I haven’t written a new Meanwhile in Cuckooland for some time. The truth is, not much is happening in politics in Poland, at least compared to the shitshow we are observing across the ocean. But there is also one other thing: we were promised the change, and we just have more of the usual while even the little that was promised has not been delivered. And I have a proof of that.
Click HERE to read the previous part of the series
Click HERE to see all the chapters of the series so far.
Take a look here, it’s from the website of Donald Tusk’s own party: a 100 tasks they promised to realise during the first 100 days of their government. We’re more than 750 days into their rule and not even a third of those are marked as completed. And those are the ones that were easy to implement. Reducing VAT rate for the beauty industry requires just a signature and will not cost much, fixing long abandoned issue of the full time carers for people with disability is a different matter altogether.
Apparently Donald Tusk was pretty relaxed for the first year of his time in power, hoping that after removing of Andrzej Duda with presidential palace, he will be able to rule with his own president in place. As we already know the things didn’t worked out his way, and Nawrocki is even worse when it comes to using his veto powers, and Tusk-led majority is nowhere big enough to overturn them, so it seems we’re up for a long term stale-mate situation.
And, let’s be honest, with “100 concretes for first 100 days” being the “easy” issues, it seems there is no chance to solve any of those that sparkled outrage in the nation that lifted Tusk to power: women rights, LGBT rights, healthcare system reform, end of the inhumane treatment of refugees at the Belarusian border… Actually we witnessed a weird switcheroo – Donald Tusk and his government changed their view by 180 degree just as they came up to power, and now are proud to be tough of migration: in 2025 there was almost twice as much deportations as year before – and that, of course, does not include illegal push-backs in the forests near Białowieża, where – according to activists – we are having a Tesco-value version of ICE: masked soldiers are kidnapping, abusing and assaulting migrants. According to Piotr Czaban, a local independent journalist covering the refugee crisis, the mainstream media are taking part in the cover-up – the portal Onet for example refused to publish footage showing a soldier shooting at close range (with rubber bullets) an unarmed, non agresive man, then smashing his face with the butt of his gun.
Meanwhile PiS turned out to suddenly love refugee status. As long as they can use it, that is. Zbigniew Ziobro, former justice minister, who for some time now has been living in Hungary, from where he was assuring everyone he is not going to follow the footsteps of his former deputy who claimed political asylum there, because he is not a coward, claimed a political asylum there. But according to his new statement it’s not cowardness. He decided to embrace Orban’s offer of political asylum to continue his heroic fight with “Stalinist regime” of Donald Tusk from afar, where he can’t be silenced (yes, this was amongst the rubbish he wrote on the nazi-paedophilia site formerly known as Twitter).
If there is anything in common between Polish right and the MAGA movement in the US (apart from both sides praising the murder of Renee Good, like Donald Trump’s biggest psycho fan and pal of Tommy Robinson, Dominik Tarczyński here) is that they definitely read Orwell. And took lessons from it. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” seems to be their new go-to rule. Just like in that Ziobro statement quoted above, where not only he blatantly lies, but also completely omits the fact, that when he was the minister of justice, he was doing all of what he accuses Donald Tusk’s government, and then some more (after all he is wanted on 26 charges, and not all of them are money embezzlement, he is also wanted for abuse of power). Similarly Mateusz Morawiecki has a cheek to record clips in which he sides with protesting farmers and criticizes Donald Tusk for allowing trade deal with Mercosur completely ignoring the fact that it was his government that took part in negotiating that deal.
It seems recording TikToks is the only thing that it’s left to do not only for the politicians in the opposition, but also by some members of the coalition government. Have I told you that nothing is really changing? Well, a year ago Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk was bragging about her biggest achievement: ensuring that Christmas Eve became a national holiday. A year has passed and she’s still on about the same thing… Why? Because whenever Lewica – the part of the left that still sticks to the government coalition – wants to do something good like ensuring protection of the workers by protecting the whistleblowers or actually giving some tools for Labour Inspectorate to enforce employment law, Donald Tusk shoots it down. Holidays on Christmas eve is just a scrap he throws them, so they can brag about the agency they have, so they can mock their direct competitors, social-democratic Razem who decided to move to opposition and call them “a couch party” that only sits and criticizes, unable to act. And it does not even costs him so much, as in exchange for this one holiday, the law made three Sundays in December working Sundays for retail, while usually shops can be open only for two Sundays in the month.
