The New York Times - USA (2020-06-28)

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALSUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020 0 N 15

WARSAW — Poland’s govern-
ing party swept to power five
years ago by appealing to a sense
of aggrieved nationalism, and
moved quickly to transform the
state in ways that critics contend
has torn at the fragile fabric of its
democracy.
In May, as the good will enjoyed
by the government in the early
days of the pandemic gave way to
uncertainty and angst, the gov-
erning Law and Justice party was
desperate to hold its presidential
election. With people still shelter-
ing in their homes, officials pro-
posed a hastily arranged “election
by mail.” But with orders already
in to print 30 million mail-in bal-
lots, Law and Justice was forced
to retreat just days before the vote
after being rebuffed by the courts
and the opposition.
On Sunday, voters will finally
get their say.
It will be the first presidential
election in the European Union
since the outbreak of the virus.
And a contest that had looked all
but certain to result in the re-elec-
tion of President Andrzej Duda, a
Law and Justice party loyalist,
has suddenly become too close to
call, polls suggest..
The delay in the planned elec-
tion allowed Warsaw’s mayor,
Rafal Trzaskowski, to enter the
race as the candidate from the
centrist Civic Platform coalition.
Most polls indicate that no candi-
date is likely to secure the 50 per-
cent needed to avoid a runoff elec-
tion.
With just 285 new infections re-
ported on Friday and the virus un-
der control in most parts of the
country, most people will go to
their usual polling stations to vote.
In areas where the virus is still be-
lieved to be spreading — small
communities in the southwestern
part of the country that have expe-
rienced recent outbreaks — the
health ministry is requiring about
10,000 people to vote by mail.
A four-member delegation from
the Parliamentary Assembly of
the Council of Europe is in the
country to monitor the process for
fairness and to assess coronavirus
precautions.
It is impossible to know what
the political fallout of the pan-
demic will ultimately be, but the
election is a reminder that the
many divisions coursing through
Poland and across the continent
have not disappeared because of
the outbreak. In fact, they may
have hardened.
The battle lines are by now fa-
miliar: Poland is grappling with
generational, geographic and cul-
tural divides that have been ag-
gravated by a brand of populism
that has stoked often explosive
passions.
Sunday’s election is widely
viewed as one of the most conse-


quential since the country liber-
ated itself from communist rule
three decades ago and set about
establishing democratic institu-
tions.
Those institutions, according to
E.U. leaders and outside experts,
have been under assault since
Law and Justice came to power.
The Polish government has
pressed ahead with efforts to
overhaul the court system, de-
spite years of warnings from E.U.
leaders that the changes threaten
judicial independence and run
counter to core Western values.
Most recently, the European Un-
ion’s highest court introduced
measures to halt Poland’s widely
criticized forced retirements of
judges.
The same court also found Po-

land broke international law by
drastically increasing logging in
one of Europe’s last primeval
woodlands — just one of many
fights on environmental issues
that have made the country an
outlier in Europe.
And recent efforts by local lead-
ers to create zones “free from
L.G.B.T. ideology” have led some
European Union officials to sug-
gest penalizing Poland by with-
holding pandemic relief funds.
The party has tried to tighten
Europe’s most restrictive policies
on abortions, only to relent after
tens of thousands of protesters
took to the streets. It has also
turned public television into a
propaganda arm of the govern-
ment.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader

of Law and Justice and the party’s
chief architect, has often tried to
cast the long list of concerns as
nothing more than assaults on Po-
land by outsiders who want to
keep the country “on its knees.”
He has accused the opposition of
creating a “whole machine which
makes our compatriots believe
that the good is evil and evil is the
good.”
“The old principle according to
which a lie told numerous times
infiltrates the social awareness
and in that sense becomes the
truth is still present in the actions
of the opposition,” he wrote in a
letter to party leaders on June 9.
Mr. Kaczynski’s party has also
been at the vanguard of casting
the L.G.B.T. rights movement as
symbolic of decadence, rhetoric

