How a Tusk-led government could bring radical change to Poland
Preliminary results suggest Poland is heading for a new government run by Donald Tusk. The change, after eight years of populist rule by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, would be a remarkable political reversal. A potential Tusk government may be restricted in its legislative manoeuvres by the veto of PiS-aligned president, Andrzej Duda, in office until 2025, but would nonetheless radically change Poland’s domestic and foreign policy landscape.
From warmer relations with Brussels and Kyiv, to a relaxation of some of Europe’s strictest abortion laws and the advent of same-sex civil partnerships, we take a closer look at what this new era might look like both at home and abroad.
Relations with Europe
Poland’s epic fallout with Brussels and other western partners has been slightly less noticeable over the last 18 months due to Warsaw’s leading place in the pro-Ukraine western coalition, but politicians in many European capitals will be happy to see the back of PiS.
Over the past eight years, the government has clashed with Brussels over rule of law concerns, leading to tens of billions of euros of European funds earmarked for Poland being frozen. In turn, PiS made attacks on the EU and Berlin a key part of its electoral campaign. One PiS campaign ad featured an invented scene of a frustrated
German diplomat trying to give orders to the Polish government “like it was under Tusk”, only to be firmly rejected by PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński.
While Tusk is not the German puppet PiS has claimed, he will certainly provide a more familiar and friendly face to Poland’s European partners, many of whom know him well after his five-year stint as European Council president.
“Poland under the new Tusk government will be a more constructive player in EU politics, seeking to mend relations with key partners and restore trust in its pro-European credentials,” said Piotr Buras, head of the Warsaw office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
However, Buras noted that there would be a strong and probably vocal rightwing opposition in the provisional new parliament, meaning “European policymaking will be the subject of a
polarised political debate which will limit the government’s room for manoeuvre”.
Rule of law
Over the past eight years, PiS has attempted to install political appointees in various supposedly neutral bodies, most notably courts and legal institutions. Reversing this politicisation has been one of the key promises of the opposition during the election campaign.
“I think it’s extremely important to put forward a new vision of Poland in which the rule of law and the constitution are respected,” said Adam Bodnar, Poland’s former human rights ombudsman, who stood for election to the senate, the upper house of parliament, from Civic Coalition.
Bodnar said returning the judicial system to normality would be difficult “under pressure of hijacking from the president and the constitutional court”, which has been packed with PiS appointees, and that the new government would have to be clever and flexible. “It will be like a chess game,” he said in an interview before Sunday’s vote.
The new government would also need to decide to what extent it wants to prioritise potential criminal cases for abuses of power during the PiS years.
Throughout the campaign, Tusk has been unequivocal about his support for relaxing the draconian abortion restrictions introduced by PiS. He has faced criticism from some feminist activists for not going far enough and allowing people with historical anti-abortion positions into his Civic Coalition, but Tusk has insisted that the legalisation of abortion up to 12 weeks would be a priority for a government led by him.
“Abortion is a woman’s decision, not a priest’s, prosecutor’s, policeman’s or party activist’s. And we have written it down as a specific project, we will be ready to propose it to the Sejm on the first day after the next parliamentary elections,” he said in the spring.
Whether Tusk would be able to secure a majority for such a move in the parliament, given the more conservative views of some of the members of Third Way, a potential governing partner in a broad opposition coalition, remains to be seen. There is also the issue of Duda’s veto.
Nevertheless, asked on Sunday night what a new government would mean for Polish women, Civic Coalition MP Barbara Nowacka said: “Safety. Finally, safety. Young women won’t be afraid to get pregnant, young women won’t be afraid to go to the doctor.”
LGBTQ+ rights
Under PiS, hate speech against LGBTQ+ people has been tolerated and even encouraged. Although it did not feature heavily in the current campaign, the PiS-aligned Duda fought his 2020 presidential campaign on a platform of fighting so-called “LGBT ideology”, which he called more dangerous than communism. Several municipalities set up so-called “LGBTfree zones”, declaring themselves free of the supposed “ideology”.
The messaging has had an effect – in a 2019 survey, when asked to name the biggest threat to Poland, the most popular answer among Polish men under 40 was “the LGBT movement and gender ideology”. Its absence from this more recent election campaign, however, hints that PiS understood that Polish society was changing and that the demonisation of LGBTQ + people was no longer a sure votewinner.
Tusk has said a legal bill to introduce same-sex civil partnerships will be a priority for the new government, despite being controversial among conservative Poles and even some elements of his own coalition.
“I know that this is the first step and still not popular in various circles, but we have to show that in matters of dignity, there can no longer be a purely political calculation that, for example, it is not beneficial to make a decision because it won’t have the support of the majority,” Tusk said in June.
