Poland’s ruling party amplifies attacks on Donald Tusk

Receive free Poland updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Poland news every morning.

Poland’s ruling rightwing party has amplified its attacks on opposition leader Donald Tusk, portraying him as a German stooge in a bid to dissuade voters from backing his coalition in upcoming elections.

Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), argued on Friday that a referendum was needed to stop Tusk’s Civic Platform party from selling state-owned companies to German and other foreign investors. “The Germans want to embed Tusk in Poland in order to sell off the common property,” Kaczyński claimed in a video he posted on Facebook.

PiS is seeking to win an unprecedented third term in office on October 15 by convincing voters that it can defend Poland against outside threats, particularly from Russia and Belarus. The country’s defence minister announced on Thursday a deployment of 10,000 troops along its border with Belarus. 

But PiS has also channelled its campaigning efforts towards vilifying Tusk and casting him as being both too friendly to Moscow and an agent of the EU and Germany.

To back his claim that the opposition wants to sell key state assets, Kaczyński included an extract from an interview given by an economist, Bogusław Grabowski, in which he backed the idea of privatising Poland’s oil and gas company Orlen. Grabowski was a member of the economic council that advised Tusk as prime minister more than a decade ago.

Tusk himself has not talked about privatising the company if returned to office.

Tusk, who was prime minister between 2007 and 2014, then served as president of the European Council from 2014 to 2019, despite an attempt by the Polish government to block his candidature. He returned to domestic politics in order to coalesce the opposition and challenge PiS in the upcoming election.

The bad blood between Tusk and Kaczyński runs deep. In 2010, Kaczynski’s twin brother Lech, who was president at the time, died in a plane crash in Russia. The surviving brother has subsequently repeatedly blamed Tusk, who was premier at the time, for colluding with Russia in killing his brother.

Poland’s president this month ratified a law designed by the government to prosecute people for pro-Russian activities, which opponents have dubbed “Lex Tusk” as it could target Tusk himself and ban him from office. 

Warsaw has been feuding with the EU over the rule of law and several other issues, including climate change and migration legislation. But it also has specific complaints about Germany, including a claim presented last year for Germany to pay €1.3tn in reparations for Nazi war crimes. 

“PiS creates and builds up the impression of successive external and internal threats that are fictitious,” said Michał Kobosko, vice-president of Polska 2050, one of the smaller opposition parties. “In the campaign, PiS knows how to play only with people’s fear, they do not have any positive development ideas.”

Opinion polls suggest neither PiS nor Tusk’s party alone is likely to gain a majority in October, which could also lead to complicated talks over forming a coalition government with smaller parties after a fiercely contested and vitriolic campaign.

In addition to the privatisation issue, the referendum would contain other questions, including on migration, and be held on the same day as the parliamentary elections. The parliament needs to approve the referendum plan, with opposition parties arguing it could allow PiS to justify using more public money to boost its own election campaign spending. 

Opposition politician Kobosko argued on Friday that “the whole idea of a referendum is contrived and nonsensical. Poles will vote on October 15 in the parliamentary elections — and this is a real referendum on the rule of PiS.”