'Pure evil': Poland ruling party attacks opposition leader's German 'links'

Since President Andrzej Duda set Poland’s parliamentary election for October 15, the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has turned its guns on Donald Tusk, the leader of the opposition Civic Platform (PO) and a figure it says is beholden to Germany – and the EU by extension.

“Tusk is the personification of evil in Poland. He is pure evil,” Jaroslaw Kaczynski, PiS leader and the deputy prime minister, said this week.

Tusk, who is from the northern Polish city of Gdansk, with historically strong links to Germany, was the president of the European Council from 2014 to 2019, and has been subjected to such name-calling for years.

Kaczynski claimed Tusk wants to abolish the social programs introduced by PiS, raise the retirement age and privatise major companies.

Mariusz Blaszczak, another senior PiS leader and the country’s defence minister, warned that Tusk would remove the fence along the border with Belarus if he came to power.

With the elections drawing closer, PiS is ahead in most polls, but its lead over PO has narrowed as it faces pressure from its core farming constituency over cheaper Ukrainian grain imports.

According to a recent survey by Pooling the Poles, PiS is at around 35 percent and the PO has 29 percent.

Aleks Szczerbiak, a professor at the University of Sussex, said it is much easier for the PiS to attack Tusk as “a proxy for the EU” rather than criticise the bloc itself.

“Poles remain overwhelmingly committed to continued membership of the EU, and any hint of supporting ‘Polexit’ would be electoral suicide,” he said.

War and history

A February survey of the Institute of Public Affairs think tank found the number of Poles who evaluate Polish-German relations positively fell from 72 percent in 2020 to 48 percent, while those who viewed them negatively increased from 14 percent to 35 percent.

In the PiS’ view, the Ukraine war has “exposed the way Germany fatally misjudged” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans, said Szczerbiak.

Meanwhile, Poland’s preference for a federation of EU nation-states also collides with Berlin’s push for a deeper EU.

Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau presented his 2023 policy priorities in April as Poland’s “duty to strive to give Polish-German relations a shape that could be described as a model.”

However, he suggested Berlin should change its position on the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which restricts the deployment of “significant military forces” in new NATO member states.

While NATO shifts its attention to Ukraine, Poland is widely seen to be a new centre of US interest in Europe – and Washington’s growing arms sales to Warsaw serve as a strong indicator.