WARSAW, January 8 -- Poland and Italy's right-wing rulers are to cement their "special relations" at a meeting in Warsaw, in what could make a new anti-EU league a major force in the next European Parliament (EP). The meeting, between Polish ruling party chief, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and Italian interior minister and deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, on Wednesday (9 January) is to discuss Poland's membership in Salvini's new EP group, according to Italian daily La Repubblica. "It's a meeting at the highest level. If [party] president Kaczynski meets another politician, it's a sign of a certain special relationship, which is how we're treating it," Polish foreign minister Jacek Czaputowicz also told Polish radio station RMF on Saturday. "We have to discuss matters related to the European Parliament," Czaputowicz added. Jacek Sasin, an MP from Kaczynski's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, said it was "uncertain" whether the meeting would "deliver a certain objective, an agreement". But Salvini and Kaczynski would "exchange ideas ... on how the European Union should function", he said. "There are definitely different points of view between us and Mr Matteo Salvini ... but that doesn't mean we don't have some ideas in common on how the [European] project should be modified," he added. Kaczynski's party currently sits in the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, which has 73 deputies. But the ECR is likely to collapse when its British Conservative party members leave after Brexit, leaving PiS homeless in Brussels. The main group, the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), already has a Kaczynski-type member, Hungary's nationalist leader Viktor Orban, whom it has kept in its club to try to contain him. But the EPP is also home to Poland's main opposition party, the Civic Platform, ruling out PiS membership. That leaves the new Salvini-led group as an option, whether to gain power in the EP, or to gain leverage in Warsaw's fight against EU sanctions on PiS' abuse of rule of law at home. "The message [of Wednesday's meeting] is: The Polish government is shifting its position to the anti-European fringe," Slawomir Nitras, a Civic Platform MP, said. "It [the Polish government] is not just sceptical [of the EU], it's joining up with forces who are thinking of how to dismantle the European Union," he added. "If he [Salvini] ... persuades Law and Justice to join, it will be one of the largest groups in the next European Parliament," Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, a former Polish prime minister who left PiS, also said. Salvini has already convinced French and Dutch far-right parties, the National Rally (formerly known as National Front) and the Party for Freedom, to join. If PiS, as well as Austria's far-right Freedom Party, come on board, it could get 140 MEPs or so, making it the third largest in the EP. If Salvini becomes Italian prime minister, as many expect due to his party's surge in polls, and if PiS wins Polish elections this year, then the new group would also have two leaders from the G6, or group of six largest EU states.
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