Chatter
A promise offensive is expected at the PiS convention. A person from the government told us that PM Mateusz Morawiecki will present the next set of PiS pre-election promises at the party convention on February 23. Their final shape is overseen by a team headed by Professor Waldemar Paruch, head of the Strategic Analysis Centre at PMChan. The new PiS proposals may tackle taxes (there has been speculation about an increase in the tax-free amount, increasing tax deductible costs or a new PIT relief for working people). Proposals may also be aimed at pensioners, something the PiS head Jarosław Kaczyński considers important (the daily Fakt has written about this). The debate at Risks and Trends suggests that PiS will want to present further ideas and promises in September, just before the parliamentary elections.
Troublesome conflict with Israel. PiS activists and managers of the state-owned companies we talked to were concerned about the escalating conflict between Poland and Israel. It started with the corrected statement of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu about Poles' complicity in cooperating in the Holocaust. This was toughened up by the acting Israeli MinFor Israel Katz, who said that "Poles sucked in anti-Semitism with their mother's milk". This meant that PM Mateusz Morawiecki decided to cancel the visit of the Polish delegation to the summit of the Visegrad Group in Israel (the planned form of the summit was subsequently cancelled). PiS politicians point out that, while the blame for the previous conflict concerning the amendment to the IPN law, fell on the Polish side, the PiS government has done nothing wrong here. There are concerns that Israeli politicians will not want to withdraw from the anti-Polish rhetoric due to their election campaign, which will affect relations between the countries over the coming months.
Freeze in Polish-Chinese relations. The arrest in Poland of two Huawei employees (including a Chinese man) in January caused a serious clash in Polish-Chinese relations. Comments of American politicians, including US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging the abandonment of the use of Chinese equipment in Warsaw last week, added fuel to the fire. According to one of the Polish managers who knows Polish-Chinese political and economic relations very well, the atmosphere of suspicion makes Polish companies more and more afraid of doing business with China. In his opinion, a visit by PM Mateusz Morawiecki to China was being prepared for the spring of this year. Currently, it hangs by a thread.
Energy firms want compensation for the law on electricity. On January 1, the amended Act on excise duty, freezing energy prices at the level of mid-2018 came into force. According to energy companies, this solution brought chaos to the market and made their operation impossible. Some trading companies do not know what price lists they can use, which forced them to stop selling energy and dismiss the employees involved. Our interlocutors in the energy sector are also in agreement that the law is "unimplementable" because MinEner has not yet issued a regulation specifying how companies can get compensation for frozen electricity prices. Many of them say that this prevents them from completing the investments planned for this year. Some companies are considering taking legal action against the state treasury to get compensation.
Polish firms do not want to issue Eurobonds. In the corridors, the financiers talked about the lack of large corporate bond issues denominated in euros. The main reason for the stagnation is cheap finance from banks which compete on their margins for servicing medium and large businesses. In this respect, Poland fares poorly compared to the much smaller Estonia and Lithuania, where cheap issues are becoming more and more popular. In Poland, Eurobonds are issued only by financial institutions, which allows them to prepare for the MREL requirements coming into force from 2023. Polish banks will have to issue up to PLN 50-100 billion of such debt, and the main buyers will be foreign asset management firms wishing to diversify their investments.
Participants praised Kosiniak. In assessing the discussion during the political panel of the conference, our interlocutors pointed out the good speech by Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz. According to one of the foreign participants, the PSL leader spoke "as if he could become PM in the future." The politicians present at Risks and Trends also referred to the planned celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of the first partially free elections. They emphasized that rumours suggesting that Donald Tusk will create an alternative movement to PO ( called the June 4 Movement) are untrue. An anniversary initiative is indeed planned, but it is supposed to provide support for the opposition. 
Dominik Brodacki, Piotr Sobolewski and Ryszard Łuczyn contributed to this analysis
