Law and Justice (PiS) will not support the SAFE bill unless key amendments proposed by the parliamentary club are included – Niezalezna.pl has learned unofficially. According to PiS, it is crucial that the act include, among other provisions, a clause stating that more than 80 percent of the funds will go to the Polish defense industry. Without such a provision, the bill will also have no chance of being signed by the President. The vote on the bill is scheduled for Friday.
According to government declarations, more than 80 percent of SAFE funds are to go to the Polish defense industry. However, this provision is not included in the draft bill.
Doubts Surrounding SAFE
According to representatives of the PiS parliamentary club, after Wednesday’s meeting of the National Security Council, “there are still doubts about what exactly is included in this draft.”
“We will not support this draft uncritically. The key lies in the amendments. We are submitting amendments identical word for word to those proposed by the Ministry of National Defence during the government’s inter-ministerial consultations. Minister Kosiniak-Kamysz fought to ensure that this money would be additional funding for Polish defense. He lost that battle to Minister Domański,” PiS MP and former Deputy Minister of National Defence Bartosz Kownacki told Niezalezna.pl.
He added that it would seem natural for the Polish People’s Party (PSL) to support the PiS amendments, which had previously been proposed at the government level by Kosiniak-Kamysz.
“These amendments guarantee that this will be additional funding for the Polish army and ensure that the modernization process of the Polish armed forces will not be halted. The risk with SAFE is that if it is serviced from the Ministry of National Defence’s budget, the ministry will no longer find additional funds for other arms purchases. This was supposed to be extra money for the army – instead, it will not be,” Kownacki noted.
PiS has also submitted another amendment on which it is conditioning its support.
“We have also submitted another amendment, in line with what Kosiniak-Kamysz has declared, stating that more than 80 percent of purchases will be carried out within the Polish defense industry. Since they declare that this is how it should be, it seems obvious that they should support this amendment. Rejecting it will mean they know that such funds will not, in fact, be absorbed by the Polish defense industry,” Kownacki said.
Former Minister of National Defence Mariusz Błaszczak, after the National Security Council meeting, said that “what concerns me in the draft bill is the provision that the loan will be repaid from the state budget, which does not mean that it will not come from the Ministry of National Defence’s portion.” He announced that the PiS parliamentary club would submit an amendment on this matter, as well as regarding the wording stipulating that “89 percent of the program’s funds are to go to the Polish arms industry – not to industrial plants that merely have ‘Polska’ in their name,” since these are often foreign companies.
During a press conference following the meeting, Head of the Chancellery of the President Zbigniew Bogucki stressed that during the discussion on the SAFE program “a great many questions were raised.” He added, “It is not the case that decisions have been made on whether to sign the future bill or not, but to approach such a serious program seriously, one must have the full set of information.”
Proposals for amendments to the government’s draft law on the SAFE instrument were announced ahead of Wednesday’s National Security Council meeting by President Karol Nawrocki.
The President assessed that there was visible “euphoria” on the government’s side following the EU bodies’ approval of Poland’s application for SAFE funds. However, as he stated, “Poles have not yet received full information about this program.”
He announced that before signing the bill enabling the implementation of the program – adopted by the government on Wednesday – he would want to review, among other things, the list of 139 projects the government intends to finance through SAFE. Nawrocki also declared that he would propose specific solutions to the draft concerning control and oversight of the program’s implementation. He further assessed that the list of projects, currently unknown to the public, should be made public.