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A deepening power struggle between Poland’s leaders is threatening to derail Donald Tusk’s pro-EU agenda and pit state institutions against one another.
In a highly anticipated meeting held on Monday, Polish President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Tusk failed to ease tensions, with Duda describing the new administration’s reforms as attempts to “violate the law” and Tusk blaming the president for “devastation of the rule of law” under the previous right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government.
Tusk has previously denounced the “obvious sabotage” tactics of the PiS opposition as a bid to maintain control over part of the state apparatus. “To put it bluntly, we are dealing with an attempt to build a dual power and with involvement of the most important state institutions,” he said in a news conference last week.
Mutual recriminations are creating “a dangerous situation” forcing Tusk to navigate from one crisis to the next, which could lead to the creation of a “dual state”, said Polish investor and columnist Paweł Konzal. “It’s unprecedented and it seems not to have been anticipated by the new government,” he told the Financial Times.
The most recent source of discord between the two politicians is the fate of the national prosecutor appointed by the previous PiS government, who was fired on Friday but whom the president wants to keep in the job. Duda, himself a PiS nominee, has also sided with the former ruling party in defending two of their lawmakers convicted of abuse in office.
In a news conference on Monday, Tusk accused Duda of being “involved in the devastation of the rule of law and legal order in Poland since 2015”.
But he also acknowledged that Duda has veto powers which could hobble his premiership until next year’s presidential elections. “It is in our common interest that the last dozen or so months of his term of office pass in a good atmosphere,” Tusk said. He vowed to press ahead with the removal of PiS appointees and a judicial overhaul required for Brussels to unblock Warsaw’s frozen EU funds.
Since he took office a month ago, Tusk has struggled to deliver on his election promises, with Duda already showing an appetite for being disruptive.
First, the president delayed Tusk’s appointment as prime minister, then he vetoed his December budget bill and last week he turned the dispute over the two convicted PiS lawmakers into a full-blown constitutional crisis.
Duda repeated calls on Monday for the release of the two “political prisoners” — as PiS refers to them — who were detained in the presidential palace where they had sought shelter. The Tusk government has said it would respect Duda’s plans to issue a fresh pardon but would not speed up their release in the meantime.
Anna Wojciuk, a politics professor at Warsaw University, said she had harboured “a small hope that Duda would play more the role of an arbiter” between Tusk’s coalition and the opposition, but his recent interventions showed that his priority was to “defend his own heritage, as one of the founding fathers of the legal changes made by PiS”.
Faced with such a battle, Tusk has opted to avoid issues that could create tensions within his unwieldy coalition or reinvigorate PiS’s ultranationalist message.
He has so far maintained the protectionist agenda of the previous government at the risk of breaking his own election pledge to return Poland to the heart of EU policymaking. He recently said Poland would “never accept” illegal migrants under an EU deal to share responsibilities for hosting asylum seekers that was agreed last year despite Poland and Hungary voting against it.
On Ukraine, he has pledged to support Kyiv in its defence against Russia’s war, but not at the expense of Polish farmers and truck drivers, who have blocked Ukrainian border crossings since November in protest at cheaper imports and services from the neighbouring country. On Tuesday, the hauliers said they would suspend the blockade after striking a deal with the government.
Tusk’s stance is also motivated by his concerns about PiS mobilising its electorate ahead of local elections in April and European parliament elections in June. Tens of thousands of Poles braved freezing Warsaw weather last week to hear PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński denounce Tusk’s alleged violation of the constitution.
An opinion poll by SW Research published last weekend in newspaper Rzeczpospolita found that 47 per cent of respondents expect Poland’s democracy to improve under Tusk, compared with 28 per cent who see it deteriorating. The rest were either undecided or believe Tusk will make little change.
Politics professor Wojciuk said the post-election feuding might be “a surprise for part of the public, but not for those who understood that PiS had been building a system of electoral authoritarianism that it was never going to give up easily”.
Tusk was likely to face “strong resistance against every step that he takes”, she added, “but what we see in the polls is that the coalition is not losing its support — and that is essential”.
