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Nawrocki’s Election Pushed Tusk To Play Hardball With Poland’s Neighbours On Illegal Immigration

By Editor on 10th July 2025 • ( 0 )

Nawrocki’s Election Pushed Tusk To Play Hardball With Poland’s Neighbours On Illegal Immigration

What’s most important to him personally is retaining power by preventing the collapse of his government, but if that’s unavoidable, then he at the very least wants to keep the conservatives out of power in the event of early elections.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk dispatched several thousand troops to his country’s borders with Germany and Lithuania to help defend against illegal immigration and assist with newly reintroduced controls along those two frontiers. The pretext was Germany’s return of some illegal immigrants to Poland and others crossing into the country from Lithuania after entering the EU from Belarus. The first-mentioned even prompted the creation of citizen patrols comprised of those concerned by this move.

The real reason though has to do with President-Elect Karol Nawrocki’s narrow victory on 1 June, which will ensure that Tusk and his ruling liberal-globalist coalition are unable to implement their agenda. Outgoing President Andrzej Duda is allied with the conservative opposition and accordingly vetoed some of parliament’s more radical bills, which they were unable to reverse due to lacking the required two-thirds majority. Nawrocki is also allied with them too and is thus expected to do the same as Duda has.

The next parliamentary elections in fall 2027 could therefore lead to the conservatives returning to power in coalition with the populist-nationalist Confederation party. In fact, this might even happen sooner than that if Tusk’s ruling liberal-globalist coalition collapses far ahead of the next elections due to rising public anger over the continued deadlock. That’s not baseless speculation either but premised on a recent midnight meeting between the parliamentary speaker and the conservative opposition leader.

Publicly financed TVP World published an analysis by Stuart Dowell about “How a midnight meeting exposed fractures inside Poland’s fragile ruling coalition”, which mentioned that Szymon Holownia’s suspicious meeting with Jaroslaw Kaczynski might have discussed his role in a “technical government”. That’s a plausible scenario since the defection of Holownia’s “Poland 2050” from the ruling liberal-globalist coalition would force early elections and the opposition might reward him accordingly.

Speculation about the future of Tusk’s government aside, which might still hold till fall 2027, it’s clear that his decision to dispatch several thousand troops to assist with newly reintroduced border controls is meant to win over so-called “moderate” on-the-fence voters whenever the next elections are held. He wouldn’t have felt compelled to do this had Nawrocki lost and his ally Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski was the next president-elect instead. Tusk would have probably done nothing in that scenario.

His ruling liberal-globalist coalition initially wasn’t opposed to illegal immigration at the same level as the prior conservative government was but rising public anger pushed them in that direction with an eye on the then-upcoming presidential election. The same goes for their hardened policy towards Ukraine. Tusk didn’t envisage implementing either when he returned to the premiership in late 2023 but ended up doing so in order to help Trzaskowski win the presidency and thus preempt continued deadlock.

It’s therefore indeed the case that Nawrocki’s election pushed Tusk to play hardball with Poland’s neighbours on illegal immigration even at the expense of incurring the EU’s wrath by jeopardizing Schengen. What’s most important to him personally is retaining power by preventing the collapse of his government, but if that’s unavoidable, then he at the very least wants to keep the conservatives out of power in the event of early elections. These calculations show how politically desperate he’s becoming.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Voice of East.