Tusk won over the critics of this culture-war programme by pledging to return Poland to its rightful place at the heart of the European Union and touting no less than a hundred policies that he planned to introduce during the first hundred days of his administration: introducing same sex civic partnerships, making abortion legal during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, raising the salaries for public-sector employees by 20% and abolishing state subsidies to religious organizations.
Today, the vast majority of these pledges have been abandoned. This is partly because of parliamentary opposition: when the government introduced measures to loosen abortion laws, one of its coalition partners – the Polish People’s Party, which forms part of the Third Way – joined with PiS to block them, in a manner that will no doubt be repeated with any future attempts at liberal reform. But it is also a matter of political will and priorities. For it is increasingly clear that Tusk’s government wants to prove its European credentials not by safeguarding democracy or women’s rights, but by ramping up the campaign against refugees.
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Tusk is not only consolidating Poland’s position as a bulwark against migration; he is also turning it into the EU’s leading military spender. While the PiS government hiked the military budget to 4.1% of GDP, KO intends to raise it further to 4.7% – roughly €44.23bn – next year, outpacing all other NATO members. When Tusk and Duda visited Washington this March, they returned with the promise of a $2bn loan to buy a vast range of armaments, adding to the $31bn that Poland had already funnelled into the US war economy in 2022-23.
Its main suppliers are based in the US, hence Sikorski remarking that up to 90% of the state’s spending in this area ‘goes directly to create American jobs on American soil’. Any hopes of Polish military Keynesianism are therefore misplaced. Nor is there a clear route to passing progressive social measures, given that conservative forces within the coalition have clearly stated their opposition to abortion rights and same-sex partnerships.
