The new liberal and pro-European government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Poland is facing a difficult task. After eight years of rule by nationalist Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, the country returned to democracy and Europe in mid-December when the Tusk government was sworn in.
Kaczynski’s Poland – like the far-right Viktor Orbán’s Hungary – had repeatedly come into conflict with the EU. Warsaw’s stance has been so anti-European that the EU has “frozen” €36 billion of recovery funds to the Poland until the independence of the Judiciary is restored. The new prime minister is trying to convince Brussels to unfreeze them.
Tough opposition
Having previously served as Prime Minister (2007-2014) and President of the European Council (2014-2019), Tusk has the experience and knowledge to restore the rule of law. However, after almost two months as prime minister, his task remains difficult.
His government faces stiff opposition from PiS, while it also faces the country’s president, Andriy Duda, who is friendly to PiS, and who will be able to veto bills until 2025, when his term expires. Before his defeat in the elections last October, Kaczynski had made sure to strengthen the institution of the president with additional powers.
As he had also taken care to appoint to the Constitutional Court judges who had exceeded the age limit but were closely related to his party, as a result of which they could prevent the enactment of legislation. Therefore, Tusk must, as the columnist Sylvie Kofman noted in “Monde”, “pave a way through mined ground”.
One of the first measures of the new government was to free the state media from the state’s suffocating control. Even supporters of Kaczynski admitted that the state television TVP was carrying out crude government propaganda, portraying Tusk as an agent of the Germans.
As President Duda refused to acquiesce to the democratization of state media, the new Minister of Culture, in charge of the media, placed state television and state radio in liquidation and appointed a new board of directors.
“This practice is not illegal but it is not ideal either” an official of the new government admitted to “Monde”. But Tusk’s supporters insist the government could not go ahead with its work with state media in a daily war against it. They recall that in 2007, when Tusk was elected prime minister succeeding the PiS government, he did not want to touch state television, which subsequently made his tenure difficult. Tusk did not forget it.
Milestones are the Euroclauses
His plan is to purge Poland’s institutions of Kaczynski’s people and convince Brussels to disburse frozen funds. For now, the polls are on the side of the new government, which hopes to secure the support of Poles in both April’s local elections and June’s European elections. The EU is already sending positive signals in terms of disbursement of funds. The Commission announced that Poland meets its conditions to receive the 76 billion euros from the Community budget for the period 2021-2027.
At the end of January, Tusk visited Kiev in order to assure Poland’s support for Ukraine in the war with Russia and also to settle the Warsaw-Kiev dispute over the issue of cheap Ukrainian grain that has flooded the Polish market. Polish farmers, however, went on new mobilizations on Friday and closed the border crossings with Ukraine in protest against the EU’s agricultural policy (and the unfair competition of the Ukrainians) and against the Polish government, which they believe does not support them enough.
Regaining citizens’ trust in the state, along with trying to unite Poland after the division caused by Kaczynski’s authoritarian eight-year rule, is Tusk’s biggest gamble, noted historian Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian. In 1989, he added, when Poland was democratizing, the communist regime that all Poles wanted to collapse was collapsing. Today, Poland’s return to democracy is an almost equally big change for the country but of a different type, as both the previous government and the current one are democratically elected.
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