Moving fast to break things: Tusk conducts a novel experiment in Europe

Mark Zuckerberg once described Facebook’s corporate culture as “move fast and break things”. But even the tech billionaire would struggle to keep up with events in his great-grandparents’ homeland.

Last October the national conservative Law and Justice (PiS) won Poland’s general election but, for want of a parliamentary majority, lost power after two terms to a new pro-EU centre-left coalition led by prime minister Donald Tusk.

For eight years Tusk and his political allies accused PiS of flouting domestic law and EU rules to capture key institutions such as public media, courts and the public prosecutor’s office. Now PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his loyalists have fired the same claims back at the new Tusk administration: it is moving fast to break the law.

“Basically we have one revolutionary movement in the former ruling party and a counter-revolutionary movement in the new government,” says Filip Pazderski, senior policy analyst at Warsaw’s Institute of Public Affairs.

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“The new government says it is putting in order the mess left by the previous government. Meanwhile the opposition, the former government, is warning Poland’s European neighbours that democracy here is in danger.”

That in itself is an ironic sign of the times given how, in power, PiS denounced such appeals to Brussels or elsewhere as treachery. It is telling, too, how few in the EU feel minded to listen to PiS.

On the contrary, many capitals know Tusk from his term as European Council president. They hold him in high regard and – for now at least – are prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

On Tuesday Tusk told parliament that his government was up and running – “the machine has started” – and would continue to run fast to depoliticise public media, courts and public prosecutor structures.

“Good politics cannot be about finding a compromise between lies and truth, lawlessness and law,” he said.

But the 66-year-old knows he has a powerful adversary in president Andrzej Duda, a PiS appointee whose term ends in 2025. After a frosty meeting on Monday, Tusk said the president “has had a hand since 2015 in the devastation of the rule of law and legal order in Poland”.

But Duda and PiS insist they have the law on their side and he has vowed to veto Tusk’s “terror of the rule of law”.

Their relationship is disintegrating at speed after the president sought to pardon, for a second time, two former PiS politicians convicted of abuse of power.

While PiS describes them as “political prisoners”, pursued by vengeful political rivals, Adam Bodnar, the new minister for justice, dismisses such talk. He has promised a “careful and legal” approach in office: to the pardon application and reforms on how public institutions operate – and how they hire.

But the 47-year-old former ombudsman’s methods have come under fire: using a legal loophole to dismiss Poland’s effective head public prosecutor. Equally controversial is the minister for culture’s approach to broadcast reform: locking out political staff by putting all public media outlets into receivership.

The latter move – including a Christmas lockout of political journalists – prompted a series of vocal, PiS-led demonstrations at public broadcaster TVP’s Warsaw headquarters. But all is quiet on a snowy weekday morning as the main evening news team gather for their morning conference.

[ Derek Scally: A tale of two pardons as Duda and Tusk engage in a battle of wills ]

There is an easy familiarity among the new team: a mix of fresh hires and older colleagues who have returned after departing during the PiS era.

One returnee recalls a “sudden shift of narrative” from 2016 after PiS took office. Echoing the PiS political playbook, TVP issued dire warnings of “invasions” – of migrants and “LGBT ideology” and repeatedly broadcast claims that Tusk was a “German agent”, preparing to sell out his homeland to Berlin. TVP chose and harassed targets – rival politicians and their families, critical journalists – and adopted an approach of loud repetition of claims that one Polish politician likened to the methods of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

Lingering after the morning conference, Pawel Pluska says his first priority as new editor-in-chief was to apologise to viewers.

“For eight years we had propaganda and hate-speech, not news, which led to suicides and other terrible things,” Pluska says. “Now we want to give people a voice and not tell them what to think – not possible in the last eight years.”

Pawel Adamczyk begs to differ. A 20-year TVP veteran news anchor and host of a Sunday evening political talkshow, he was appointed TVP chief shortly before he and others were locked out of its downtown office.

