Special envoy to Sopot,
It was supposed to be a debate between the six candidates from the parties competing for the Polish legislative elections on October 15. But it was a fight that was both brutal and insubstantial between Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, representing the particularly aggressive ruling Law and Justice party, and Donald Tusk, leader of the Civic Platform coalition, who, shelled by his former collaborator, tried to answer him in the same tone.
Everyone was waiting with curiosity for this moment which would allow for the first time the leader of the opposition Donald Tusk to address a part of the population over which the ruling Law and Justice Party reigns supreme, having taken over control of all public television channels and banned the opposition from the air. He jokingly wondered if we would cut off his microphone or if we would draw devil horns on him.
The confrontation promised to be all the more interesting as Morawiecki was once Tusk’s advisor, when the latter was prime minister. But Tusk appeared destabilized by the virulence of his former protégé’s attacks, and did not really know how to take advantage of the opportunity to highlight his own program during the short interventions to which he was entitled, hesitating in his responses without releasing of attractive key ideas.
It is true that the two journalists supposed to moderate the debate looked more like two political commissars busy praising the government’s action and indicting Tusk’s policies during long tirades which ended with biased questions. A reality which undoubtedly surprised no Pole, the public television channel having become in eight years a veritable organ of propaganda.
The other four candidates, Szymon Holownia of the Third Way, Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus of the New Left, Krzysztof Bosak of the Confederation, and the unknown Krzysztof Maja of the “Non-Partisan Local Government” appeared in contrast, each in his own way, more reasonable and more dignified. But were they heard amid the heavyweights’ mutual accusations?
“Tusk was promised a position of high responsibility if he accepted the migrants,” declared Morawiecki from the outset, implying that he was corrupted by the European institutions before making fun of “the gang of rouquin” (Tusk is redhead), a phrase sounding “very derogatory in Polish”, commented the vice-president of the municipality of Sopot Katarzyna Gruszecka-Spychal (without political affiliation), who was watching the debate with Le Figaro.
Other shots followed, Morawiecki endeavoring to present his opponent as a neoliberal without heart or concern for social issues (a subject on which the government of Donald Tusk was indeed found wanting during his mandate). “Tusk had no heart, when he governed nothing moved him,” he said. And to say that a grandmother who received two zlotys in allowance told him to give them back to his opponent. “I know that you received a gold and silver vase from Putin in 2010, how much did it cost and what did you get it in exchange for,” the Prime Minister also told his opponent, who nevertheless hopes win against the PiS thanks to a coalition with the Third Way and the new Left.
Morawiecki, who multiplied the short sentences, accused Tusk of having put Poland up for sale by selling off its industrial jewels “like at Lidl, one week by selling the airlines to the Germans, the next the energy companies to the French”. “We are not going to let you put the country up for sale,” he launched, a recurring slogan of the PiS which would like to renationalize certain privatized companies.
Morawiecki also accused Tusk of having designed a plan to defend the country which would take the Vistula as its line of defense, denouncing “the abandonment of half the country to the Russian soldier”. An obviously ridiculous accusation, the plan having only been conceived in the event of the Russians bypassing the lines at the border. With PiS, “Poland will have stability and security”, with the disparate opposition coalition, it will be chaos and a battle with the president (who will stay) even if there is a change of government, he said. he argued.
Tusk responded by recalling that the Morawiecki government had sold a refinery in Gdansk to Saudi Arabia at a very low price. Calling Morawiecki a “liar Pinocchio”, he wondered what “the PiS could have done to him to make him change so much”. He revealed a letter in which his former colleague affirmed that it was necessary to increase the retirement age, while Morawiecki’s government is now formally opposed to this and is organizing a referendum to this effect at the same time as the elections. “We have a leader of the government camp (Jaroslav Kaczynski, Editor’s note) who escapes his responsibilities and hides behind his prime minister,” he noted, Kaczynski having been absent from the debate due to an electoral trip to countryside.
At the end of the battle, it was difficult to understand what one or other of the protagonists could have gained. The outsiders seemed to fare better and in particular the boss of the New Left, who stuck to her social discourse, hard secularism, and centered on women’s rights, also knew how to ironically about the men who behave (in the debate) “like my son when he was two years old”. The libertarian nationalist Krzysztof Bosak spoke about borders, refusal of aid to Ukraine, warning against the privileged social state to the detriment of entrepreneurship, while Krzysztof Maja proposed concrete measures to open up the territories left to abandonment.
The leader of the third Holownia knew how to find the right tone when he warned against the internal dispute which is gnawing away at Poland. “Morawiecki will be able to tell us for another eight years what Tusk did to him 15 years ago… But we need national reconciliation. Our enemy is outside, not inside,” he recalled, evoking the warning sent by the tragedy in Israel, where power was torn apart while Hamas prepared its terrible attacks. .
It will be interesting to see if this above-the-line approach finds its way to voters. For the moment, the polls, which are oscillating, are far from clear. The ruling party is still in the lead with 34.6% of the votes according to a very recent IBRIS poll for the Polsat channel, while the civic coalition would win 27.9, the third way 7.6, the New Left 11.4 and the Confederation 7.7. “No one really knows what Poles really think,” noted Sopot Vice President Katarzyna Gruszecka Szpychal, noting that they do not necessarily give their opinion to pollsters.