Brussels – Donald Tusk‘s gamble has paid off: the Polish premier gained confidence in Parliament this afternoon (11 June), requested after the defeat of government candidate Rafal Trzaskowski in the presidential elections on 1 June. The pro-European government thus remains in power, with the support of 243 MPs out of a total of 460.
The clash with the PiS (Law and Justice), the ultra-nationalist party of the newly elected President Karol Nawrocki, with whom Tusk will have to get along for the next few years, is total: PiS deputies left the Warsaw Parliament hall during the premier’s speech and then voted for a no-confidence motion. However, Tusk’s fragile four-party coalition, comprising forces ranging from the conservative agrarian wing to the social democratic left, held.
“I call for a vote of confidence with the full conviction that we have a mandate to govern and to take full responsibility for what is happening in Poland,” the PM told the House before the vote. Nawrocki’s narrow victory “is not an earthquake,” he continued, but poses “greater challenges than expected” to the government and to the implementation of the reform programme with which Tusk was elected in October 2023. Nawrocki will in fact replace in August Andrzej Duda, a two-term president and PiS member, who has so far prevented Tusk from fully putting Warsaw back on a pro-European path after the years of progressive dismantling of the rule of law dictated by former premier Mateusz Morawiecki (now president of the European Conservatives and Reformists).
Cohabiting with Nawrocki promises to be just as strenuous: in Poland, the president can veto the government’s laws. “In August, a president who is reluctant to the changes we propose will be replaced by a president who is at least as reluctant to proposals that were attractive to the 11 million people who voted for the coalition,” admitted the premier and former president of the European Council.
The first move announced by Tusk, based on Parliament’s renewed confidence, will be a government reshuffle, as early as next month. The centrist leader, a charismatic figure of the European People’s Party, promised an acceleration of the legislative agenda and confirmed the existence of a ‘contingency plan‘ to deal with the obstacle represented by the Nawrocki presidency.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
