PiS government

"The poor state of the Polish education system is the effect of actions by all governments in power since 1989," Martynowicz tells BIRN.

"But my decision to leave the state system is caused to a large extent by what happened in the [seven] years since [Law and Justice] PiS came to power," he says.

But Warsaw is flexing its muscles to lash out against the EU more generally. The PiS government has rejected the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on its reforms of the judiciary. And Warsaw refuses to pay the penalties imposed by the CJEU, which to date amount to over 130 million euros.

Kwiatkowski said that the Audit Office had already pointed out in 2018 that the expenditure was illegal according to Polish law, because such purchases by the CBA should come from the state budget and face proper parliamentary scrutiny.

A draft law published at 9pm on Wednesday would make it impossible for the Polish national broadcasting council, KRRiT, to renew the licence of TVN24, the most important private news channel in the country. Its licence expires in August. It would also impact the future of TVN as a whole.

Immediately following Macron's visit, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed a "muzzle" law that empowers the government to punish judges for acting independently.

Duda then added insult to injury by hosting the president of North Macedonia, a country that has its own dispute with France following Macron's decision to block its EU accession bid.

Examples are legion. When Der Spiegel reported that the far-right Alternative for Deutschland had misappropriated funds, the party's supporters could not have cared less.

Poland's conservative Law and Justice party won a landslide in the Oct. 25 general election on anti-refugee rhetoric and welfare promises, ending eight years of centrist rule in a victory that risks inflaming tensions with the EU and Russia.