Nawrocki announced on Thursday that he had submitted a second referendum request, this time posing a single question: whether Poles support the implementation of the EU's climate policy.
He pointed to high electricity costs for Polish businesses, which he said pay EUR 252 per megawatt-hour, compared with EUR 237 in Germany, EUR 166 in France and EUR 158 in Spain, and blamed the EU's emissions trading system and Green Deal targets.
Speaking on private broadcaster Tok FM radio on Monday, Sikorski said the question was misleading, comparing it to asking Poles whether they wanted to scrap EU farm subsidies.
"That is the world of the Europhobe, where some imagine an EU that's all privileges and no obligations."
"As the British discovered, that kind of EU does not exist," he added.
On the ETS2 emissions trading scheme, which Poland wants to see phased in more slowly, Sikorski said the EU had set overly ambitious targets, but that change should come through building coalitions with other member states and the bloc's institutions.
He also argued that Europhobes had wrongly warned against other EU deals that later proved beneficial, citing a near-30 percent rise in Polish agri-food exports to Mercosur countries in the first month after the trade agreement between the European Union and the South American bloc took effect.
Presidential spokesman Rafał Leśkiewicz, speaking separately to private radio broadcaster RMF24, rejected claims that the referendum push amounted to a de facto EU exit as "nonsense," and insisted legal routes could be found to cut Poland's ETS-related costs.
It is Nawrocki's second attempt at a referendum on the issue.
An earlier proposal, submitted to the Senate earlier this year with a broader set of questions on rejecting the Green Deal and the ETS, was rejected after senators objected that the questions were vaguely worded and leading.
(ał)
Source: PAP