French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron said that if elected, he would call for EU sanctions against Poland. Macron’s threat flies in the face of Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski, who only recently hailed Macron as “a predictable and experienced” politician.

In an interview with Sputnik, Polish political analyst and journalist Konrad Rekas said that the ruling Law and Justice Party had shot itself in the foot by rejecting Marine Le Pen’s offer of a serious discussion of the EU’s future and reaffirming its allegiance to Brussels and EU supporters at home by backing Macron whom they never bothered to learn about even during the ongoing presidential campaign in France.

“France’s fledgling Demo-Liberal political camp is totally at variance with what Law and Justice Party’s voters are holding out for. It wants a stronger EU and will try to persuade Poland and Hungary to embrace Brussel’s idea of a European super-state. This new diplomatic and geopolitical flop speaks volumes about the party’s dim view of the European future,” Konrad Rekas told Sputnik Poland

When asked about the unfolding scandal in France over the planned closure of a Whirlpool factory in northern France and its relocation in Poland causing hundreds of French workers to lose their jobs, he said that Poland is just a passive victim of a game played by the world’s high and mighty.

“Securing foreign investments has been topmost on our government’s mind ever since 1989. Another underlying premise was that Poland is competitive because labor here is cheap. As a result, our cheap labor moved to places where it was no longer cheap and Poland ended up as an assembly line foreign companies use to put together their products,” Rekas emphasized.

He added that just as before, Poland remains a source of cheap labor and a major market for outsourcing in Europe.

Macron’s criticism of Warsaw comes amid an ongoing row over the planned closure of a Whirlpool tumble-dryer factory in France as production shifts to Poland.

Emmanuel Macron criticized local companies, which employ cheaper labor from other EU member-states or move production to lower-wage countries like Poland.

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