Polish parliament votes in Donald Tusk as prime minister

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Poland’s parliament appointed Donald Tusk as prime minister after rejecting a last-ditch attempt by the rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) party to remain in office.

Lawmakers voted by 248 to 201 in the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, to back Tusk two months after he and his coalition partners secured a pro-European majority in parliamentary elections in October.

Hours earlier outgoing Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki lost a vote of confidence, bringing to a close eight years of PiS government that were marked by repeated clashes with Brussels over Poland’s eroding rule of law.

But Monday’s handover of power also underlined Poland’s deep polarisation, including the acrimonious personal rivalry between Tusk and PiS party leader Jarosław Kaczyński that has shaped Polish politics for the past two decades as their parties have alternated in office.

After Tusk in an address to parliament on Monday dedicated his victory to his grandfathers and also made a reference to Kaczyński and his deceased twin brother Lech, the PiS leader made another unexpected intervention to respond to Tusk with a longstanding insult: “I don’t know who your grandfathers were, but I know one thing: you are a German agent, just a German agent.”

Tusk will have to wait until Wednesday to be signed into office by President Andrzej Duda, who is a PiS appointee and has played along with the rightwing party’s stalling tactics since the elections. On Monday, Duda started a two-day visit to Switzerland — and according to Polish law, he needs to be physically present when presiding over the government changeover in Warsaw.

“This is a truly wonderful day, not only for me but for all those who have really believed over these many years that things will get better, that we will chase away the darkness, chase away the evil,” Tusk told parliament on Monday. He pledged to usher in “historic change” for Polish society.

Tusk will present his government and its programme in parliament on Tuesday and later this week is expected to attend an EU summit in Brussels that will be dominated by discussions over support for Ukraine in its defence against Russian aggression. 

Morawiecki told lawmakers on Monday that PiS had demonstrated during its two terms in office that Poland was “not doomed to poverty and backwardness” and vowed to fight future EU legislation that could encroach on Polish sovereignty.

Earlier during Monday’s parliamentary session, Kaczyński delivered a similar message, saying his party was standing firm against “the concept of changing the Polish state into a place of residence for Poles, managed from outside, from Brussels and in fact from Berlin”.

Tusk, 66, was first elected prime minister in 2007 at the helm of the centre-right Civic Platform party he co-founded. Between 2014-2019, he was the first president of the European Council to come from a former communist country and was re-elected midterm despite strong opposition from the PiS-led government.

His return to power is expected to help reposition Warsaw at the heart of EU decision-making, including on the green transition where PiS fought for longer phasing-out periods for coal. One of Tusk’s priorities is to get the European Commission to unlock billions of euros of EU pandemic recovery funds frozen over PiS reforms that stifled the independence of Polish judges. 

But Tusk also faces a number of other challenges, including working alongside PiS, including Duda, who holds veto powers over legislation and whose term in office only ends in 2025.

Adam Glapiński, the governor of the National Bank of Poland, recently called on the European Central Bank to defend his position against any attempt by Tusk to remove him early, by claiming that this would undermine the central bank’s independence and breach EU legislation.

Mending relations with Kyiv is likely to become one of Tusk’s thorniest foreign policy tasks, as he will seek not to antagonise large sectors of the economy that now want to maintain protectionist measures against cheaper Ukrainian competition.

Warsaw earlier this year introduced a unilateral ban on Ukrainian grain imports, in violation of EU common trade policy. Tusk is also inheriting a month-long dispute sparked by Polish truckers who have blocked border crossings with Ukraine to protest against cheap competition from Ukrainian hauliers.