WARSAW — Karol Nawrocki is being sworn in Wednesday for a five-year term as Poland’s president, but it’s not going to be a happy day for Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
June’s narrow electoral victory by Nawrocki — a nationalist openly allied with U.S. President Donald Trump — delivered a massive body blow to the political prospects of the ruling coalition led by pro-EU centrist Tusk.
That threatens to stall the legislative agenda of the EU’s fifth-largest country and to slow a push to restore rule of law that led to a breakdown of relations between Warsaw and Brussels.
But there are efforts to find common cause between Nawrocki and the centrists in areas like defense — where everyone can agree Russia is the enemy.
“The right-wing opposition candidate’s presidential election victory has radically changed Poland’s political dynamics, scuppering the liberal-centrist coalition government’s plans to reset its reform agenda,” wrote Aleks Szczerbiak, a professor at the University of Sussex who studies Polish politics.
Nawrocki succeeds Andrzej Duda, also supported by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and who has slow-walked Tusk’s agenda. Nawrocki promises to be even more aggressive in hopes of painting the government as being ineffective and paving the way for PiS to return to power in 2027, the next general election.
Ben Stanley, a political scientist at the SWPS University in Warsaw, predicted that Poland faces a two-year tug-of-war between Nawrocki and Tusk.
Dark clouds
Everything looks set for a stormy showdown.
A recent reshuffle of the Cabinet elevated anti-PiS hawks to government positions, signaling Tusk’s willingness to take on Nawrocki. The new Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek, a former judge persecuted by PiS for his opposition to judiciary reforms, has already started driving out judges promoted by PiS.
“It’s just a warm-up,” Tusk quipped on social media, reacting to the outrage coming from the PiS camp.
Nawrocki has called Tusk, “the worst prime minister since 1989,” referring to the year when Communism fell.
One key area that is likely to see clashes is Tusk’s continuing effort to roll back changes to the judicial system imposed by the previous PiS government that led to Brussels freezing billions in EU funds over concerns about backsliding on rule of law.
Tusk got the money back on promises to restore democratic norms. He has, however, made little progress in returning judicial independence and removing judges accused of being improperly nominated, thanks to the slowness of his government and resistance from Duda. Nawrocki will likely continue to block such changes.
“The government will find it extremely difficult to unravel its Law and Justice predecessor’s judicial reforms,” wrote Szczerbiak.
There are already warnings from Brussels.
“It’s important for the institutions to continue to follow up on the reforms for veritable separation of power,” said Ana Catarina Mendes, the vice chair of the Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament who led on a report last year on rule of law in Poland.
Nawrocki, who is able to propose legislation as president, has promised to push through popular measures like doubling the amount of tax-free income for individuals — an idea abandoned by the Tusk government over deficit worries.
“Nawrocki will definitely want to put the government in a difficult position by presenting proposals aligned with the government’s earlier promises or policy goals, which the government has failed to deliver,” Stanley said.
Nawrocki has pledged to tour Poland to promote his tax ideas, such as no tax for families with two or more children, lowering the VAT rate and other tax cuts that would sap the budget of tens of billions.
Tusk has already fired back, saying last week: “I will not allow Mr Nawrocki, once he’s sworn in as president, to politically sabotage the government.”
Nawrocki has also promised to veto any laws that “change the shape of national identity, or surrender Poland’s sovereignty to authorities outside the Republic” — a jab at the EU, immigration policy and at issues like changing abortion laws and giving more rights to LGBTQ+ people.
Tusk said: “I know the constitution by heart, especially the parts that spell out the responsibilities of the president and of the government: the president is the representative of the Polish state. The government conducts domestic and foreign policy.”
Looking for common ground
But the two men do recognize that they will have to work together.
In their first meeting after the election, Tusk brought up the issue of national defense and continued military support for Ukraine — issues that straddle Poland’s deep political divide.
“We both realize that it is in the best interest of everyone in Poland that state institutions, whether they like each other or not, must cooperate on key issues,” Tusk said in June.
Nawrocki has also said that Poles “expect the president and prime minister to talk and cooperate on issues that are important to our national community.”
“I will seek to make security a unifying issue for all Poles,” Nawrocki told Defence24, a news website, in June.
The new president said he would like to forge an agreement between his office, the government, and the parliament to “define defense funding levels, the main directions for developing Poland’s security and defense system, as well as related capabilities and legal regulations.”
But those words don’t disguise the coming clash.
Tusk’s increasingly inchoate coalition is likely to ramp up its work on stalled legislation ranging from easing access to abortion through undoing PiS’s legacy in the judiciary, to holding PiS’s top brass to account for alleged crimes.
The idea would be to show that progress is being blocked by the new president.
The government may decide “that it has no choice but to go for a full-frontal confrontation with Mr Nawrocki hoping that he will over-reach so that it can blame its shortcomings on presidential obstruction,” said Szczerbiak.
That will leave voters in 2027 with a conundrum — back Tusk’s coalition and continue the confrontation at least until the end of Nawrocki’s first term in 2030 or allow for unified right-wing government and president.
“The next election essentially will hinge around the question of whether it’s better to have a government with a president that can facilitate it, or whether it’s better to ensure that we don’t have a return to 2015-2023, where both sides of the executive were essentially complicit in democratic backsliding,” said Stanley, referring to PiS’s previous term in power.
That means one of the EU’s fastest-growing economies, a close friend of the United States with the highest percentage levels of defense spending in NATO and a crucial ally in helping keep Ukraine in the fight against Russia, faces years of drift.
Max Griera contributed reporting from Brussels.
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