Relations with Ukraine
The PiS government was one of the earliest and most vocal supporters of Ukraine, with fear of Russia and support for Kyiv one of the few issues that united most of Poland’s polarised society.
However, in recent months, as “Ukraine fatigue” sets in among a growing minority of Poles, PiS toughened its rhetoric, partly to avoid haemorrhaging support to the far-right Confederation, which was openly anti-Ukrainian. This saw president Duda compare Ukraine to a “drowning person” last month, and the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, announced a halt to arms deliveries to Kyiv amid a spat over grain exports.
Civic Coalition has pledged to maintain support for Ukraine and has criticised PiS for its recent words about Poland’s eastern neighbour.
Since 2016, local regulators have flagged almost 700 exceptional events to the EPA. The agency agreed to adjust the data on 139 of them.
The adjustments were allowed in more than 70 counties across 20 states, which together are home to almost 36 million Americans.
More than 21 million Americans live in areas where an adjustment allowed local regulators to claim the area had met strict national health standards or that the air was cleaner than it actually was.
On three-quarters of the days exceptional events were reported, local governments pointed at wildfires in justifying their requests.
Local regulators are turning to the exceptional events rule for wildfires more and more often to reach air-quality goals. In 2016, 19 wildfire events were submitted to the EPA. In 2020, 65 were.
Businesses and industry representatives lobbied local air regulators before an event was even considered, as happened in Kentucky, and worked together with them to file exceptional event requests, as happened in Louisiana.
The use of the exceptional events rule means US air-quality data doesn’t reflect how safe it is to breathe, said Vijay Limaye, a climate and health scientist at the NRDC.
“Our regulatory picture is really not keeping up with the true toll, the true health burden posed by air pollution and wildfire smoke,” he said. “And we really need to be taking into consideration the truth on the ground in terms of what exposures look like and what that means for public health across the country.”
The rule in practice lets regional regulators meet air-quality goals without having to put additional demands on polluters.
“We’re just pretending like it’s just not happening,” said Sanjay Narayan, the managing attorney for the Sierra Club’s environmental law program. “The pollution is not in the air from sort of a regulatory perspective, which is the way in which things become invisible. All of this is invisible unless you trawl through all of these reports.”
In response to questions, a spokesperson for the EPA, Khanya Brann, said the agency “takes our decisions related to exceptional events seriously. We recognize that even when pollution (such as wildfire smoke) is not something that an air agency can control, people still are breathing the polluted air.”
The EPA said it requires mitigation plans where exceptional events recur. Those plans include efforts to educate and notify the public about the pollution risk, as well as to take “steps to identify, study, and implement mitigating measures”.
A growing loophole
Soot, ash and other particulate matter drive health risks that are significant to pregnant people, children, outdoor workers, residents of leaky buildings and anyone with heart or lung ailments. Ozone produced by wildfire pollution carries an invisible threat, irritating and inflaming lungs; even shortterm exposure above certain levels raises the risk of premature death. The federal Office of Management and Budget estimatesthat in an increasingly extreme climate,wildfire smoke exposure could increase federal healthcare expenditures by $128m to $226m each year by the end of the century.
“We need to focus on solutions for wildfire smoke, because about 30% to 50% of our wildfires are directly attributed to climate change and increasing temperatures around the globe,” said Kari Nadeau, an immunologist who directs the center for climate, health and the global environment at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “No one is immune to this. Everyone can be affected.”
Climate change has already created the conditions for more frequent and significant wildfires this year, from Maui to Quebec.
Scientists and activists worry that the exceptional events rule can be exploited to avoid the costly efforts needed to address this growing crisis.
When the Clean Air Act was passed by a nearly unanimous Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970, it focused on pollution from soot-spewing smokestacks and freeways full of cars with tailpipes.
The soot from Canadian fires that choked skies from Chicago to Washington earlier this year was a sickly brown telltale for some of the same key pollutants the Clean Air Act aimed to fight.
The EPA has proposed lowering the standard for fine particulates. Soon, ozone standards could be tightened, too, a consensus recommendation of the agency’s top scientific advisers.
Lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry have told the EPA the exceptional events rule will be a key part of meeting ozone standards. States themselves say any moves to tighten particulate or ozone limits will be met with a greater reliance on the exceptional events rule.
“This is a big problem,” said Leonard of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center. “And you’re not only actively ignoring it, you’re actively trying to get out of doing something about it.”
Smoke, Screened: The Clean Air Act’s Dirty Secret is a collaboration of the California Newsroom, MuckRock and the Guardian. Molly Peterson is a reporter for the California Newsroom. Dillon Bergin is a data reporter for MuckRock. Emily Zentner is a data reporter for the California Newsroom. Andrew Witherspoon is a data reporter for the Guardian.