Donald Tusk’s administration faces new wave of Polish culture wars

Step in off the busy Warsaw street, and what was once a shop is now a white-walled gallery lined with odd portraits of St John Paul II.

For his exhibition, artist Bartek Kielbowicz has deconstructed a famous official portrait of the Polish pope. Some popes are blobby, others are barely there. The painter’s aim: to challenge fellow Poles to look again at this familiar painting of a once comforting and cherished figure.

The project began life amid allegations in March that the former pope, as archbishop of Kraków in the 1970s, had covered up allegations against paedophile priests. A series of explosive claims prompted the ruling national conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party to hold demonstrations: not in protest at the church, but in support of the pope’s memory.

“In Poland under the last government, if you criticised JPII you were immediately considered an enemy of the nation, a non-Polish Pole,” said Kielbowicz. “I wanted to provoke society. I wanted to show that we can discuss what it means to be Polish.”

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The exhibition opened just before last October’s election, where PiS finished first but failed to secure a parliamentary majority.

Power passed this week to a new pro-EU coalition led by Donald Tusk. The 66-year-old inherits a country at war with itself after two turbulent and polarising PiS terms.

Its patriotic-nationalist narratives have taken root, and its populist tentacles reach deep into all corners of daily life. Even in opposition, with PiS authoritarian ambitions halted in practice, loyal appointees remain active in Poland’s courts, media, arts institutions and beyond.

Most attention has focused on president Andrzej Duda, a former PiS candidate, who swore in the new government on Wednesday. He agreed to work with the new administration, but raised eyebrows with his promise not to block any legislation that “benefits Poland”.

An uncomfortable Duda-Tusk cohabitation until next year’s presidential elections is possible, but the long-term battles lie elsewhere.

The first shot was fired on Thursday when one PiS-controlled institution moved to protect another.

Poland’s constitutional tribunal issued an interim order preventing the new government from making major changes to public broadcaster TVP, potentially hindering Tusk’s promise to “depoliticise” public media.

For critics, TVP was shaped into a propaganda outlet during the PiS administrations and is the main reason Poland slipped from 18th to 66th place in the World Press Freedom Index.

Legal expert Prof Michal Romanowski told Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza daily that the constitutional court had no legal competence to decide on the case. He described the intervention – by PiS loyalist judges, some in position through contested appointments – as “the purest form of lawlessness”.

Whether politicised courts or reform of state television, for some the bare-knuckle battle for the Polish soul carries an air of deja vu.

In his 1959 book The Captive Mind, future Nobel-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz skewered several opportunist friends. To further their careers, they had fallen in line with the Marxist-Leninist mainstream of communist Poland. Embracing the comfort of the crowd, many went on to attack – and demonise – those who failed to compromise.

“When people are divided into ‘loyalists’ and ‘criminals’,” warned Milosz, “a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling.”

[ Warsaw cinema screens real-life political drama as Tusk replaces Morawiecki ]

Three years ago Polish writer Wojciech Engelking revived the Captive Mind spirit in a magazine portrait of a former friend who accepted an offer from an unnamed “populist party”. This organisation valued loyalty over competence and, to create “a new national elite”, bound ambitious opportunists with “threads that covered Polish institutions with a dense, thick spider’s web”.

“He worked in the supreme court colonised by this party... persecuting lawyers unfavourable to the government and soon worked... in the equally deeply colonised Ministry of Justice,” wrote Engelking.

In the last eight years, no public institution has been spared PiS attention. New directors were appointed to leading museums. Exhibitions were either reframed or replaced entirely to suit a nativist agenda that prioritises a Polish martyrological narrative of history.

Many departed in protest, such as one employee of a major Warsaw art institution after the appointment of a new PiS-loyalist director.

“He curates all the exhibitions – they are always filled with Jesus on crosses or images of how the Polish people suffered so much,” said one former employee who asked not to be named. “Many hope he will be gone soon, the Polish institutions have been destroyed by these people, but it must be done legally.”

Things are even more complicated for Poland’s conservative bishops. Fearful of dwindling attendance as Mass, many of them threw their lot in with PiS culture wars. After backing the government’s campaign against LGBT “ideology”, bishops secured an effective ban on abortion.

“Bills were sent to bishops for advice and, in the last eight years, there was extra state money for church institutions,” said Marta Abramowicz, author of the recent book Ireland: Up Off its Knees, a look at the decline of Catholic Ireland for a Polish readership.

Like many Polish liberals, Abramowicz is watching closely to see if the Tusk administration will make good on its promise to push a separation of church and state. In a first move this week, education minister Barbara Nowacka announced she will halve classroom hours for religious instruction in state schools.

Similar to Bartek Kielbowicz, the pope portrait artist, Abramowicz sees a bitter battle ahead to wrest national identity away from the PiS-church duopoly.

“The Irish story encourages many Polish people,” she said. “We may need more time, but people can be encouraged to use their own minds, and make changes for themselves.”

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