Poland was promised change. It got politics.

WARSAW — Rhetoric, meet reality. 

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk rode to power last December on a wave of promises to bring Poland back into the EU fold and roll back nearly everything his populist Law and Justice (PiS) party predecessors had done during the previous eight years.

But six months on, the Polish leader is learning that it’s not so easy to erase years of nationalist policies and cronyism — all while constantly fending off a revved-up PiS eyeing a comeback in the fast-approaching EU election. 

Tusk has struggled to find consensus in his diverse coalition — which awkwardly unites the left and right with Tusk’s centrist party — slowing action on everything from abortion to the climate crisis. And he’s softened some of his campaign’s EU-friendly rhetoric, bucking Brussels on issues like agriculture and migration.

Meanwhile, the prime minister is still battling PiS leftovers in institutions like the Constitutional Tribunal, a top court, and the Presidential Palace, where PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda is hell-bent on throwing sand in the gears up until his last day in office in mid-2025.

Permanent campaigning isn’t helping, either.

June’s EU election and Poland’s presidential election next year will pit coalition party leaders — currently government teammates — against one another, not to mention PiS. 

“Voters are feeling increasingly that the government lacks a positive agenda at the same time as they are losing interest in its efforts to settle scores with PiS,” said Aleks Szczerbiak, a professor at the University of Sussex in the U.K. who keeps a close eye on Polish politics.

Know thine enemy

Nonetheless, Tusk is sticking to the strategy that elevated him to power: Make it all about PiS.

The Polish leader has recently amped up his attacks, essentially branding PiS as Russian collaborators.

“Russia means hostility toward the West, especially the European Union, contempt for the rule of law and all minorities, politicization of the economy and media, corrupt state, religion serving the government, and the dominance of special services,” Tusk said earlier this month. “Open your eyes and look for similarities.”

Tusk is even reviving a special commission — originally set up by PiS to discredit him — that will probe Russian influence in Poland. The move came just weeks after a senior Polish judge with PiS links defected to Russia-allied Belarus. Several other investigative efforts into potential PiS corruption in Poland’s parliament are also ongoing but have yet to yield results.

Meanwhile, progress on domestic legislative promises has been halting.

The most glaring issue is abortion. Tusk’s coalition partners initially presented mutually exclusive proposals to ease Poland’s hyper-restrictive abortion laws. The drafts were sent to a special parliamentary commission to hammer out a compromise — but that remains a tall order given the disparity of what’s on the table.

It’s not just abortion. The Tusk government is still deciding what to do with an ambitious central airport project near Warsaw that PiS promoted. And it has conceded that Poland’s first nuclear power plant  — another big PiS undertaking — will face a delay. Critics have pounced, arguing that Tusk is dampening Poland’s ambitions to grow bigger within the EU.

Elsewhere, the government has only taken minimal steps to bring down exorbitant housing prices, with a proposal from the coalition’s left wing to boost public housing getting little traction.

Brussels bust-up

Even Tusk’s promised rapprochement with Brussels, which regularly tangled with PiS over democratic backsliding allegations, has been frostier than expected. 

After initially proclaiming that Poland’s days as a climate spoiler had come to an end, Tusk’s government soon descended into infighting over the issue. It then U-turned on the EU’s Nature Restoration Law, a key pillar of efforts to save degraded land and water, helping put the bill on ice.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk rode to power last December on a wave of promises to bring Poland back into the EU fold. | Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images

Later, Tusk aligned with the EU’s No. 1 critic, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, to oppose a deal to distribute migrants more evenly across the bloc, vowing to get Poland an exemption.

He also disparaged a percolating push to change the EU’s decision-making process — something major EU powers says must happen to keep the bloc functioning and relevant.

“Any attempts to change treaties against our interests are out of the question,” Tusk declared shortly after taking office. 

In Poland, the comments were seen as perpetuating “false suspicions that maybe this is actually about taking away some of our sovereignty,” according to Karolina Borońska-Hryniewiecka, a political science professor at Wrocław University.

The pattern has not gone unnoticed.

“On migration, the Green Deal, or the EU’s institutional reform, Tusk has been very conservative, which I think might make it difficult for his government to fight for a position Poland aspires to in the EU now,” said Piotr Buras, who heads the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Warsaw office.

“I hope this is just about being cautious before the election,” Buras said.

That said, Tusk has not completely shunned his pledges to tie Poland closer to Europe. Buras noted he has won over a once skeptical Poland to the idea of “joint European defense” and revived the Weimar Triangle grouping of Poland, Germany and France, which went all but dormant under PiS.

Ultimately, though, people may have overlooked the fact that Tusk has “never been an EU federalist and seems unlikely to push for greater integration,” Buras said.

In his defense, Tusk argues that his government has raised salaries in education and public services, and — quite literally — wrestled Poland’s public media from PiS control.

And most notably, Tusk has begun the arduous process of undoing PiS reforms the EU said were eroding Poland’s independent judicial system. Tusk’s efforts have prompted Brussels to reopen the EU money tap, unleashing billions that were being frozen as leverage over the country. 

Poland recently received the first payment — a hefty €6.3 billion or 27 billion złoty — from the EU’s pandemic recovery fund. That money and further EU payouts are expected to help lift Poland’s economic growth to at least 4 percent this year and even higher in 2025.

PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda is hell-bent on throwing sand in the gears up until his last day in office in mid-2025. | Petras Malukas/AFP via Getty Images

Election first

For now, however, the EU election is all that counts.

Earlier this month, Tusk reshuffled his government, relieving four key ministers of their duties so they can focus on running for the European Parliament.

Those officials — Borys Budka, who oversaw state assets, Marcin Kierwiński, the former home affairs minister, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, the ex-culture minister, and Krzysztof Hetman, the ex-technology minister — are now widely expected to go to Brussels as Tusk-aligned Parliament members. 

“Tusk wants to stand high profile figures to try and raise the stakes of the election in order to persuade supporters that it’s really important that they turn out to vote, as he’s worried that they are less motivated than PiS supporters,” said Szczerbiak, the U.K.-based professor. 

PiS is also fielding high-profile figures to draw attention to the election. 

There are the two ex-Polish lawmakers, Mariusz Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik, who were convicted and jailed on abuse of power charges before being pardoned by Duda. Then there’s the controversial former head of Poland’s public media company, Jacek Kurski, and the ousted CEO of Poland’s Orlen state oil company, Daniel Obajtek, who was recently linked to a botched 1.6 billion złoty oil deal.

PiS hopes an EU election win will catapult them toward Poland’s next crucial election — the presidency race in 2025. Poland’s president can veto legislation and make life difficult for the government. If PiS prevails, it would all but derail Tusk’s agenda.

Currently, POLITICO’s Poll of Polls shows Tusk’s Civic Coalition party level with PiS at 32 percent. Tusk’s coalition partners, Polska 2050 and the Left, are at 12 percent and 9 percent, respectively. 

Buras cautioned Tusk against dabbling too much in EU skepticism on the campaign trail.

“It’s short-sighted and self-defeating because at the end of the day,” he said, “Tusk won’t ever outdo PiS in anti-EU rhetoric.”