Poland’s political drama echoes Trump election loss aftermath

WARSAW, Poland – Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk knew it would be a challenge to extricate the outgoing nationalist government from power after he orchestrated a shock election victory three months ago.

“Did anyone really think that the job ahead of us would be light, easy and pleasant?” he said on social media platform X on Jan. 5. “No, it will be heavy, difficult and unpleasant for some time.”

But just how tough is being laid bare in a political drama in Warsaw that has echoes of the aftermath of Donald Trump losing the U.S. presidential election. It’s shaping up to be the biggest test of Polish democracy since the end of communism almost 35 years ago.

Between the president protecting two fugitive members of parliament, a central bank chief avoiding a probe into his policymaking and tens of thousands of people on the freezing streets of Warsaw, it’s been an eventful week in Poland.

Tusk’s return to power was supposed to end a feud with the European Union over rule of law and unlock €60 billion ($66 billion) of frozen funds after his new government vowed to take Poland back into the mainstream. His election pledge was to reverse the country’s course within 24 hours.

Rebuilding democratic institutions was never going to be straightforward, though, after eight years of rule by the Law & Justice Party, which stacked public media, the courts and state-owned companies with its people.

Rather than go quietly, the party under Jaroslaw Kaczynski, its leader and Tusk’s nemesis, has fired up supporters. Addressing crowds on Thursday in front of the Polish Parliament, Kaczynski said the incoming administration was trying to destroy Poland and subjugate it to Germany.

“This is going to be the pattern now,” said Anna Materska-Sosnowska, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw. “So, I don’t see the situation calming down at all. I think we are likely to have a very turbulent period coming up.”

Poland’s speaker of parliament has warned the country is in a deepening constitutional crisis. He said opposition lawmakers have told him they may set up their own assembly or at least disrupt the legislature. Among other things, Tusk’s government needs to approve its budget by the end of the month.

Tusk said on Friday evening he wants to unite the country divided by the years of aggressive political conflict. “For me, rebuilding institutions and their independence is absolutely critical – it’s a starting point for the Polish state to become acceptable to everyone again,” he said on television, adding the process may take years. “People need to feel that it’s for all, not for the selected few.”

Demonstrators aren’t about to storm the building like three years ago in Washington, yet there are similarities with Trump supporters and the advent of the Joe Biden administration because of the divisions within Polish society.

Law & Justice came to power in 2015, vowing to be the defenders of “true Poles” against the liberal elites in Warsaw and Brussels.

Everything from abortion and LGBTQ rights to immigration and relations with Germany were weaponized with the populist, us-against-them narrative backed by state media, the Catholic Church and, on most occasions, President Andrzej Duda, a party loyalist.

“What has happened is something that many of us thought was impossible, which is for Polish politics to get even more polarized,” said Aleks Szczerbiak, a professor of politics at the University of Sussex in the U.K. “The government has moved very quickly with radical measures. The result has been to raise the temperature very high.”

Investors have taken the turmoil in their stride for now, and they have a lot riding on the transition of Poland back to a core EU ally. The zloty, stocks and bonds have all rallied since the election on Oct. 15, when Tusk’s opposition bloc won a majority as more voters turned out since the first free elections in 1989.

Poland’s currency has gained nearly 9% against the dollar since the ballot, the yield on benchmark 10-year notes dropped about 75 basis points, while Warsaw’s WIG20 stock index gained 14% – all among the best performers across emerging markets. Markets have become accustomed to political rows, said Ernest Pytlarczyk, chief economist at Bank Pekao SA in Warsaw.

That could change. Tusk, a former Polish premier who left to become European Council president, was sworn in a month ago and started loosening Law & Justice’s grip on state institutions. The government started with the national broadcaster, and immediately ran into trouble. On Dec. 20, some channels went off air as Law & Justice parliamentarians started sit-ins. Duda then vetoed a law to fund a new television station.

The same week, a court sentenced two of the party’s lawmakers to two years in prison for abuse of power dating back to the late 2000s. That set the scene for the twists of the past week or so.

A part of the Supreme Court controlled by Law & Justice-appointed judges revoked a decision by the speaker of parliament to strip the pair of their mandates to sit in the legislature. They remained under arrest, though. Enter Duda again. The president invited them to his palace – replete with a photo op for the three of them – saying they would stay there until the “evil is conquered.”

Later in the evening on Jan. 9, police went into the presidential palace and arrested the lawmakers, only for Duda to announce at a news conference two days later that he plans to pardon the “political prisoners.” He appealed for demonstrations to be peaceful.

“Andrzej Duda is the godfather of the problems we face today,” said Radoslaw Markowski, professor of political sciences at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. “There will be a fierce fight between the president and the new government.”

The battles, though, are on many fronts. As Law & Justice supporters were preparing to gather in front of parliament on Jan. 11, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal barred the government from trying to investigate central bank Governor Adam Glapinski for political influence on monetary policy. A rate cut in September ahead of the election blindsided investors and sent the zloty into freefall.

Tusk on Friday dismissed the ruling as “non-binding” and said there were other legal ways to probe the governor.

Indeed, the issue facing Tusk and his government is how to restore rule of law in Poland and meet EU requirements without breaking the law themselves. The public wants a return to “normality,” but that’s hard without breaking the law, said Wladyslaw Teofil Bartoszewski, the deputy foreign minister.

The escalation of the conflict with Duda is a reminder that accessing EU recovery funds will be difficult, according to EU diplomats. To get the financing, Poland needs to meet a set of conditions that include legislative – and the president is expected to veto them.

The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, steered clear of commenting on what was happening Poland, pointing instead its last rule-of-law report, which mentioned “serious concerns” related to the independence of the Polish judiciary.

“There are only two ways to undo the entire system,” Bartoszewski said. “Either break the constitution using the same mechanism or change the system meticulously – piece by piece.”

(Wojciech Moskwa, Ewa Krukowska, Patrick Donahue and Agnieszka Barteczko contributed to this report.)