The more President Donald Tusk speaks in public, the more it becomes clear that he is not interested in the fate of Poland and the Poles, but only in gaining power in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
He can say anything, once he is liberal and talks about the need to reduce social spending, and a few sentences later already a socially sensitive person, demanding an increase in spending for these purposes.
Strangely, this does not bother his supporters, including pundits, journalists and the media that support him, all of them admire his fitness and claim that such behavior will lead his formation to victory.
Tusk tries to attach himself to the PiS program
The most spectacular example of such almost Machiavellian statements by Tusk was his first speech last week on Thursday in Sulechów in Lubuskie Voivodeship, in which he declared that the beneficiaries of the 500+ are “the kings of life who drink, beat children , women beat and have not disgraced themselves with work “for many years” to demand the introduction of 800+ from June 1 this year in Krakow on Monday.
It was in Krakow, during a meeting with voters, that Tusk tried to “cling” to the announcement made the day before by President Jarosław Kaczyński that child benefits would be increased by as much as 60% from January 500 to PLN 800 1 next year. Among other things, he said: “President, if you really want to help Polish families, and don’t want to play a political game, we can do it together in the Sejm, so that valorization on Children’s Day becomes a fact.”
So in just 5 days Tusk changed his mind, now the benefit for families raising children is no longer for those “who drink, beat their wives and don’t work” but for children, which is why it should be immediately increased by PLN 300.
In addition, speaking about the future of the “Family 500+” program, Tusk is extremely brutal, because “forever” he was not only the opponent, but even mocked it.
This was the case in 2014, when Law and Justice announced the introduction of the Family 500+ program, when voters entrusted power to this formation in the upcoming parliamentary elections, Tusk ironically asked in Zakopane: “isn’t the money for its implementation to bury?” here?”
A few years later, he explained in his friend TVN that he was glad he had not introduced such a program, because it would lead to a budget disaster, and he is a responsible politician.
Even now, in the aforementioned Sulechów, he claimed that the main beneficiaries of this program are those “who drink, beat children and women, and do not work”, which is why he directly attacked families who raise children and use these funds.
Destabilization of public finances
It’s a shame that Tusk never responded to his announcements of the budget being ruined by Law and Justice social programs like Family 500+, lowering the retirement age, or the 13th and 14th pensions.
For the implementation of the first, for 7 years of its existence (as of April 1, 2016), an astronomical amount of PLN 230 billion has already been spent from the budget, and this has affected the state of the budget or the state of public finances, because the debt-to-GDP ratio was 49% at the end of 2022 and according to EU methodology.
During Tusk’s rule, despite the fact that there was no program at the time, public finances were threatened with such massive destabilization that his government decided to “break” the OFE system and took as much as PLN 153 billion from them, which was a whopping 9% of GDP at the time.
At that time, the national debt amounted to a whopping 57 percent of GDP. GDP, and the budget deficit for 2014 would be so high that without the “theft” of outstanding pension funds, the national debt would reach as much as 66% of GDP, meaning that the limit set in the Constitution of the Republic of Poland (60% of GDP) and, consequently, the Tribunal for Tusk and his then Treasury Secretary.
Thus, during his reign, Tusk led to such a destabilization of public finances that he had to take Poland’s money from OFE to avoid liability in the State Court.
Later, realizing the inevitable defeat of the PO in the forthcoming parliamentary elections, he fled to Brussels, from where he returned after the end of his term with the slogan “to remove PiS from power”.
Now he is trying to abide by Law and Justice’s decision to significantly increase the amount of childcare allowance to PLN 800 of the Family 500+ program, which he mocked both in the past and now.
Source: wPolityce