Donald Tusk's Polish revival masks deeper divisions with German neighbours

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

66% : Polish support for the EU remains high but has fallen back from the stratospheric enthusiasm of the recent past: a survey for the Warsaw-based pollster CBOS showed 77% of respondents in favour of the EU in April 2024, down from 92% less than two years earlier.
57% : Tusk later showed his influence inside the European Council of EU leaders, helping to orchestrate the return of his centre-right ally Ursula von der Leyen as European Commission president.
54% : During its EU presidency, Poland is expected to make the case for more European defence spending, including via EU financing, which could entail joint borrowing.
52% : More broadly, despite the return of a pro-EU government in Warsaw and the epoch-making "turning point", the Zeitenwende, in Germany, German-Polish relations are weighed down by mistrust and recrimination.
51% : The European Commission has put the cost of boosting EU defences at a minimum of €500bn and has promised an options paper on how to raise these funds early in 2025.
47% : Some EU insiders contend that Poland's government is playing it safe by avoiding putting controversial topics on the EU agenda, such as 2040 carbon reduction targets.
46% : "Buras thinks the rest of the EU underestimates how far PiS "redefined the parameters of the Polish European debate".
45% : One of his first acts was to end a long-festering dispute with Brussels with a pledge to restore constitutional norms, which unlocked billions of frozen EU funds.
44% : Germany, meanwhile, was one of Warsaw's toughest critics on the politicisation of its courts, helping to broker an agreement in 2020 that meant EU funds could be frozen over rule-of-law violations.
42% : Berlin was exasperated when in May Tusk joined forces with the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, to call for a European air defence shield to protect EU airspace against all incoming threats, described as "a bold initiative that will send a clear and strong message to our friends and foes".
39% : Any agreement on European defence spending will have to go through Europe's largest contributor to the EU budget, Germany, where political opposition and legal constraints make common borrowing deeply problematic.
28% : Anna Wójcik, of Kozminski University in Warsaw, said Tusk's government could use the "surprising card of President Duda, who has good relations with the president-elect of the United States".More broadly, Warsaw has a good story to tell Trump, who has fiercely criticised Nato allies for "not paying their bills".

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