WARSAW – Polish opposition leader Donald Tusk is going through an uphill combat to win new hearts in his efforts to unseat the nationalist conservative executive in Poland’s upcoming parliamentary election.
The ex-prime minister and previous European Union leader returned to Polish politics a number of years in the past, in the hunt for to breathe new lifestyles into his languishing birthday celebration and win again energy — and opposite what many view as a degradation of basic rights and ties with European companions below the governing populist Law and Justice birthday celebration.
Tusk, 66, is hoping a main rally that he arranged for Sunday will energize his supporters.
But he faces many stumbling blocks, together with divisions amongst his opposition ranks and, much more importantly, tough executive forces that depict him as disloyal to the country.
Shaping the marketing campaign is a long and bitter personal rivalry between Tusk and Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who’s the rustic’s 74-year-old de facto leader. Kaczynski, different executive figures and state media many times allege that Tusk’s time as high minister from 2007 to 2014 used to be damaging to Poland.
They level to the nice phrases he used to be on with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel to make unproven allegations that he represented the pursuits of Germany, a neighboring nation that brutally occupied Poland all over World War II. They additionally accuse him of leaving behind Poland when he went to Brussels in 2014 to turn out to be European Council president, a most sensible EU post.
“Herr Donald, you left Poland to serve German interests in Brussels, for big money. … I gave up a high salary in order to serve Poland,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, a former banker, recently tweeted after Tusk questioned whether he was hiding his wealth.
Tusk has denied being partisan to Germany and laughs off the allegations.
Tusk’s “March of a Million Hearts” on Sunday comes two weeks before the Oct. 15 vote. His electoral alliance, the Civic Coalition, trails a few percentage points behind Law and Justice in opinion polls.
The march, the coalition’s biggest campaign event, was inspired by the huge success of a similar march on June 4 that drew hundreds of thousands of opposition supporters from across Poland.
One of Tusk’s greatest challenges is convincing supporters that the incumbent party can be defeated despite having consolidated huge power.
“On June 4, you gave Poland hope, so I am asking you now: On Oct. 1, let’s give not just hope, but the full belief in victory, in our success in removing these evil people from power,” Tusk stated when saying Sunday’s march.
Tusk has been pushing again towards the populist executive’s makes an attempt to forged him as unpatriotic. His marketing campaign image is a middle in the nationwide colours of white and purple to display that “we all have Poland in our hearts.”
The June 4 march noticed a massive outpouring of team spirit as it used to be held after Law and Justice handed contentious law setting up a state fee for investigating Russian influence in Poland. The regulation used to be observed because the governing birthday celebration’s manner of concentrated on Tusk and casting off him from public lifestyles. Instead, it rallied strengthen for Tusk and boosted his electoral chances.
Opposition teams set aside their variations and marched with Tusk then. But this time, an opposition alliance known as the Third Way — a coalition of the centrist Poland 2050 birthday celebration and agrarian Polish People’s Party (PSL) — would possibly not participate.
The Third Way participated then for the reason that Russian affect fee “made it very clear that the ruling team, using uncivilized methods, wants to get at the leader of the biggest opposition party,” Sen. Jan Filip Libicki, of PSL, informed The Associated Press. “There was a reason for this extraordinary mobilization.”
Libicki says there is no such pressing matter now.
These divisions complicate Tusk’s attempts to return to power. His electoral alliance includes his Civic Platform party and three other small parties. However, apart from the Third Way, there is also the Left party in the opposition camp and it’s competing for younger voters against the far-right Confederation party. The party has been growing in popularity, especially among young men fed up with the political parties that have dominated Poland for most of the post-Communist era.
Rafal Chwedoruk, a political scientist with the University of Warsaw, says Tusk’s coalition, the Left and the Third Way together seem poised to get a majority of the votes, judging by opinion polls. But they haven’t worked out a joint electoral strategy.
Some analysts see the disunity in the opposition as partly Tusk’s fault.
Tusk is a charismatic leader with long political experience at home and internationally. But he also has a reputation for being domineering toward others in his party, and that has led some to leave and join other groups, like Libicki did in 2018.
Tusk recently moved his centrist alliance to the left, courting women and younger voters. Civic Platform has traditionally taken a fairly conservative position on abortion. But after a near-total ban was imposed under Law and Justice, Tusk vowed to liberalize the abortion law and has threatened to ban party members who criticize his plan from running in the election.
Lawmaker Boguslaw Sonik quit Tusk’s party this year amid disagreements on abortion and the general drift to the left, and is now unaffiliated.
“A party cannot be run in a military style,” he stated on business radio station RMF FM. “These are issues of judgment of right and wrong.”