Can Donald Tusk bring Poland back to great blessings?

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Former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk returned to where he started, relinquishing his position as head of the Civic Platform (PO), the party he led to election victories in 2007 and 2011, before serving as president of the European Council. His task now is to return Poland to the good blessings of Europe.

With a huge victory over Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw and Poland’s most famous politician, Tusk will surely return with style and aplomb. But his success cast a shadow on a younger liberal politician who built his own political movement for some time.

It’s hard to believe that Trzaskowskis said he didn’t want to secede and compete with PO (where he will continue to serve as deputy chair). Under the former chair, Borys Budka, the PO suffered a historic loss of support of 1520% in opinion pollsand reached by the movement journalist and activist Szymon Holownias Poland 2050 (currently at 2025%).

Budka assumed the chair position because Trzaskowski originally didn’t want the job. But since Trzaskowski led the younger generation that took over the party from Grzegorz Schetyna in January 2020, the Budkas leadership has created an unstoppable division of labor. A party leader who does not represent the most powerful bloc within his party will surely fail.

Usually there are two career paths open to Polish politicians. If power is what you want, you must aspire to lead your party, engage in local level politics and become prime minister (or become a puppet master like Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the de facto head of the current government of Poland) . But if you’re more interested in prestige and popularity and especially if party politics means being president is a more appropriate aspiration; that office allows one to reign rather than reign.

Tusk (like Kaczynski) is a clear example of the first kind, whereas Trzaskowski is more of a presidential politician. While Tusk famously mocked sitting under [presidential palace] the chandelier did not interest me, Trzaskowski admitted that sometimes he was less impatient when he became an opposition MP. When he had the opportunity to lead the celebration, he resigned it. After narrowly defeating the presidential election last summer, he promised to organize a New Solidarity movement, but then failed to follow through on that project.

Now, the political situation has changed. There is a new movement organized by Trzaskowski, but it is emerging from Campus Poland of the Future (a leadership school for 1,000 young people held in Olsztyn this fall). Those invited included prominent intellectuals and mayors of Prague, Budapest and other cities.

For his part, Trzaskowski wants to rely more on local government officials to mobilize support, taking advantage of the fact that the opposition still controls Polands ’100 largest cities and half of the provinces. But, again, no one is surprised if this approach fails to lead to the establishment of a new political party.

Trzaskowski and his entourage are claimed to be preparing for a confrontation with Tusk, but the truth is that their interests will complement. Since Tusk is not interested in the presidency, we can expect hell’s promise to support Trzaskowski in the pursuit of that office. Moreover, Trzaskowski certainly knew that an open confrontation with Tusk was dangerous. After all, he still has to govern Warsaw on a day-to-day basis, while Tusk, whose comeback is dominated by the Polish media, has plenty of free time to focus the nuts and bolts of local politics. . The former prime minister just started a tour in Poland and got a lot of people.

For the past year and a half, politics has taken place mainly online, so Holownia manages to gain support in the polls despite her lack of party infrastructure. But when normal politics continued after the pandemic, social media was not enough. In this context, it is important to note that no successful new party has been formed in the 20 years that Kaczynskis Law and Justice (PiS) and PO have been the dominant force in Polish politics.

Caring for a new festival will be as difficult today as it was in the past. Given what little Holownia has done to show that he can really lead, the Poles don’t know how intense he is with a politician until he faces his first crisis. It could happen soon, as Kaczynski’s reaction to having Tusks is like a bull seen in red. Whatever Holownias ’talents, he would look boyish and callow compared to Tusk.

Yet the return of the Tusks was not without risk. Why would a politician who has succeeded in everything today be able to return to politics in Poland to lead a party that is so supportive? Unlike POs, the position of PiSs has remained strong in its shameless disloyalty and rejection of populist hand-outs. The poles don’t seem to mind dirty business. And now that even more EU money from the pandemic recovery fund is ready to flow into the country, the PiS government will have more resources available to it.

The question, then, is whether Tusk can be a credible politician of the people. No other political style can win in a country so tainted by populism. If the Tusks who seven years serving at the highest level of EU power were made an indeterminate technocrat, he could make former foreign minister Bronislaw Geremek, a symbol of Poland’s intelligence who would never win more than 1012 % support for party leadership. contests

Tusk doesn’t need to imitate Kaczynski by openly snubbing elites. But he needs to show a deep, genuine commitment to the working-class and rural Poles. And even that may not be enough to break the power of PiSs.

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