Poland Takes Center Stage

UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF PRIME MINISTER Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland has taken a decidedly nationalist turn, winning high praise among many Western conservatives but scorn among some progressives. Like many of its peer countries in the Visegrad Group (an alliance of four countries in Central Europe) and the Three Seas Initiative (a coalition of 12 EU countries bordered by the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Seas), Poland sits at the crossroads of the Western European/German-centric hub of pro-European Union sentiment to the west and the broader umbrella of Vladimir Putin-led Russian influence to the east.

Newsweek Opinion Editor Josh Hammer and Polish-American journalist Matthew Tyrmand sat down in Warsaw with Prime Minister Morawiecki on May 27. A member of the national conservative Law and Justice party, Morawiecki has served as prime minister of the Republic of Poland since December 11, 2017. The following conversation, which has been edited for space, is the first in-depth English-language interview with an American news outlet that Morawiecki has done since taking over as prime minister.

Let’s start with the economy. The Polish economy has grown steadily, with barely any contractions since 1989. But new challenges threaten the Eurozone economies and those challenges have a high correlation to Poland’s economic growth. How do you see Poland economically positioned, more generally, as we start to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic?

To be precise, there was a huge contraction between 1989 and 1991—a huge recession. And then, since 1991, there was steady growth until the COVID-19