Eurasia Press & News
Pro-Palestinians occupying Warsaw University were ousted by police, while Hungary was fined for ignoring EU asylum rules, Peter Pellegrini prepared to become Slovak President – and Russia was blamed for an attempted attack on Prague buses.
Apro-Palestinian student occupation at Warsaw University escalated on Wednesday, when police forcefully removed students from the main campus and said it would press criminal charges against them.
The students had been organising an occupation of the university for 20 days, demanding that the institution cuts its ties with Israeli universities and companies that can be linked to the war in Gaza or the occupation of Palestine.
The students had initially set up tents, where they slept and organised discussions on Palestine, in a more far-flung part of the campus. However, on Tuesday, they moved their tents in front of the main university building and attempted to block a small road that cars use to enter the site. The rector declared the situation unacceptable and called the police, who made a first attempt to remove the students before noon on Wednesday.
The protesters continued to demonstrate for the rest of the day, demanding that the rector engage in dialogue, with two students even managing to mount a Palestinian flag on the scaffolding of the rectorate building before the demonstration was dispersed by police.
Several MPs from left-wing party Razem were on site, supporting the students’ demands for the rector to come down for negotiations.
“The rector is afraid of students” and “Warsaw remembers what genocide looks like” were some of the chants of the students as they awaited the management of the university to resume talks.
Towards evening, however, the police intervened in a more determined manner to remove the students, even physically carrying away those who were passively resisting removal. Several of the students apprehended were told they would be called in for questioning, potentially facing criminal charges, including for disturbing public order.
On Thursday, hundreds of students and university staff protested in front of the main entrance of the University, supporting the demands of the occupying students and protesting against their eviction.
In other news from the country, three Polish men were among several individuals to be sentenced in The Netherlands to between 14 and 28 years in prison for the murder of Dutch investigative journalist Peter de Vries. De Vries, an investigative reporter who dealt especially with the criminal underworld in his television programmes, was shot on the street in Amsterdam in July 2021.
Prosecutors in his case said they believed his murder was ordered by Ridouan Taghi, who is currently in prison facing murder and drug trafficking charges. De Vries worked as an advisor to a state witness in the Taghi case. However, the prosecutors lacked evidence to indict Taghi in the case in which the Poles were convicted.
Two of the Poles were charged with planning the murder and helping a third man, a Dutch citizen who actually shot De Vries, escape from the scene. A third Pole was involved in providing the murder weapon.
One of the Polish men convicted in the case was reportedly acting on orders from people who were also planning the kidnapping of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
Hungary fined 200 million euros by EU Court, votes recounted in Budapest
Hungary was heavily fined by the European Court of Justice for failing to comply with EU asylum rules. The €200 million fine, plus €1 million per day, is a major blow to a government already struggling with an ailing economy.
The fine opens a new chapter in a long history of wrangling between the EU and Hungary. The ECJ ruled in 2020 that Hungary had to close its controversial transit centres, where asylum seekers were detained for weeks and often months before their applications were processed. As a reaction to the ruling, the government promptly closed the centres, but doubled down by introducing a new mechanism which forced asylum seekers to file for asylum in a pre-screening process at the country’s embassies in Belgrade or Kyiv.
The mechanism made it virtually impossible to apply for asylum in Hungary, and the number of people granted asylum or protection dropped to almost zero, while pushbacks at the Serbian-Hungarian border have become a routine procedure.
The European Commission turned to the ECJ again in 2022, pointing out that Hungary had not complied with the 2020 decision. Thursday’s ruling shows that patience with Hungary is running out. The ECJ said in its ruling that Hungary’s position, “which consists in deliberately avoiding the application of a common EU policy as a whole, constitutes an unprecedented and extremely serious breach of EU law”.
Hungarian Prime Minister Orban called the ruling outrageous and unacceptable and said he would not give in to financial blackmail. Orban’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas, said the government would study the ruling closely and warned that he believed it violated the Hungarian constitution, implicitly threatening that “someone will have to pay the price”.
“Today’s ruling will hopefully put an end to one of the most shameful practices in Hungary’s asylum system, while restoring one of the cornerstones of the rule of law: respect for court rulings,” said Zsolt Szekeres, legal officer of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights watchdog.
In other news from Hungary, the National Election Committee ordered a recount of the votes in Budapest after a neck-to-neck election on Sunday in which the incumbent mayor, Gergely Karacsony, finished just 324 votes ahead of his rival, David Vitezy, a former Fidesz state secretary who ran on the ticket of a small Green party and with the backing of Fidesz.
The last-minute withdrawal of the official Fidesz candidate complicated the vote in many districts, with many people casting invalid votes.
