In the closing weeks of the European Parliament campaign, Donald Tusk aimed to defeat Law and Justice decisively. He targeted the Third Way and its leaders Szymon Hołownia and Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz with a strategy aided by a revealing report from the Onet.pl portal. The report recalled an incident from late March at the Belarus-Poland border when illegal migrants attacked. Soldiers reportedly fired warning shots, were detained by military police, and then released with pay reductions of 50% after preliminary proceedings. Although Minister Kosiniak-Kamysz was aware of the event, he did not know the case details, leading to a tense, uncomfortable session with the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice.
Shortly before this quiet period, news broke of a Polish soldier’s death after being stabbed by an illegal migrant near the same border area. Media outlets suggested the attack could be linked to the earlier incident, arguing that fear over using force after the warning-shot episode had contributed to the violence. This sequence weighed on Third Way’s poll numbers. Some voters shifted to Platforma, others abstained, resulting in a 6.9% share and three seats for the bloc in the elections. The outcome was widely viewed as a setback. Even journalists friendly to the ruling coalition noted that Tusk had long been pressing against both the Third Way and the Left, accelerating this trend toward the campaign’s end.
Despite achieving a relative victory for Tusk—defeating Law and Justice for the first time in a decade by a slim margin of 0.9 percentage points and just over 100,000 votes—the win was precarious. The strategy aimed at Third Way voters drew scrutiny from party leaders, and critical voices emerged in PSL within hours of the EP results. Senior MP Marek Sawicki suggested that if the Third Way does not articulate a clear coalition with a broader government rather than a Tusk-led arrangement, it should reconsider its position. The implied demand was for a coalition approach that does not align with Tusk’s preferred leadership model, a dynamic reminiscent of his tenure from 2008 to 2014, now playing out with a four-party government in place.
Further, there were calls for the government to implement policy pledges from both the Hołownia Movement (Ryszard Petru, chair of the parliamentary economics committee, spoke on this) and PSL (Marek Sawicki again). Razem party leader Adrian Zandberg warned that the coalition would either advance the left’s priorities or exit the governing partnership. It remains unclear how firmly the remaining coalition leaders will push back in negotiations with Tusk, but signs point to growing firmness and potential governance friction. This comes at a time when the Finance Ministry’s budget projections for the coming months hint at tighter times ahead, echoing Jan Vincent Rostowski’s remark that “there is no money and there will be no money.”
Source: wPolityce