that has been blamed for fueling
violence by far-right groups in re-
cent years at pride marches.
Mr. Duda opened his campaign
by vowing to protect “traditional
families.” He launched a wither-
ing attack on gays and lesbians —
a frequent target of the ruling
party — comparing homosexual-
ity with communist ideology that
was “force feeding our children.”
After international criticism,
and in advance of a visit to Wash-
ington on Wednesday to meet
with President Trump, he toned
down his homophobic rhetoric
and focused more on economic is-
sues.
“Look at the pages of history,”
the president told supporters in a
speech on Krakow’s medieval
market square last week. While

the virus has helped drive unem-
ployment up to around 6 percent,
he said, joblessness was still lower
than when the opposition con-
trolled the government. “They
were a worse type of virus than
the coronavirus,” he said.
Mr. Duda hoped that his visit to
the White House on Wednesday
would give his campaign a boost.
But he did not come away with
anything of substance from the
meeting with President Trump
and his opponents were quick to
cast the trip as an act of despera-
tion.
There are 11 candidates in the
race, and should the voting force a
runoff as expected, the top two fin-
ishers will face each other on July
12.
If the opposition rallies around
Mr. Trzaskowski, Warsaw’s may-
or, and he makes it to the runoff,
Mr. Duda will need to draw sup-
port from the country’s far right,
which took in roughly one million
votes in parliamentary elections
— setting the stage for a bitter
fight.
Mr. Trzaskowski made interna-
tional headlines for his vocal sup-
port of L.G.B.T. rights after draw-
ing a third more votes than any
Warsaw mayoral candidate in the
past two decades as turnout
surged in 2014.
Wojciech Przybylski, the editor
in chief of Visegrad Insight, a pol-
icy journal focused on Central Eu-
rope, said that Mr. Trzaskowski
was avoiding a trap that past op-
position candidates had fallen
into.
His campaign slogan boils
down to a simple message:
Enough is enough.
“For the first time in the last five
years, Law and Justice and An-
drzej Duda are unable to generate
new promises that would resonate
in a wider public, and went on the
defensive with a strong negative
campaign,” Mr. Przybylski said.
“While Rafał Trzaskowski effec-
tively captured the momentum
with messages of hope and
change.”
Mr. Trzaskowski, a 48-year-old
multilingual former E.U. minister,
has said he will continue the gen-
erous social welfare programs
that have been at the heart of the
public’s support for Law and Jus-
tice.
But he said he would end an era
dominated by political division.
“Real experts, professionals
have been put on the sidelines,” he
said. “We need professionalism
today; we need people who will
not divide us but will think how to
deal with the most pressing is-
sues.”
“The epidemic has proved that
we are all thinking about the same
thing — health, security, equal op-
portunities in education,” he said
during a recent speech in
Wałbrzych, a former coal mining
city in southwest Poland. “In all of
Poland we have the same prob-
lems.”

Poland’s President Was Seen as a Shoo-In for Re-election. Not Anymore.


AGENCJA GAZETA, VIA REUTERS

KACPER PEMPEL/REUTERS

Joanna Berendt and Anatol
Magdziarz contributed reporting
from Warsaw.


By MARC SANTORA

Clockwise from top: Supporters of President Andrzej Duda at a campaign event in Warsaw on Friday; Mr. Duda, center, in Zakopane
last week; Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski of Warsaw, the presidential candidate of the opposition Civic Platform coalition, on Friday.

