Ever since Poland joined the European Union (EU) 20 years ago, its leaders have felt excluded from the bloc’s innermost councils, something they saw as a bitter injustice because the country is the EU’s fifth largest by population, as well as the self-appointed leader of its eastern member states. 

Now with Germany, France and Spain embroiled in domestic political turmoil, and Italy ruled by the post-fascist Georgia Meloni, the weight of expectation falls on Prime Minister Donald Tusk as Poland prepares to take over the EU’s rotating presidency. 

“This is an opportunity for Poland to have its moment,”  Marcin Zaborowski, senior fellow at Slovak think-tank Globsec, told bne IntelliNews in a telephone interview. “We are seen as a constructive player and this gives us a role.” 

Tusk will take over the EU presidency on January 1, just in time to face the seismic shock of the arrival of US President Donald Trump: a man who detests the EU and scorns Nato, who has pledged to end Russia’s war against Ukraine by giving Moscow most of what it wants, and to impose swingeing import tariffs. 

Tusk has described this new political landscape as “a serious challenge for everyone” and has warned of the risk of a US withdrawal of support leading to Ukraine’s defeat. 

“No one wants the conflict to escalate, and at the same time, no one wants Ukraine to weaken or even capitulate; this would be a fundamental threat to Poland and Polish interests,” Tusk has said.

In many respects, Tusk looks ideal to meet this daunting challenge. As well as having already served as Polish premier between 2007-14, he is both a former president of the European Council and a former president of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the EU’s biggest political grouping, so he knows all the key leaders inside the EU. 

He also met Trump while president of the European Council, commenting after the US presidential election, “I know Trump well from those times. He is a demanding partner but we had a good relationship”. 

Furthermore, Poland has boosted its military spending to double the Nato recommendation of 2% of gross domestic product and the highest percentage in the military alliance, a feat that Trump will applaud.

However, the two Donalds also have some history. Last year Tusk accused Trump of being linked to the Russian secret services and this year he said his re-election would “probably be detrimental from the point of view of Poland’s security”.

Zaborowski nevertheless expects both leaders to build a pragmatic relationship. 

“Tusk will look for ways of coping with Trump. He will not look for trouble but will be very aware of what kind of person he is dealing with,” he says.

Rebuilding bridges

In preparation for the Polish presidency of the EU and to put together a common response to Trump’s looming offensive, Tusk has already announced plans to meet the leaders of France, the UK, Nato, and Baltic and Nordic states over the next few weeks. link: 

Some commentators have hailed this as the moment that Poland finally steps up to the role that its size and geographical position entitles it to. However, there are also some serious handicaps holding it back, not least its own vicious internal politics.

The previous Law and Justice government put the country at the forefront of the Western effort to resupply Ukraine, and begun a massive build-up in domestic military spending. 

Yet it also isolated the country though its quarrels with Germany, Ukraine and Brussels. Eventually the EU suspended sending funds to Poland because of the way the government violated the rule of law during its consolidation of power, notably by capturing the judicial system and the public broadcasters.

After Tusk’s Civic Platform formed a coalition government last December, he moved quickly to rebuild bridges with Poland’s Western partners. 

He reactivated the Weimar Triangle – which brings together West and East Europe in the shape of Berlin, Paris and Warsaw, and gives Poland the kind of top-level diplomatic clout it has always craved. This week, on November 19, the Weimar Triangle and Italian ministers will meet in Warsaw together with Kaja Kallas, the incoming EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy. 

Furthermore, Poland is looking north to the Nordic and Baltic states, which share Warsaw’s hawkish view of Russia and are likewise hiking their military spending, and are also now co-operating more intensively to defend the Baltic Sea theatre against Russian threats.   It is now seen as highly probably that Poland will join the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which stages military exercises in the Baltic Sea, North Atlantic and High North theatres.

Meanwhile the Visegrad Group of Central European states to the south has been sidelined as something that no longer meets Poland’s current geopolitical role, given that Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico are defenders of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

“The Visegrad Group is a very different creature and it is very troubled,” says Zaborowski, pointing out that Poland currently has “very bad relations” with Hungary, there is a “lack of trust” with the Slovak government, while relations with Czechia remain “very good”.

By contrast with the Hungarian and Slovak populist authoritarian leaders, Tusk stands out as someone who has beaten the populists, giving him the legitimacy to fulfil Poland’s role at Europe’s top table, argues Zaborowski. “He is the only one in Europe to do that effectively,” he says.

EU applauds Poland's new direction

The EU applauded Poland’s new direction by lifting the Article 7 procedure against the country over its violations of the rule of law, and then unblocking the sending of cohesion and pandemic recovery funds. 

Some €6.3bn of pandemic funds was released in April and another €9.4bn earlier this month. This was a significant boost, given that Poland’s economy still lags significantly behind the EU average and its budget deficit is well above the 3% of GDP limit set by the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact.    

