Poland's PM Donald Tusk strikes defiant tone after winning confidence vote
Poland's beleaguered prime minister has won a confidence vote, shoring up his position after a right-wing populist opponent took the presidency.
Donald Tusk struck a defiant tone in parliament and insisted that his government would not yield by 'so much as a millimetre' amid conjecture that his already fractured coalition might disintegrate after the election.
Tusk, who returned to power 18 months ago, had his ambitions for liberalising social reforms and a wholesale clean-out of the public sector repeatedly frustrated by the outgoing President Duda, who is close to the nationalist opposition.
The prime minister's centre-right Civic Platform party had high hopes of breaking the blockade by getting Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw and an ally of Tusk, elected president in Duda's place.
Yet Trzaskowski's lead in the polls evaporated and he lost to Karol Nawrocki, another opposition figure, who has vowed to intensify Duda's veto tactics after he takes office in August.
• Who is Poland's new president?
The defeat leaves Tusk's coalition at risk of being unable to present any significant legislation without it being rejected by Nawrocki. That has in turn led to calls for Tusk to stand down and call an early election instead of serving out his remaining two and a half years as premier.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the most powerful figure in the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, has urged Tusk to make way for an interim cabinet of technocrats who would hold the fort until voters elect a new government aligned with the Nawrocki presidency.
Yet Tusk resolved to fight on, using a vote of confidence in his own leadership to compel his coalition partners to reaffirm their loyalty. 'I don't know the meaning of the word 'capitulation',' he told MPs. 'There is no talk of it.'
Fielding more than a hundred questions during a debate that dragged on for more than six hours, he announced that he would reshuffle his cabinet next month and hinted that he would abolish a number of ministries to fix what he described as a 'dysfunctional structure' in the administration.
'There is no political earthquake, but let's be honest: we face two and a half years of very hard, serious work under conditions that are unlikely to improve,' Tusk said.
He suggested that his government's image problems had stemmed as much from understating its successes and a 'festival of lies from the opposition' as from its struggles to enact the promises it had made to the electorate: 'Perhaps we have overdone it with the belief that the truth will defend itself.'
• How Poland's new president will halt the march of liberal reforms
During the ensuing debate, PiS MPs lined up to accuse Tusk of losing control of the public finances and mismanaging projects of national prestige such as a container port near Szczecin and the country's nuclear research reactor facility.
Radoslaw Fogiel, an influential PiS MP, told The Times that the confidence vote had been 'irrelevant' and 'nothing more than political theatre' intended to distract voters from the presidential election defeat.
'Donald Tusk's government has record-low approval ratings, has failed to deliver on most of its promises, does not respond to the aspirations of the Polish people, and is focused solely on fighting the opposition,' Fogiel said.
Michal Wojcik, a former deputy justice minister, told Tusk's coalition benches: 'You are the Huns of Polish politics. You, like those nomads who invaded Europe many centuries ago, destroyed and pillaged, but lost. The Hun empire fell because it came into contact with the forces of democracy.'
Ultimately, however, Tusk carried the day by 243 votes to 210, implying that all of the MPs in his coalition had remained by his side.
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