Donald Tusk’s divisive campaign to restore Polish democracy

Donald Tusk’s divisive campaign to restore Polish democracy

Paweł Moskalewicz was thrust into the heart of Poland’s political conflict the morning that he took charge of the public television news channel TVP Info in December.

Arriving at the TVP studios in central Warsaw, he found the entrance blocked by politicians from the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party and their supporters, some of whom had barricaded themselves inside the building. The freshly installed coalition government led by Donald Tusk had abruptly replaced the management of the state media company, without the approval of Poland’s media regulators, and PiS was up in arms.

So Moskalewicz went instead to a secondary studio near Warsaw’s airport. TVP Info was soon taken off air at the direction of Tusk’s culture ministry (the channel had long been denounced by Tusk as a PiS mouthpiece). A week later, a redesigned TVP Info resumed broadcasting, with different presenters and a new name for its flagship evening news.

“I have never started a job in such tough and surreal circumstances, but I also never before felt that I was making a real change to life and politics in my country,” Moskalewicz says. “It really felt like undertaking a transformation mission for Polish society.”

Since voters chose to end eight years of PiS rule in last October’s election, the coalition has wielded what Tusk has called his “iron broom”, sweeping aside PiS loyalists from a state apparatus that had steered the country towards illiberal democracy.

But Tusk has faced a fierce backlash from PiS, which is backed by President Andrzej Duda, a party nominee, and a constitutional court packed with PiS-appointed judges.

Their opposition has been denounced by Tusk as “obvious sabotage”. “To put it bluntly, we are dealing with an attempt to build a dual power and with involvement of the most important state institutions,” Tusk told a news conference last month.

Tusk is in effect sailing uncharted waters, says Michał Baranowski, who heads the Warsaw office of the German Marshall Fund think-tank. Poland’s transition has become a case study for how a newly elected administration can restore the norms and institutions that got reshaped or erased by the previous government. What happens in Poland could have implications for other countries in which, one day, the opposition regains power from a leader who has taken an authoritarian turn, such as Hungary or Turkey.

Tusk switched a television channel off and on within a week, but some of his other reforms are facing far bigger obstacles. Notably, he has confronted stiff resistance to his attempts to overhaul the judiciary, a move which could release billions of euros of EU pandemic recovery funds withheld by Brussels during its lengthy confrontation with the PiS government over Poland’s eroding rule of law.

There will be lessons for other countries to draw from Poland — both on what to do and not to do

Michał Baranowski, head of the Warsaw office of the German Marshall Fund think-tank

In some quarters, the speed and methods used by Tusk have raised concerns about whether he should be breaking the law in order to fix it. While Tusk claims his tense start in office is evidence that PiS remains in denial about its defeat, post-election Poland appears increasingly polarised.

“Most of the people around me are surprised by just how messy this post-election has been,” says Baranowski.

“There will be lessons for other countries to draw from Poland — both on what to do and not to do — but Tusk has the disadvantage of being the first, trying to clean up without a detox handbook,” he adds.

Tusk’s centre-right Civic Platform party and its coalition partners have at least three reasons to remain confident in their approach to government. First, Tusk’s return to office — he was prime minister between 2007 and 2014 — has become a beacon of hope for other politicians defending the EU and its values.

Baranowski says experts at his think-tank consider 10 years to be the longest period of “democratic backsliding” that a state can endure, after which “the country enters into a black hole from where it is almost impossible to get out”.

According to this deadline, Tusk was just in time to beat an incumbent party that had stacked the odds in its favour. As well as controlling the public broadcaster, the PiS government scheduled a referendum on illegal migration, among other things, the day of the parliamentary elections, meaning it got more public money to promote its priorities. Tusk declared the move unlawful.

The election brought a euphoric market reaction, but of course some investors . . . wonder how big this political crisis could get

Piotr Bielski, chief economist, Santander Bank Polska

Tusk’s election success was also striking because it was sandwiched between votes in Slovakia and the Netherlands that yielded victories for Eurosceptic party leaders.

Given that context, Tusk got a hero’s welcome on his return to Brussels, where he was president of the European Council between 2014 and 2019. In December, he secured the release of an initial €5bn tranche of EU funding, which Tusk called a “Christmas present”. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told him to “rest assured that the commission stands by your side”. Other EU officials who have since visited Warsaw have also praised Tusk’s progress rather than dwelled on his difficulties.

Tusk needs strong international support to create the blueprint for how to recover from populism and safeguard the EU, according to the coalition’s leaders.

“Of course we know what happened in Slovakia, in the Netherlands and what could happen in Germany or France, but we are in a different situation here in Poland, because we have removed the populists after eight years in power,” says parliamentary Speaker Szymon Hołownia, who also heads the Poland 2050 party within Tusk’s coalition. “We are one or two steps ahead of the process in other parts of Europe, where populism is gaining rather than losing.”

Second, investors are backing Tusk, who has promised to reposition Poland at the heart of EU policymaking and to unlock the frozen EU funds. The Polish currency and stock market soared after October’s election, even if some of these gains were pared last month after PiS also started to challenge Tusk’s reform agenda in court.

“The election brought a euphoric market reaction, but of course some investors now see the bumps on the road and wonder how big this political crisis could get,” says Piotr Bielski, chief economist of Santander Bank Polska. “Even so, our foreign clients are betting on a gradual economic acceleration once all the EU funds get released.”

Third, Tusk’s coalition is widening its lead over PiS in opinion polls. The coalition leaders see this as proof that PiS is in disarray and that the coalition’s voters want them to fulfil campaign pledges that include prosecuting PiS officials for past wrongdoings, even possibly Duda after he ends his second and final term next year.