Governing in Budapest will prove almost impossible, as neither candidate has the necessary support in the city council, which is divided between Fidesz, the newcomer TISZA party and the left-wing supporters of Karacsony and Vitezy’s small party. Newcomer TISZA has yet to find suitable candidates for the city council, and the party has no programme for the capital.
Incumbent mayor Karacsony will be in office until October (which would have been the regular date for local elections before the government decided to merge them with the European elections), so there is still time to find a modus vivendi, but new elections in Budapest cannot be ruled out.
More Russian sabotage and more weapons purchases in Czechia
There is a strong likelihood that Russia was behind the attempted arson attack on Prague city buses that took place last week, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala declared following a meeting of the state security council.
“It’s part of the hybrid war that Russia is waging against us, and which we must defend ourselves against and stop”, Fiala said, accusing Moscow of “repeatedly trying to sow unrest and undermine citizens’ trust in our state”. Putting the attack in an international context, Fiala also said similar sabotage activities had been witnessed all across Europe, including in Poland and Lithuania, and pointed to Russia’s role in the 2014 explosion of the Vrbetice ammunition depots in Czechia. The suspect in last week’s failed arson attack, a Spanish-speaking man in his twenties, was arrested shortly after the deed and is now being prosecuted.
Asked why the Kremlin would be targeting such low-level targets, Vojtech Bahensky, from the department of security studies at Charles University in Prague, speculated that “they might want to somehow bring the war home to us, because they perceive the war in Ukraine as a war on the West”. “I’m sceptical of the real impact. I think the only thing they might pursue is trying to scare the Czech population, to make it feel vulnerable. This is like the classic terrorist handbook,” he added.
The Czech government plans to earmark more than 50 billion crowns (over 2 billion euros) for the purchase of 77 Leopard 2A8 tanks, PM Fiala announced earlier this week, confirming Czechia’s involvement in the German-led joint European procurement scheme.
With a goal of securing 122 Leopard tanks by the early 2030s, the acquisition is seen as a key step to replace Czechia’s Soviet-era military equipment and boost the country’s capabilities and preparedness. The final agreement should be finalised by the end of July, according to Defence Minister Jana Cernochova, and comes on the heels of other large military contracts agreed by the government, including the purchase of 24 US F-35 fighter jets (150 billion Czech crowns) and of over 200 Swedish-made infantry fighting vehicles (60 billion Czech crowns).
After years of lagging behind most NATO countries, Czechia’s defence budget is expected to finally reach the 2 per cent of GDP target this year or the next.
Slovakia’s new President and a bill to protect politicians
Peter Pellegrini,former speaker of parliament and PM Robert Fico’s ally, will assume the presidential office on Saturday, June 15, replacing Zuzana Caputova. Earlier this week, Caputova visited the Czech Republic, her last official presidential visit to a foreign country.
For a long time, it has not been known what she will do after her term ends. She has declined to go into politics, and in Prague, she said that she would like to take up lecturing at a university.
The shooting attack on Fico in mid-May did not help his party, Smer, win the European elections, despite the party exploiting the incident in its campaign. Progressive Slovakia (PS), a liberal pro-European party, came first, taking six of the 15 seats. Smer won five seats.
PS has thus secured a strong position in Renew Europe, a pro-European political group in the European Parliament. Conversely, Smer, with five MEPs, might be of little help to Slovak citizens if its representatives fail to join the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. Smer’s membership in the Party of European Socialists remains suspended due to Smer forming a coalition with the nationalist Slovak National Party. The remaining Slovak MEPs come from the Christian Democratic Movement (1), Hlas (1), and far-right Republika (2).
Observers deemed Hlas’ and Republika’s results a surprise. Hlas, a coalition party established by future president Peter Pellegrini, started out as a pro-European party but turned to lies about the EU in its campaign. Despite one seat won, its performance is seen as a failure. On the other hand, non-parliamentary Republika attacked Smer and the Slovak National Party in its campaign, which turned out to be a good strategy. It doubled the number of seats in the EP, while the Slovak National Party failed completely, receiving less than 2 per cent.
In reaction to the attack on the Prime Minister, the government approved a bill called “lex assassination” on June 12 in an effort to increase the safety of selected groups of people, including politicians and journalists.
One of the measures in the bill includes a pension for life for any prime minister and speaker of parliament who serve at least two full terms. Of all the speakers and prime ministers, only one man fulfils the criterion at present: PM Fico. The government argues that it is difficult for a prime minister to reintegrate into normal life once their term ends. Still, it is not clear how this measure can help a politician feel safer.
The bill will also extend and grant protection to leaders of political parties. According to the bill, protests may not take place within 50 metres of the government office and the presidential palace. Protests outside the latter will be impossible, if the change is approved in parliament. Protests outside the homes of both politicians and journalists will be banned completely.