Poland has also been rewarded by receiving the plum portfolio of the budget for its nominee Piotr Serafin. 

The EU gave these rewards in expectation of a transformed performance; however, so far Poland’s new government has failed to fulfil its part of the bargain.

Tusk’s government has been unable to fully repair the broken rule of law in Poland because of the vetoes wielded by President Andrzej Duda, who is faithfully carrying out the dictates of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, founder and leader of the Law and Justice party, which nominated him. 

Given Duda’s vetoes, which the government does not have the votes to override, the European Commission gave a decidedly mixed report on Poland’s progress on the rule of law in July. Moreover, Duda is only due to step down next summer and it is far from certain that his successor will be more congenial to Tusk’s government.

If reversing the damage to Poland’s domestic rule of law is at least partly out of Tusk’s control, there are several aspects of his government’s foreign policy that have also disappointed Brussels by being virtually identical to its predecessor’s – casting doubt on whether Poland is yet ready to step into the European role that it feels it deserves. 

The Law and Justice government set itself against the EU’s Green Deal initiative by trying to slow down action to phase out coal mining or cars with combustion engines on the grounds that this would be too costly. Tusk’s government has done little to differentiate itself on this issue so far. Cowed by its powerful farming lobby, the government voted against the EU’s Nature Restoration Law, and Tusk has said he will use its EU presidency to try to revisit key elements of the Green Deal.

On migration too, Tusk has largely followed its predecessor’s policy. He announced last month that Poland would suspend the right to asylum to stem the flows of refugees across the Belarus border. The Polish government has blamed President Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorship for directing the refugee flow as a “hybrid weapon” against Poland. 

Human rights groups, however, point out that Poland has international obligations to at least consider refugees’ asylum requests, and it must not just push them back across the border.

Tusk nevertheless won initial endorsement for this policy at an EU summit last month, indicating that European opinion on migration appears to be becoming more illiberal and Poland might be pushing at an open door here.

Zaborowski argues that Tusk has been able to lead the EPP to the right on migration and he will try to do so on the Green Deal too. “He is shifting it to the right, depriving the populists of certain issues such as migration,” he says. 

But he points out that, unlike its predecessor, the current government is not using “hate speech” against migrants. “You don’t have this element of incitement of negative feelings towards migrants,” he says.

Pointless quarrels

On Ukraine, Tusk’s policy is also virtually identical to that of the previous government, which was criticised for instrumentalising creeping fatigue with aid to its neighbour, rather than giving Kyiv its unconditional support.  

Like the Law and Justice government, Tusk has backed up farmers’ concerns over cheap food imports and truckers’ fears of being undercut by Ukrainian drivers. In addition, the government even threatened it would block Ukraine’s entry to the EU if Kyiv does not recognise the wartime massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists.

Finally, Tusk’s government, like its predecessor, has provoked pointless quarrels with neighbouring Germany, scotching hopes that the new government would instantly repair the damaged relationship. 

Warsaw criticised Berlin for imposing tighter border controls against migration in September, reacted angrily to German claims that it had allowed a suspect in the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage to escape (and may have been party to the plot), and even repeated claims for World War II reparations that the Law and Justice government had revived. 

More importantly, Warsaw remains frustrated with the German government’s slowness in supplying Ukraine’s military needs and its overall failure to provide European leadership. This week Tusk  criticised German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for his “telephone diplomacy” with Putin. “No one will stop Putin with phone calls,” he grumbled. “Telephone diplomacy cannot replace real support from the whole West for Ukraine.”

Now that Sholz’s coalition is likely to become a lame duck after the vote of confidence next month, Warsaw believes it will have to step in to provide this leadership during its EU presidency. Pointedly, Berlin is not on Tusk’s list of stops in the coming weeks.

In short, the new government’s failure to make a more fundamental break with its predecessor’s foreign policy  shows  that there is  a fair degree of political consensus on Poland’s interests.

“He is adopting some of their positions,” says Zaborowski. “There is some continuity on a number of issues [with the Law and Justice government], except that the current government doesn’t pursue them in a spirit of looking for trouble but in a spirit of discussion with its EU partners.” 

The continuity also shows that the government remains completely focussed on winning the presidential election in May and cannot afford to give any hostages to fortune. If a Law and Justice is victorious again, the government can wave goodbye to fulfilling its domestic agenda, so it has to protect its foreign policy back. 

“There is a lot of understanding for Tusk in Brussels and in national capitals,” says Zaborowski. He points out that Duda is already blocking the appointment of several ambassadors and the election of another Law and Justice president would make Tusk’s foreign policy “far more complicated”.

This all demonstrates that Poland’s domestic politics remains so polarised and poisonous that it will be difficult for Tusk to strike out boldly in foreign policy and play the role that he and many Poles believe is the country’s right and responsibility. The EU may also come to feel that it may have been a little premature in its  enthusiastic welcome for the new government.