“Nobody from this coalition will punish the voters of PiS, but we will hold accountable and punish those who committed crimes and destroyed our rule of law,” says deputy prime minister Krzysztof Gawkowski.

But by using an iron broom to clean what Tusk calls his “Augean stables”, the coalition risks paving the way for PiS or another opposition force to act with similar resolve in erasing Tusk’s legacy as soon as his coalition loses office.

“It seems the pendulum has now swung very strongly towards the executive, which might seem fine as long as the good guys are in power, but what happens if they lose and get replaced at some point?” asks Andrzej Bobiński, managing director of think-tank Polityka Insight.

“I understand what this government is doing and what its voters want, but I don’t feel this is moving us in the right direction for the longer term,” he adds.

Last year, Tusk and PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński each told voters that they faced a make-or-break election for Poland, albeit for radically different reasons.

Tusk, 66, warned that PiS would complete the removal of individual rights like abortion and use another term to push Poland out of the EU. Kaczyński, 74, painted Tusk as a foreign stooge prepared to relinquish national sovereignty to Brussels, Berlin or even Moscow.

As soon as exit polls were released on October 15, Tusk told his supporters: “It’s the end of the evil times, it’s the end of the PiS rule.”

But far from ending a toxic personal feud with Kaczyński that has shaped Polish politics for decades, Tusk’s victory has triggered a fresh round of fighting.

On the day of his investiture in parliament, Tusk dedicated his success to his grandfathers. Kaczyński responded to Tusk’s speech by unexpectedly returning to the Speaker’s podium to repeat a long-standing insult: “I don’t know who your grandfathers were, but I know one thing: you are a German agent, just a German agent.”

Last month Kaczyński went further, likening Tusk to Hitler. “This is what it boils down to: Tusk’s will is the law. There have already been those for whom the will was the law: the Führer’s will was law,” Kaczyński told a PiS rally.

“The different factions in Poland have always claimed moral ownership of the truth,” says Thomas Lorman, a historian and lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London.

“PiS blends its Catholicism with claims to be the only genuine defender of Polish sovereignty. But what has come as more of a shock is that Tusk has done the same, claiming a moral victory as soon he saw the exit poll, which I think immediately closed the door on any kind of reconciliation and dealmaking.”

Both Tusk and Kaczyński compared the importance of October’s election to that of the partially-free vote that paved the way for the removal of Poland’s communist regime. In fact, October’s record turnout of 74 per cent surpassed the 63 per cent of voters who gave the Solidarity protest movement a landslide victory in 1989.

But some veteran politicians contrast instead the two elections, both in terms of the expectations they generated and their aftermaths.

“In 1989 nobody thought everything would change immediately, because the Soviet Union had not disappeared and the Communist party still looked very strong, so voters expected power sharing,” says Leszek Balcerowicz, the former finance minister who transformed the Polish economy after 1989. “This has nothing to do with the way of thinking about this election.”

While still trading insults with Kaczyński, Tusk is also treating him as a delusional backbencher who has not accepted his election defeat.

Last month, after Kaczyński urged his supporters to consider “various methods” to fight the government, Tusk said that this veiled coup threat showed “a man increasingly detached from reality, and on a scale that looks grotesque although with some dangerous tendencies”.

But within Poland’s institutional framework, the main obstacle for Tusk is not Kaczyński but the tandem formed by Duda and the constitutional court, both now serving the interests of PiS.

This has created an unprecedented situation in which the president is either vetoing new legislation or sending it to the court for review — as Duda did most recently with the country’s 2024 budget.

“Poland shows that a constitution can be too weak to protect a democracy,” says former foreign minister Dariusz Rosati, who also served as economic adviser to Tusk’s party. He says Duda and PiS cannot claim now to be guardians of a constitution that they misused during two terms in office: “We have checks and balances in our constitution, but PiS unfortunately showed us how they could effectively be blocked.”

The government is preparing several more bills aimed at overhauling the judiciary, says justice minister Adam Bodnar. They are likely to be adopted in parliament, where the coalition holds a majority, which would then force Duda to assume the “political responsibility” if he blocks them. In a worse-case scenario, Bodnar adds, some reforms will need to wait until next year, when Duda leaves and the coalition hopes to get one of its politicians elected as president instead.

But for now, Poland is in an institutional crisis in which Tusk’s government can choose to ignore the rulings of a constitutional court that it considers ineligible, while the PiS opposition seeks to undermine the coalition’s credibility by accusing Tusk of flouting the constitution.

Ironically, PiS has recently appealed to the EU to force Tusk to abide by Polish legislation, even though its previous government ignored several decisions from European courts, backed by a constitutional court that ruled that supranational bodies had no jurisdiction over the “constitutionality and compatibility” of Polish laws.

So far Brussels has avoided wading into Poland’s legal quagmire, including the dispute over how Tusk bypassed a PiS-created media regulator to reshape the public broadcaster. “The problem is that you can now find 15 lawyers who say that all is fine and 15 who say that it’s unlawful,” says Bobiński from Polityka Insight.

Asked whether Brussels is granting Tusk a blank cheque to proceed with his reforms, Bodnar turns the question around. The issue, he says, is not how Tusk reformed state media, but that “the European Union did nothing to protect our media for eight years, nothing at all”.

Bodnar argues that the media overhaul, alongside other government initiatives, should be viewed not on the basis of laws and regulations created or altered by PiS but more through the prism of a theory from political science about input and output “legitimacy”. “Even if the input legitimacy is not 100 per cent iron clad, what is very important is what comes out,” Bodnar says.

Observers should wait before judging whether Tusk is successful in his reforms, he says. “Our task is to repair the rule of law after eight years of destruction — we are not just talking about two years or so — so we are now showing that we are not just sitting here but acting to stop this destruction and ready to work many more years for the new Poland.”