Germany’s chancellor appears to be heading for defeat; France’s president is mired in crisis. But while Europe’s traditional power duo are in the doldrums, there is a strong, stable and pro-EU leader east of Paris and Berlin – Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk.
For European officials, it’s a helpful gift of the calendar that Poland takes charge of the Council of the EU rotating presidency from 1 January.
Tusk, a former European Council president, returned as Poland’s prime minister in 2023, leading a broad coalition that defeated the rightwing populist party Law and Justice (PiS). One of his first acts was to end a long-festering dispute with Brussels with a pledge to restore constitutional norms, which unlocked billions of frozen EU funds. Tusk later showed his influence inside the European Council of EU leaders, helping to orchestrate the return of his centre-right ally Ursula von der Leyen as European Commission president.
An EU presidency is a technical business: chairing hundreds of meetings, setting agendas. Tusk has no formal role. But symbolism matters. The presidency logo, a Polish flag entwined with the letters “E” and “U”, is intended to project Poland’s return to the European mainstream. Tusk’s government, which has pledged to prioritise security during its six-month stint, is an especially welcome contrast after the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s rogue diplomacy during his country’s presidency.
Michał Wawrykiewicz, a centre-right MEP, affiliated to the governing Civic Coalition, said: “We are just after the presidency of Hungary, which is the biggest violator of all of the fundamentals of the European Union. So it is a good time slot for my country to prove that we are one of the leaders of the European Union.”
But the image of harmony regained is not quite what it seems. First, Poland’s democratic restoration is incomplete. As many as a third of Poland’s 10,000 judges are so-called “neo judges”, according to the Council of Europe – ie politicised appointees who took office through processes introduced by PiS that were widely deemed to violate the rule of law. Tusk’s government faces a legal minefield in restoring independent judges, while the PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda is blocking many reforms. “It shows how difficult it is to reverse the country on the democratic path after such a huge devastation,” said Wawrykiewicz, a lawyer who campaigned to restore the rule of law before he was elected as an MEP in 2024.
Duda is nearing the end of his term limit, so presidential elections likely in May will be critical in determining whether Tusk’s government can fulfil its promise to restore the rule of law in Poland. That could affect how Poland runs its presidency. Some EU insiders contend that Poland’s government is playing it safe by avoiding putting controversial topics on the EU agenda, such as 2040 carbon reduction targets.
Before Duda stands down, he could be a helpful bridge to Donald Trump’s White House. Anna Wójcik, of Kozminski University in Warsaw, said Tusk’s government could use the “surprising card of President Duda, who has good relations with the president-elect of the United States”.
More broadly, Warsaw has a good story to tell Trump, who has fiercely criticised Nato allies for “not paying their bills”. Poland, already the biggest defence spender in GDP terms in Nato, is expected to spend 4.7% of its economic output on defence in 2025. This will be an advantage in Washington and “a way of proving that Europe can well commit and even over-commit” to Nato goals, Wójcik said.
During its presidency of the Council of the EU, Poland is expected to make the case for more European defence spending, including via EU financing, which could entail joint borrowing. The European Commission has put the cost of boosting EU defences at a minimum of €500bn and has promised an options paper on how to raise these funds early in 2025.
Any agreement on European defence spending will have to go through Europe’s largest contributor to the EU budget, Germany, where political opposition and legal constraints make common borrowing deeply problematic. More broadly, despite the return of a pro-EU government in Warsaw and the epoch-making “turning point”, the Zeitenwende, in Germany, German-Polish relations are weighed down by mistrust and recrimination.
Under the previous PiS government, Poland waged a long-running campaign for reparations for damage caused by the Nazi invasion and occupation. Germany, meanwhile, was one of Warsaw’s toughest critics on the politicisation of its courts, helping to broker an agreement in 2020 that meant EU funds could be frozen over rule-of-law violations.
In theory, Tusk’s election should have improved relations, but the mood remains sour. Berlin was exasperated when in May Tusk joined forces with the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, to call for a European air defence shield to protect EU airspace against all incoming threats, described as “a bold initiative that will send a clear and strong message to our friends and foes”. Germany dismissed the plan as a nonstarter, objecting to its vast cost and apparent emphasis on it being made in Europe.
For Tusk, facing smears from his PiS rivals of being pro-German, that refusal closed down a positive, future-looking project that could have put relations on a better path. “There is no agreement on how to solve this conundrum in the Polish-German relations,” said Piotr Buras, the head of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ office in Warsaw. “This is a major problem for Tusk because he is the one who faces accusations that he is too pro-German, so he needs to make himself more credible to the Polish public opinion by being tough on Germany.”
Buras thinks the rest of the EU underestimates how far PiS “redefined the parameters of the Polish European debate”. Polish support for the EU remains high but has fallen back from the stratospheric enthusiasm of the recent past: a survey for the Warsaw-based pollster CBOS showed 77% of respondents in favour of the EU in April 2024, down from 92% less than two years earlier. Opposition to Ukrainian refugees in Poland is growing.
“Tusk is very much under pressure from the opposition, from the PiS, and he needs to be very, very cautious and he is very cautious,” Buras said. “That sets limits for some major pro-European, courageous initiatives.”
