite the fact that the Commission has approved Poland's National Recovery Plan (KPO), which outlines how the government will spend the money.

The EC has set a number of conditions, or 'milestones,' for Poland to meet before the funding can be unblocked, one of which demands that Poland should reverse, amend or withdraw changes to the judiciary that Brussels feels threaten the rule of law.

"But it is necessary to restore the rule of law in the European Union and lay down regulations, in accordance with which, what is permitted in one country should be also permitted in all countries," Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the Law and Justice party (PiS), told a Polish public television and radio programme on Thursday.

"This is a huge sum and it will surely help us," he said, referring to the recovery funds, adding that the coalition government "was doing everything it can" to get the money.

Kaczyński also said that there was "a large sphere of lawlessness in the European Union," and expressed hope that the time would come "to rebuild the rule of law" there.

"When this has happened, everything will be settled," the PiS leader continued, adding that Poland had to be in the EU and fight for this change.

"We must be patient in order to be able to change much for the better in the EU," Kaczyński said, while claiming that at the moment, Germany with its "neo-imperial" plans, and France's, to some extent, had a decisive position in the Union.

"But, in new situations, these plans will turn out no longer topical," Kaczyński concluded.