Donald Tusk, who declared victory in last month’s Polish parliamentary election, will have to wait several weeks before having a chance to form a government after the president, Andrzej Duda, said he would offer the first chance to do so to the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.
PiS, the nationalist, populist party that has governed Poland for the past eight years, won the most votes of any party in the election but fell far short of a majority of seats in parliament. All other parties have ruled out entering a coalition with them, leaving them without any obvious path to retain power.
A broad coalition of opposition forces, the biggest of which is led by Tusk, the former prime minister and European Council president, have said they are ready and willing to form a government.
Constitutionally, however, the president chooses who gets the first shot at forming a coalition. Duda, who has long been aligned with PiS, has taken his time to make a decision, which has been seen by many as a time-wasting tactic.
On Monday evening, in a televised address, Duda said he had held consultations with PiS and Tusk’s Civic Coalition and both had claimed to be confident of forming a government.
“Both – the representatives of Law and Justice, which obtained the best result in the elections, and the Civic Coalition, which took second place – presented their candidates for prime minister and expressed their will to form a government,” said Duda.
“Therefore, I decided to continue the good parliamentary tradition, according to which the opportunity to form a government is given to the winning party.”
Duda nominated the PiS prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, as his candidate. When the Sejm, the lower house of Poland’s parliament, reconvenes next Monday, Morawiecki will have two weeks to attempt to form a working majority. PiS figures have claimed they still have a chance to build a coalition.
“The chance that we will create a parliamentary majority is very low, but that does not mean it is zero,” the deputy foreign minister, Paweł Jabłoński, said on Monday.
Assuming that Morawiecki fails to find a majority, after two weeks the Sejm will be able to nominate its own candidate. This is likely to be Tusk, who would then lead a broad grouping of opposition forces, including Civic Coalition, the centre-right Third Way and the leftist Lewica.
Over the past weeks, Tusk and other leaders have been meeting to hash out a broad coalition agreement and distribute ministries and other key jobs.
“The coalition is finalised in every detail and I hope that the president also hears it,” said Tusk on Monday, before Duda’s announcement.
Duda said if Morawiecki fails to put together a government and the parliament chooses its own prime ministerial candidate, he would respect the process.
“If the mission of the representative of Law and Justice fails, then in the next step, the Sejm will choose a candidate for prime minister, and I will immediately appoint him to this position. All constitutional rules and deadlines will be respected,” he said.
The election, on 15 October, followed a vicious and bitter campaign as PiS sought to win a third term in office. PiS mixed increased social spending with rightwing, populist rhetoric, attacking migrants and LGBT people and tightening Poland’s already restrictive abortion laws.
During the campaign, PiS’s chair, Jarosław Kaczyński, called Tusk “the personification of evil” and suggested he was a traitor. Tusk, for his part, said the election was the last chance to save democracy in Poland, and promised legal retribution for those who committed abuses of office during the PiS years.
Tusk has said his priorities in power would include de-politicising key state institutions that were taken over by PiS loyalists. However, he will be limited in his room for manoeuvre by Duda, who will be in office until 2025 and has veto power over any legal initiatives, and by the breadth of his own coalition. Some of the more conservative elements of the coalition have already said they would not support legalising abortion up to 12 weeks, one of Tusk’s campaign promises.
