Tusk, by ‘cannibalizing’ TD and left-wing voters in the European Parliament elections, caused a crisis in the government

In the last weeks of the campaign for the European Parliament, wanting to achieve victory over Law and Justice at all costs, Donald Tusk decided to strongly attack the Third Way and its leaders Szymon Hołownia and Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz. This was done with the help of the “discovery” of journalists from the Onet.pl portal, that two months earlier (at the end of March), during an attack by illegal immigrants on the Belarusian-Polish border, soldiers fired warning shots, and then As a result, three of them were handcuffed and detained by military police. The military prosecutor’s office initiated preliminary proceedings in this case and although the soldiers were released, they were suspended from performing their duties and their wages were reduced by 50%. Although Minister Kosiniak-Kamysz was aware of this event, he did not know the details of the procedure, so he was called “on the carpet” to the Prime Minister together with the Minister of Justice, and the message showed that the conversation was not a pleasant one.

Moreover, just before the selective silence, there was the announcement of the death of a Polish soldier who had been stabbed a few days earlier by an illegal immigrant on the part of the border where the shooting incident had previously taken place. There were strong suggestions in the media that this attack would not have happened without the earlier incident where soldiers were arrested and warning shots were fired as soldiers became afraid to use weapons afterwards. All of this undoubtedly had a negative effect on Third Way’s ratings. Some voters decided to vote for the Platform, others decided not to participate in the elections. Hence the result of only 6.9%, which gave this coalition only 3 seats in the elections. EP. This result is generally considered a defeat, and many journalists, even those sympathetic to the current ruling coalition, explicitly write that Tusk has been ‘cannibalizing’ both the Third Way and the Left for some time, and at the end of the EP campaign, this process has been accelerated considerably.

Everything indicates that although Tusk achieved the success he dreamed of, he won the elections against Law and Justice for the first time in ten years, but it was a victory of only 0.9 percentage points and just over 100,000 votes, i.e. by proverbial hair. But this ‘attack’ on the Third Way voters did not go unnoticed by the leaders and now governing will be much more difficult, especially as strong critical voices appeared in the PSL just a few hours after the announcement of the EP election results. Their main exponent was the senior marshal, MP Marek Sawicki, who said in an interview for Wirtualna Polska: “If the Third Way does not make it clear that we have a coalition government and not the government of Donald Tusk, then let it resolve itself and the government forget. the project.” So the PESEL party of the Third Way will demand a coalition government, which Donald Tusk will obviously not agree to, because he only recognizes the government formula of the “leader”. This was the case during his premiership in 2008-2014 and in fact it is now more visible, even though we are dealing with a government consisting of four formations.

There were also statements about the need for the government to implement the program announcements of both the Hołownia Movement (chairman of the parliamentary economics committee Ryszard Petru spoke about it) and the PSL (again MP Marek Sawicki). In a similar vein, Razem Party chairman Adrian Zandberg also said the coalition government would either implement the left’s demands or leave the governing coalition. It is not clear whether the remaining coalition leaders will be as decisive as their clubs’ MPs in direct talks with Tusk, but all indications are that they will become radicalized, which means more and more problems with governance. Especially since reality will become increasingly ‘cracker’, as evidenced by the Ministry of Finance’s announcements on the implementation of the budget in the coming months, which show that, in the words of Jan Vincent Rostowski, ‘there is no money and there will be no money.”