Ryszard Antoni Legutko is a Polish politician, and a professor of philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In 2005, he was elected to the Polish Senate from the Law and Justice list. He is a former minister of education and a secretary of state in the Chancellery of President Lech Kaczyński. He co-founded the Centre for Political Thought.
Legutko's views on homosexuality, religion, and reproductive rights are very controversial. During the EP debate on homophobia and discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity he claimed that “Homophobia is a stick with which today’s fanatics beat everyone who dares to disagree with them. There is no greater nonsense than to claim that homosexuals are victimised. The opposite is true. They are the most privileged group today.”
In the debate on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Legutko, among others, said that “The communists continued their careers afterwards, after the system fell, and some of them joined the European Parliament, joined the European institutions, some are still here. [...] We have militant, aggressive, secularist and barbaric social engineering. Again, these were the trademarks of the communist system. We have neo-Marxists very much alive and kicking today.”
Ha participated at the event on national conservatism in Rome along with Viktor Orban and Matteo Salvini. He is quite often absent during EP votes (participating in 79% of roll-call votes). He criticised the Confederation party because “The sovereignty of the Polish state will never be secured by a close alliance with Russia, which would become anti-American and anti-EU”. Legutko also claimed that “quite irrationally, Western Europe is much more anti-American than anti-Russian in politics. […] Even in Eastern Europe there are countries that deal with Russia on their own account - Hungary is an obvious example here."
After the decision of the Court of Justice of the EU on the Polish-Czech dispute over the mine in Turów, he claimed that the European institutions were pathological.
After the Belarusian activist Raman Pratesiewicz was kidnapped from the Ryan Air plane on May 23, he said that only Poland would protest in this matter, and that other EU countries and the EU itself would not do anything.
Ryszard Legutko is known for depreciating EU institutions and pointing out that they serve the interests of Germany.
(Updated: 13/7/2021)
