Poland: Tusk Calls for Confidence Vote in His Government

Bloomberg

2 days ago

00:00
What is Tusk's motivation, Oli, for calling a confidence vote? Does he need to call this vote at this point? He wants to demonstrate before lawmakers, before the whole world that there is still a mandate within the government that this is a vote that he really believes that he's going to win very comfortably. This is not the sort of thing that is going to sort of bring down the government, but it does follow, Tom, as you say, the loss of his ally, the candidate that he really wanted to win that election, the person who would have made his legislative priorities possible to defeat to the Law and Justice Party, the far right nationalist part of the Polish political spectrum that basically now creates a huge amount of gridlock within Poland because the president has a lot of veto powers over everything that the prime minister would like to do. Donald Tusk is still the sort of prominent political force, but he can be basically blocked by a lot of his priorities by the president. And at the end of the day, he's going have to figure out how to navigate that landscape. We are also going to expect a reshuffle of the government to maybe streamline things a little bit. We also heard from Donald Tusk saying also that he wanted everyone to see, including his opponents at home and abroad, that we are not that we are ready for the situation, that we understand the gravity of the moment, but we do not intend to take a single step back. He may not take a single step back, but it's going to be very difficult to see how he's going to manage to put and take steps forward, particularly feeling the heat as he is coming from the far right at a time when Poland was really going to change its trajectory and sort of get unlock a bunch of EU funds and sort of his liberalizing agenda that basically comes potentially to a dead halt. He needs to figure out what his Plan B is, and that is what he's assembling now.