GRZEGORZ MOMOT/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK

BEIJING — China’s Commu-
nist Party has long pursued its
agenda in Hong Kong by working
through loyalists among the city’s
top officials, lawmakers and ty-
coons. That behind-the-scenes ap-
proach was a key feature in pre-
serving considerable autonomy
for the territory.
Now, as the party prepares to
grab more power in Hong Kong af-
ter months of sometimes violent
unrest last year, it has pushed
aside even its own allies in the city.
The party’s strategy sends a clear
message to Hong Kong: In quash-
ing challenges to its authority, Bei-
jing won’t hesitate to upend the
delicate political balance at the
core of the city’s identity.
Party-appointed lawmakers in
Beijing are expected to pass a
sweeping security law for Hong
Kong on Tuesday. Yet few among
the city’s Beijing-backed estab-
lishment, even at the highest lev-
els, appear to have seen a draft. Its
top leader, Carrie Lam, and secre-
tary for justice, Teresa Cheng,
have both acknowledged knowing
little about the law beyond what
has been reported in the news.
“Your guess is as good as mine,”
Ms. Cheng said earlier this month.
Bernard Chan, a Hong Kong
cabinet official and member of the
Chinese legislature, said he had
not expected Beijing to act this
spring. “I’m actually surprised,
caught by surprise with the tim-
ing,” he said in an interview.
The sidelining of Hong Kong’s
elite is the latest sign that in his
pursuit for power, China’s top
leader, Xi Jinping, is willing to
defy political norms established
over decades, and will do so
swiftly and secretively. Mr. Xi’s
decision to have Beijing take
charge points to how deeply the
months of protests in Hong Kong
have unsettled his administra-


tion’s confidence in its handpicked
allies in the city.
“There was a mood among
mainland officials that we needed
a second handover of Hong Kong
to China, and we’re moving to-
ward that,” said Jean-Pierre
Cabestan, a political-science pro-
fessor at Hong Kong Baptist Uni-
versity. “I don’t think Beijing
trusts the Hong Kong elites any-
more.”
Even before Britain returned
Hong Kong to Chinese
sovereignty in 1997, Beijing was
cultivating ties with tycoons who
had fled Communism in China for
the city and built vast fortunes in
trading, banking, real estate and
industry. The tycoons, together
with British-trained civil ser-
vants, later formed the establish-
ment Beijing entrusted with run-
ning the city alongside an inde-
pendent judiciary, police, academ-
ic system and capitalist model.
The elite have served as Bei-
jing’s eyes and ears. They have
defended the Communist Party’s
interests by promoting patriotism
and pushing through unpopular
laws, including one earlier this
month that criminalized disre-
spect of the national anthem.
But the establishment has
struggled to balance Beijing’s de-
sire for control with residents’ de-
mands to preserve the autonomy
that has shielded them from the
mainland’s feared security serv-
ices and opaque, often harsh legal
system.
When protests erupted last
summer, the city’s leadership was
responsible for trying to quell it
but was not empowered by Bei-
jing to make major concessions,
resulting in an impasse. The pro-
Beijing camp now also sees the
Communist Party’s new as-
sertiveness as a sign of its impa-
tience with the local establish-
ment’s failure to pass national se-
curity laws on its own.
“They delegated that authority
to us to do it and we failed, we
failed 23 years. So they said, OK,
we’ll take it back,” said Mr. Chan,

the top government adviser. “So
we can’t say anymore that we did-
n’t have a chance.”
Beijing also increasingly recog-
nizes that the influence of its pro-
business allies has fueled public
anger over the small pensions and
costly housing that have made
Hong Kong one of the most un-
equal places in the world. Support
for the pro-Beijing camp has fallen
to record lows: they suffered a re-
sounding defeat in local district
elections in November, and could
see potentially heavy losses in
legislative elections in September.
The party’s push for more overt
control throws into question the
role of Hong Kong’s elite in the
coming months and years. Estab-
lishment figures now find them-
selves in the awkward position of
having to defend a law they have
not seen in detail, amid growing
pressure from Beijing to demon-
strate loyalty.
“I am also disappointed that we
can’t see the bill,” Elsie Leung, a
stalwart Beijing ally and former
secretary for justice, told report-
ers, in a rare admission. She said,
though, that she believed that Bei-
jing had heard different views
about the law.