Most recently Donald Tusk simply binned Lewica’s bill on Labour Inspectorate, which aimed to tackle the plague of fake self-employment (employers in Poland regularly force their employees to become self-employed subcontractors in order to avoid respecting their worker’s rights, while higher paid workers such as coders and IT specialists do it on their own will as a “tax optimization” method). This had skyrocketed since 2008 when Donald Tusk – who was also in power back then – “temporary relaxed” the employment laws in order to help the economy during the credit crunch and Poland is currently amongst the worst offenders in that field in the EU – so much, that one of the condition for releasing money from recovering funds was for Poland to sort it out. Apparently though, neither the rights of the Polish workers or the expectation of his coalition partner matter for Donald Tusk as much, as the potential need of seeking new coalition partner after next elections. And radical right is very much against “over regulating of the work market”.
Under such circumstances one can argue that just a few of Razem MP’s have more agency that Lewica that is a part of the government coalition, as since they are not bound by coalition agreement, they are free to criticize, and they manage to draw attention to some issues so much, that they can no longer be avoided. Even if those are minor things – like sale of alcohol in parliamentary canteen or lack of control over MP’s travel expenses, which leads to MP’s from every single party but Razem claiming ridiculous amount of money as petrol reimbursements – both issues are being finally dealt with after Razem was banging about them for months.
With such impotence of the government to act on anything we hoped they might do, no wonder that more and more people are disillusioned with politics. The slogan promoted by the radical right for many years “PiS, PO – Jedno zło (PiS, PO – same evil)” looks to be more and more true. This of course brings more voters for the radical right, and – at much smaller scale – to Razem, but most of the people just become disengaged. The radical right, however, has a strong ally in the East. The Russian propaganda creeps more and more and not only attitude towards Ukrainians becomes more and more hostile, but so are anti-EU sentiments. Recently TikTok has been flooded with AI generated clips of young women, Polish patriots, talking with fierce conviction about how Poland needs to finally break free from EU. This, of course, was caught very quickly, but who knows in how many more subtle ways the Russian propaganda is poisoning the Polish minds?
With the ruling party understanding of the online information mechanisms being at least 20 years behind (as presented by this widely mocked picture with Tusk accompanied by a slogan “are you looking for new year’s resolution? Follow our party’s social media profiles!”) and chronic lack of funds for science and modern technologies (a few months back we had a huge scandal after it has emerged that the Mikołaj Kopernik University’s 32m radio telescope near Toruń, the biggest in Poland, has not received necessary funding to operate for the next three years) is not painting a very optimistic picture. Apparently, just like with everything else, the government think that lack of bread can be covered with circuses – as while astronomers were begging for money required to protect some of the biggest European research programs from collapsing, the government spent millions to send Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski to space with ESA on a mission with , which was met with widespread criticism and speculations if it was possible because his wife (allegedly thanks to her dad’s money) is an MP from Donald Tusk’s party… While of course I am unable to confirm or deny rumours that she has became one of the youngest MP thanks to generous donation from her multi-milionaire father, I think it’s worth to mention this, as the optics is pretty in line with many other accusations of nepotism that Koalicja Obywatelska has to regularly face – and most of them seems to be valid. Seems that even here while we were promised a change, the only change we got is personal: it’s just different people doing the same, for which they were blasting the previous government before.
But there are some new things too. A few days back president Karol Nawrocki took part in the annual pilgrimage of football hooligans to Jasna Góra sanctuary. During this event, which over many years were known for outraging displays of racist and hateful messages in one of the most prominent places for the christian cult in Poland, Nawrocki had a friendly encounter with Tomasz P. (the surname us protected under Polish criminal law), who is currently appealing a sentence of 6 years in prison for being a head of criminal organisation and promoting Nazi ideology. I guess our president knows him from one of the so called “ustawka”, a regular battle between football hooligans supporting different clubsin which they use not only fist, but also clubs, machetes and other bladed weaponry – it oftent ends with heavy injuries or sometimes even deaths. Tomasz P. is accused of organizing such events.
As I write those words, Nawrocki is with official visit in London, where he briefly met Keir Starmer. Some Polish journalists in London praise him for finding nearly 90 minutes for informal meeting with representatives of the Polish diaspora, but the fact is that his visit’s itinerary is not exactly packed with events. The truth is that foreign politicians are also aware of the stale-mate situation in the Polish politics and are not exactly interested in talking to the politician who’s only real power is to push the stick through the spokes of the wheel when Tusks is trying to do anything – and, as we already said, it’s not like Tusk is trying too hard.
Personally, I am not too optimistic. Tusk made a mistake on betting everything on his candidate winning the presidential elections, then cocked it up spectacularly. With Nawrocki in the palace, there is no way out. In such tough times like today, we should be able to act, and act boldly. But there is no hope for any of that anytime soon: Poland is politically in the clinch, while the Russian propaganda is biting the fighters on the ankles. And radical right is just waiting to take over – in few years we might just miss good, old, peaceful times of a responsible PiS government.
This piece was written for Britské Listy
Meme: author unknown.