Though he insists he is the rightful boss of TVP, Adamczyk concedes that this ship has sailed because the new government has “refused to respect the law and decided to put in their own head of TVP”.

The government disagrees, contesting the legality of the PiS-controlled media body that appointed him. Does Adamczyk understand the huge political and public resentment towards TVP over its recent reporting and language?

Adamczyk chews over his answer, and his lip, for a few silent seconds.

“Some of the strong words we used could have been perceived as aggression,” he says. “But it is good we spoke about some subjects on which others were silent.”

And was Tusk, as TVP repeated ad nauseam, a German agent? Another pause and a nervous smile.

“Well ‘agent’ is too strong, it is fair to say he is very connected with the Germans,” Adamczyk says. “Can you give me one decision, as president of European Council, that was against German interests?”

An email to a busy former EU Tusk staffer returns three points, 14 minutes later. He “completely provoked German fury by refusing to advance or table mandatory asylum quotas at council level”. Tusk was “very sceptical” of the 2015 Berlin-managed Russian-Ukraine talks in Minsk, the staffer adds, pointing to tweets where the politician warned that “appeasement encourages the aggressor to greater acts of violence”. He also proposed an EU energy union to stop a repeat of the bilateral Nordstream II pipeline that bypassed Poland and Ukraine.

“As in so much else,” wrote the former Tusk staffer, “time has proven him right.”

Though TVP’s pursuit of Tusk mirrors a personal obsession of PiS leader Jaroslaw Kacynski, the former news anchor insists he “didn’t get any instructions” from the party and denies any contact with its leaders. Many of his arguments now repeat verbatim PiS talking points, in particular how the TVP reforms shatter a “media parity” by abolishing a conservative outlet in an otherwise liberal television landscape.

So what do ordinary Poles think of TVP news now? Many are wary of giving it another go while those who have are slow with praise.

“The TVP evening news now is very balanced, very careful but almost a little boring,” says Maciek, a 29-year-old Warsaw graduate. “They seem afraid now to try any emotional, entertainment or personal approach.”

For many political analysts, however, the TVP row was just a taster of what’s to come as Tusk conducts a novel experiment in Europe: undoing populist, authoritarian rule.

“It may be even more troublesome to have PiS as a populist opposition than in power,” says Mateusz Mazzini, a writer-at-large for the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. “The Tusk government faces the burden of responsibility to play by the rules while PiS, in opposition as in power, has never felt the need to.”

Watching Tuesday’s raucous session of the Sejm parliament gave a taste of what is to come, as PiS deputies disrupted proceedings and forced a recess. For PiS MP Malgorzata Wassermann, the first weeks of the Tusk government have been “farcical”.

“This dismantling of the constitutional state will have disastrous effects,” Wassermann says. “I have hope that it won’t affect the whole Polish legal system as much as precisely the people attempting these unlawful actions.”

Though she describes claims by PiS chairman Kaczynski that Tusk is a German agent as “undeniably harsh”, she says his words “have to be treated more as a political opinion, and not as a form of litigation or a matter of evidence”.

In his Warsaw studio, artist Bartek Kielbowicz reviews dozens of his illustrations and political caricatures for news weekly Polityka. One pre-election image of red-striped circus tent references two terms of PiS rule: “Eight years of circus is enough”.

“After the election we were hopeful that the PiS circus was over, but now they are continuing an even bigger circus from opposition,” says Kielbowicz.

Like many Tusk supporters he is waiting impatiently for the government to deliver on campaign promises, such as an end to Poland’s effective abortion ban. But, he fears its capacity to act – at home and in EU politics – will the hobbled by PiS disruption.

“PiS is not a political party it’s a religion and they are working on a new myth,” says the artist. “It’s a myth of them as the victims of oppression that taps into memories of the 1980s Solidarity struggle. It’s very cynical, because it is not true, but it could prove very effective.”

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