For many in Hong Kong, such
reassurances have largely rung
hollow. The city’s residents are ac-
customed to very public, some-
times rowdy discussions of new
laws by the city’s legislature. Con-
fronted with Beijing’s secrecy,
Hong Kong’s democracy activists,
scholars and former chief justices
have asked: Who would get to rule
on cases? Would Hong Kong’s res-
idents be extradited to the main-
land? Would the law be used retro-
actively to prosecute protesters?
Mrs. Lam, the city’s leader, has
sought to allay the public’s con-
cerns, saying this week that Bei-
jing had pledged to preserve the
city’s civil liberties. But she ac-
knowledged not having seen the
specifics of the legislation.
Tanya Chan, a pro-democracy
lawmaker, said Beijing had under-
cut the city government’s credibil-
ity. “How could we believe you?”
she said in an interview.
“The entire law is to be imposed
on Hong Kong, but the govern-
ment is willing to be a propaganda
machine without having seen the
clauses,” Ms. Chan said. “Not only
did they not help citizens fight for
the right to know, they were
blinded themselves.”

Even without releasing a draft
of the law, China last week made
clear that its passage would grant
Beijing expansive powers in the
city. It would allow mainland secu-
rity agencies to set up operations
in Hong Kong and for Beijing to
assert legal jurisdiction over some
cases. The law calls for a mainland
security official to be an adviser to
Mrs. Lam and for tighter controls
on the city’s schools, which have
been hotbeds of sometimes vio-
lent activism.
The law would make it a crime
to collude with foreigners, push
for independence, subvert the
state or otherwise endanger the
party’s rule. Beijing has not yet
disclosed how these crimes will be
defined, but many pro-democracy
lawyers and activists fear they
will be applied broadly to muzzle
dissent and shut down the opposi-
tion.
The Chinese government
crafted the national security plan
this spring with such stealth to
prevent the city’s tycoons and pro-
fessionals from lobbying against
it.
“Beijing this time has kept its
secret very well,” said Lau Siu-kai,
a former senior Hong Kong gov-

ernment official who now advises
Beijing on the territory’s policies.
These days, he added, “the mili-
tary and the national security peo-
ple are more influential in Hong
Kong affairs.”
Besides marginalizing the par-
ty’s allies in Hong Kong, Mr. Xi
also removed and replaced sev-
eral of Beijing’s longest-serving
officials dealing with the territo-
ry’s affairs, including Sun Lijun, a
deputy minister of public security.
Up until January, the head of
Beijing’s powerful Liaison Office
in Hong Kong was Wang Zhimin,
who was a fixture on the Hong
Kong cocktail party circuit, hob-
nobbing with bankers, captains of
industry and top civil servants.
Mr. Wang was said to have been
criticized in Beijing for not fore-
seeing the grass-roots anger that
fed Hong Kong’s protests.
He was replaced by Luo Huin-
ing, an official from central China
who spent much of his career as a
tough security enforcer in north-
western China. Unlike Mr. Wang,
Mr. Luo does not speak Canton-
ese, makes few public appear-
ances in Hong Kong and often
works from a backup office in Bei-
jing, not Hong Kong. Mr. Xi also in-
stalled a trusted aide as the new
head of an office in Beijing that
oversees Hong Kong affairs.
“These new leaders are little
known in Hong Kong,” said Regi-
na Ip, a Hong Kong cabinet mem-
ber and leader of a pro-Beijing
party in the legislature.
As Hong Kong has become
deeply polarized between Bei-
jing’s allies and democracy advo-
cates, a shrinking political center
has looked for compromises. But
it is unlikely to wring major con-
cessions from Beijing.
James Tien, a moderate poli-
tician and honorary chairman of
the pro-establishment Liberal
Party, has emerged as one of the
few establishment figures willing
to acknowledge that Beijing’s
move is deeply unpopular and un-
settling, despite the party’s as-
sertion that the law enjoys wide
support.
“I think most people will say
that we don’t like it, we don’t want
it,” he said last week in an inter-
view with Radio Television Hong
Kong. “But there’s nothing much
we could do.”

China has not shown Hong Kong’s top leader, Carrie Lam, its coming security law for the territory.

VINCENT YU/ASSOCIATED PRESS

China Casts Its Loyalists


Within Hong Kong Aside


By KEITH BRADSHER
and ELAINE YU

Keith Bradsher reported from Bei-
jing, and Elaine Yu from Hong
Kong.

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