Poland’s escalating power struggle

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A deepening power struggle between Poland’s leaders is threatening to derail Donald Tusk’s pro-EU agenda and pit state institutions against one another.

In a highly anticipated meeting held on Monday, Polish President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Tusk failed to ease tensions, with Duda describing the new administration’s reforms as attempts to “violate the law” and Tusk blaming the president for “devastation of the rule of law” under the previous right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government.

Tusk has previously denounced the “obvious sabotage” tactics of the PiS opposition as a bid to maintain control over part of the state apparatus. “To put it bluntly, we are dealing with an attempt to build a dual power and with involvement of the most important state institutions,” he said in a news conference last week.

Mutual recriminations are creating “a dangerous situation” forcing Tusk to navigate from one crisis to the next, which could lead to the creation of a “dual state”, said Polish investor and columnist Paweł Konzal. “It’s unprecedented and it seems not to have been anticipated by the new government,” he told the Financial Times.

The most recent source of discord between the two politicians is the fate of the national prosecutor appointed by the previous PiS government, who was fired on Friday but whom the president wants to keep in the job. Duda, himself a PiS nominee, has also sided with the former ruling party in defending two of their lawmakers convicted of abuse in office.

In a news conference on Monday, Tusk accused Duda of being “involved in the devastation of the rule of law and legal order in Poland since 2015”.

But he also acknowledged that Duda has veto powers which could hobble his premiership until next year’s presidential elections. “It is in our common interest that the last dozen…