Poland's new president sets collision course with Tusk government

Karol Nawrocki was sworn in as Poland's president on Wednesday, 6 August, opening a five-year term that immediately places the country's legislative agenda in limbo. The nationalist historian, elected in June with a razor-thin margin over Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, takes office openly aligned with Donald Trump and backed by the Law and Justice (PiS) party that ruled Poland from 2015 to 2023. His victory dealt what Sussex professor Aleks Szczerbiak called a "massive body blow" to the reform plans of Prime Minister Donald Tusk's pro-European coalition.

A narrow victory that changes everything

The June election was closer than most polls suggested. Nawrocki secured 50.89 per cent in the second round, a margin of roughly 400,000 votes out of more than 21 million cast. That result denied Tusk the cooperative president his government assumed it would have after eight years of Andrzej Duda, who also came from PiS but occasionally accommodated the new administration. Nawrocki has signalled he will be more aggressive, using the presidential veto and legislative initiative to paint the government as ineffective and clear a path for PiS to return to power in the 2027 parliamentary election.

Tusk's response was swift. A cabinet reshuffle in late July elevated hardline anti-PiS figures, most notably Waldemar Żurek as justice minister. Żurek, a former judge who was disciplined under the previous government for opposing its judicial overhaul, has already begun removing judges promoted during the PiS era. "It's just a warm-up," Tusk wrote on social media as PiS politicians denounced the move. The prime minister has also made clear he will not tolerate what he calls presidential sabotage: "I will not allow Mr Nawrocki, once he's sworn in as president, to politically sabotage the government."

The judicial battlefield

The most immediate collision point is the rule-of-law file that dominated Poland's relations with Brussels for years. The European Commission froze billions in cohesion and recovery funds after PiS restructured the Supreme Court, created a disciplinary chamber for judges and politicised the National Council of the Judiciary. Tusk's government regained access to that money, roughly €35 billion in cohesion funds and €60 billion in recovery grants, on commitments to reverse those changes. Progress has been glacial. Duda slow-walked appointments; Nawrocki is expected to block them entirely.

"The government will find it extremely difficult to unravel its Law and Justice predecessor's judicial reforms," Szczerbiak wrote. The European Parliament shares that concern. Ana Catarina Mendes, the vice chair of the Socialists and Democrats group who led last year's rule-of-law report on Poland, said: "It's important for the institutions to continue to follow up on the reforms for veritable separation of power." That pressure from Brussels gives Tusk a reason to keep pushing, but the presidential veto makes legislative repair nearly impossible without a three-fifths parliamentary majority the coalition does not possess.

Tax promises and budget reality

Nawrocki's second front is fiscal. He has pledged to double the tax-free allowance for individuals, eliminate income tax for families with two or more children, and cut VAT, measures the Tusk government abandoned after calculating they would cost the budget tens of billions of złoty annually. Poland's deficit is already above the EU's 3 per cent of GDP threshold, and the European Commission has placed the country under the excessive deficit procedure. Nawrocki plans a nationwide tour to promote the proposals, framing them as fulfilment of promises Tusk made but did not keep.

"Nawrocki will definitely want to put the government in a difficult position by presenting proposals aligned with the government's earlier promises or policy goals, which the government has failed to deliver," said Ben Stanley of SWPS University. The president can propose legislation but cannot pass it; the Sejm must approve. Tusk's coalition can vote the measures down, but that hands Nawrocki a campaign narrative: the president tries to cut taxes, the government blocks them.

Social policy and the sovereignty veto

Beyond courts and taxes, Nawrocki has promised to veto any law that "changes the shape of national identity, or surrenders Poland's sovereignty to authorities outside the Republic." That formulation targets three areas: liberalising abortion access (currently among the strictest in the EU), expanding LGBTQ+ rights, and any deepening of EU integration that Warsaw perceives as encroaching on national competences. Tusk's coalition includes parties that campaigned on all three. The prime minister's retort was constitutional: "I know the constitution by heart, especially the parts that spell out the responsibilities of the president and of the government: the president is the representative of the Polish state. The government conducts domestic and foreign policy."

The practical effect is a legislative freeze. Tusk's increasingly fragile coalition, an alliance of Civic Coalition, Third Way and the Left, may decide, as Szczerbiak suggests, "that it has no choice but to go for a full-frontal confrontation with Mr Nawrocki hoping that he will over-reach so that it can blame its shortcomings on presidential obstruction." That strategy carries risk: if voters blame the government for inaction, PiS returns in 2027 with both the presidency and a parliamentary majority.

Defence as the only common ground

The single area where both men speak the same language is security. In their first post-election meeting, Tusk raised national defence and continued military support for Ukraine. "We both realize that it is in the best interest of everyone in Poland that state institutions, whether they like each other or not, must cooperate on key issues," Tusk said in June. Nawrocki echoed the sentiment: "Poles expect the president and prime minister to talk and cooperate on issues that are important to our national community." He told Defence24 he would "seek to make security a unifying issue for all Poles" and proposed a tripartite agreement between the presidency, the government and parliament to set defence funding levels, capability priorities and legal frameworks.

That convergence is not accidental. Poland spends more than 4 per cent of GDP on defence, the highest share in NATO, and has become the primary logistical hub for Western military aid to Ukraine. Both the nationalist right and the pro-EU centre view the Russian threat as existential. Nawrocki's Trump alignment does not translate into scepticism about NATO or Ukraine; his campaign emphasised modernising the armed forces and strengthening the eastern flank. Tusk, for his part, has made defence the centrepiece of his European leadership ambitions. A formal agreement on multi-year funding would insulate procurement from the political deadlock elsewhere.

The 2027 calculation

Everything between now and the autumn 2027 parliamentary election is shaped by a single question: which configuration do voters prefer? Stanley frames it bluntly: "The next election essentially will hinge around the question of whether it's better to have a government with a president that can facilitate it, or whether it's better to ensure that we don't have a return to 2015-2023, where both sides of the executive were essentially complicit in democratic backsliding." The PiS years saw the systematic capture of courts, public media and state-owned enterprises, triggering Article 7 proceedings and the fund freeze. Tusk's pitch is that divided government is the price of preventing a repeat. Nawrocki's pitch is that divided government is paralysis.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Nawrocki serves until 2030. Even if PiS wins a parliamentary majority in 2027, it would need a three-fifths supermajority to override presidential vetoes, unlikely in Poland's fragmented party system. If Tusk's coalition survives, it faces at least three more years of cohabitation. The only way to break the deadlock is a landslide for one side, which no poll currently suggests. The most probable outcome is drift: defence spending rises, judicial reform stalls, tax policy oscillates, and social legislation freezes.

What this means for Europe

Poland is the EU's fifth-largest economy, a net beneficiary of cohesion funds, and the alliance's eastern anchor. Its political stability matters beyond Warsaw. A paralysed Polish government cannot lead on EU enlargement, energy integration or the next multiannual financial framework. It also cannot easily advance the rule-of-law conditionality that Brussels has made central to budget discipline. Conversely, a return to unified PiS control would revive the Article 7 confrontation and test the EU's willingness to enforce its values against a strategically indispensable member state.