Donald Tusk: a Polish ex-premier aiming to restore liberal democracy

In 2021 Donald Tusk returned to Warsaw after presiding over the European Council in Brussels in order to oust his longstanding nemesis Jarosław Kaczyński and his rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) party. “Evil reigns in Poland and we want to fight it,” Tusk declared.

The fight looked like a mismatch. Tusk was reassuming control of his struggling Civic Platform party, which had sunk to 16 per cent in opinion polls with only two years until the next election. PiS had meanwhile packed the state apparatus with loyalists, stretching from partisan judges to a state media acting as the ruling party’s mouthpiece.  

But last Sunday Civic Platform and two smaller opposition parties won a combined parliamentary majority in a fiercely contested election. The triumph was amplified by Tusk’s ability to mobilise people, which drew hundreds of thousands to two Warsaw campaign rallies. The outcome was even more spectacular: 74 per cent of Poles voted in the largest election turnout in the country’s modern history, surpassing by almost 12 percentage points the participation in the landmark vote of 1989 that defeated the communists.

Tusk’s voters heeded his warning that this election was existential for Poland, a last-ditch chance to salvage democracy and the fundamental rights of women and minorities, as well as to close the door on PiS using a third term to push Poland towards an EU exit. His victory also brought relief for those fearful about faltering democracies in which nobody could defeat entrenched ruling politicians riding on a wave of populism.

“It’s a historic moment because the playing field was very uneven and I think that, after the elections in Hungary and Turkey, international experts just didn’t think Tusk could win,” says Anna Wojciuk, politics professor at Warsaw University. “Tusk and the other opposition leaders did an extraordinary job to activate all kinds of networks across Poland, but this is also the victory of our civil society which really mobilised.”

Tusk, 66, first waded into politics in much harsher circumstances, as a student activist in the 1980s tied to the Solidarity protest movement against communist rule that started with a shipyard strike in his birthplace of Gdańsk. But the collapse of communism was followed by years of painful economic transition and party fragmentation. Tusk co-founded Civic Platform in 2001, the same year Kaczyński and his twin Lech created PiS.

Tusk first defeated PiS in a 2007 election. In 2014, he left Warsaw near the end of his second term after being appointed as European Council president. It was a breakthrough nomination for a politician from central and eastern Europe. Tusk promised at his first news conference, delivered in his native tongue, that “I will polish my English” in order to be effective in Brussels. 

PiS claimed Tusk was abandoning Poland, after neglecting the poor and raising the retirement age, to become a stooge of Germany in the EU. This accusation fed a vicious questioning of Tusk’s Polish identity, since his grandmother was German. Still, Tusk displayed in Brussels a dogged determination that belied the German lapdog accusation peddled in Warsaw. 

In July 2015, when German chancellor Angela Merkel and Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras hit a roadblock after 14 hours of talks about Greece’s future in the eurozone, Tusk forced them to work harder to reach a deal. “Sorry, but there is no way you are leaving this room,” Tusk told them.

Tusk also confronted London in the EU negotiations that followed Brexit, drawing a furious backlash from the Conservatives in 2019 after warning that “a special place in hell” awaited British leaders who campaigned for Brexit with no idea how to deliver it.

Tusk’s decision to fight another round against Kaczyński made this election more vitriolic and personal. It also showed each veteran leader’s grip on his own camp. Few question whether Tusk will become prime minister again, even though he must agree power-sharing terms with two unwieldy coalition partners. Despite his defeat, Kaczyński has no obvious successor and is expected to stay on. “Like Kaczyński, Tusk is a political killer who doesn’t like to have strong partners and is very clever in political games,” says Rafał Ziemkiewicz, a rightwing political commentator.

Even if policy divergences eventually strain the three-way partnership, Tusk “knows how to work a coalition”, says Adam Jasser, who ran the policy unit in Tusk’s cabinet a decade ago. “He is principled about values but when it comes to policies, he pays attention to evidence, is pragmatic and ready to compromise.”

Tusk recalibrated his social message after being blamed as premier for privileging the urban middle class, which allowed PiS to grab “Poland B”, a term used to refer to the poorer rural eastern half of the country. This summer, Tusk engaged in a bidding battle with PiS over who offered more subsidies. “His social sensitivity is very different now from the years when he was [first] in office,” says former prime minister Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, who is close to Tusk. 

But Tusk will find it hard to heal the divisions of Polish society after an election that confirmed PiS as the largest party, backed by 35 per cent of voters. At a conference in Warsaw, historian Timothy Garton Ash questioned the way Tusk presented his win in Manichaean terms, “us and them”, as if this election mirrored Solidarity’s 1989 triumph over communism. “I can understand why Donald Tusk likes to make that comparison but I don’t think that it is necessarily a very helpful framing,” he said.

raphael.minder@ft.com