In today’s edition, we analyse the final results of the Polish general elections and navigate the main challenges that Donald Tusk will face in the forthcoming months. Enjoy!

Donald Tusk’s Job Is Yet To Be Done

Opposition parties won Poland’s parliamentary election that took place on Sunday, ending the eight-year reign of Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice (PiS) party.

The final results are clear: they put PiS first, with 35.4 per cent and 194 seats, but that’s too few for a majority in the 460-member lower house of parliament.

Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition – the main opposition party – together with the Third Way and New Left parties, reached a total of 53.5 per cent of the vote. The extreme right wing of the Confederation (7.1 per cent) also came out of the elections reduced but entered parliament. Now Polish President Andrzej Duda, with a past in the PiS, must follow up on the results, entrusting the task of forming a new executive to the winning coalition.

And this is the first game that the opposition leader, Donald Tusk, needs to play.

President Duda already said that presidents traditionally choose the leader of the largest party to try to form a government, meaning that, even though PiS is a no-hoper, this could delay the formation of a stable government.

Evidence for this theory is that Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki will try to build a parliamentary majority.

According to the Polish constitution, the president must convene a fresh parliamentary session within 30 days following an election. Subsequently, the president has 14 days to put forth a candidate for prime minister. Once the nominee is declared, there is another 14-day window for them to secure a vote of confidence in parliament. In the event of a confidence vote failure, the parliament will select a new candidate for the position of prime minister.

Consequently, if President Duda remains aligned with the PiS party, it may not be until mid-December before the three opposition parties – namely the Civic Coalition, the Third Way, and the Left – can attempt to establish a government. Together, these parties hold 248 seats in the newly constituted legislature.

Suppose the opposite scenario comes true: Donald Tusk is appointed to establish a government with the other opposition parties. Well, the job won’t be easy. During the election campaign, the opposition has been unified by the sole scope to bring the PiS down, but considerable differences in their political manifestos cannot be neglected.

First, it is worth mentioning that Tusk’s Civic Coalition, although mainly refers to the European centre-right family of the EPP, contains a constellation of small movements that also refers to The Greens. This could pose problems during the coalition talks if we consider that the EPP, behind Manfred Weber’s lead, has repeatedly criticised the Commission’s Green Deal.

Furthermore, The Third Way is a partnership between two political parties: Poland 2050, established by television presenter Szymon Hołownia, and the Polish People’s Party (PSL), the nation’s longest-standing political entity advocating for rural interests. Poland 2050 is affiliated with the Renew group, while PSL aligns with the EPP. This coalition leans toward the centre-right of the political spectrum, making it probable to have disagreements with the Left on issues such as the relaxation of stringent abortion laws.

Conversely, the Left is a fusion of three smaller political factions whose leaders have frequently been in bitter conflict.

Another fundamental game that Donald Tusk will have to play will be to eradicate the media system that, over the past eight years, PiS has built around its leadership.

During the campaign, the state-controlled media was firmly in the government’s camp despite being obliged by law to be impartial. A chain of newspapers owned by state-owned refiner Orlen also backed PiS — and papers even rejected advertising from opposition parties. Eradicating this information system will take time, but Tusk can be sure that he will have the support of Brussels in this battle.

Tusk is a seasoned figure in Brussels, having served for five years as the European Council president and the European People’s Party leader.

The departure of PiS signals a significant shift in the EU’s dynamics, as it marks the end of an eight-year period during which the EU engaged in contentious disputes with Warsaw over far-reaching alterations to the judicial system, intended to exert more political influence over the judiciary.

Since 2021, there has been an ongoing legal dispute determined by two rulings of Poland’s Constitutional Court: the first on 14 July, when the judges in Warsaw rejected the EU regulation allowing the EU Court of Justice to rule on the “systems, principles and procedures” of Polish courts; the second on 7 October, when the Constitutional Court questioned the primacy of EU law, calling Articles 1 and 19 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and several rulings of EU courts “incompatible” with the Polish Constitution. At the centre of the dispute is the decision to provisionally suspend the powers of the disciplinary section of the Supreme Court of Poland due to some arbitrary measures against magistrates disliked by the government majority. While the infringement procedure by the European Commission is ongoing, the EU Court of Justice has ordered the member country to pay a million euro fine per day: the bill has already risen to over half a billion euros – 526 million to be exact – from 27 October 2021 to 14 April 2023.

Moreover, The European Commission moved to end Poland’s voting rights as an EU member under a so-called Article 7 procedure. It blocked the payout of €36 billion in loans and grants from the bloc’s pandemic recovery fund, while the European Parliament passed resolutions decrying Warsaw’s backsliding on democratic principles.

At the European Council table, Morawiecki will sit for a short time yet – certainly at the October one, probably for the December one – and this change of guard in Warsaw closely concerns not only Orbán but also the Italian government led by Giorgia Meloni. The Italian PM will lose her closest ally among the other 26 EU leaders, possibly impacting her leadership of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR). PiS is one of the conservative family’s two biggest parties, simultaneously the biggest obstacle to a complicated election agreement with Manfred Weber’s European People’s Party ahead of next year’s European elections. While at first glance, a weakening of the two might open some glimmer of hope for a closer confrontation between Meloni and Weber in defining an alternative to the current majority between EPP, Social Democrats and Liberals of Renew in the EU Parliament, one cannot hide the fact that for European conservatives the defeat of PiS in Poland represents yet another setback for the national elections in 2023: after the good performances in Sweden and Finland, the right-wing parties also suffered brutal setbacks in Spain and Slovakia, before the blackest day in Warsaw, dampening enthusiasm for a rise at European level at the moment.