Polish voters knew to fasten their seat belts when Jaroslaw Kaczyński announced his return to the main stage of Warsaw politics.
A former child actor turned anti-communist campaigner, the 74-year-old chairman of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party is Poland’s most influential politician and its de facto ruler.
For most of his party’s two recent terms in office, Mr Kaczyński has pulled the strings from the wood-clad PiS headquarters, 4km west of the Sejm parliament.
Though leading polls with a stable 34 per cent, his return as deputy prime minister, for the second time, reflects how an unhappy second-term cohabitation with smaller allies has created real uncertainty over its post-election power options.
Back in the saddle, Mr Kaczyński plans to activate the party’s voter base – conservative, older and outside of major cities – by turning the October 15th general election into a figurative – and literal – referendum.
Alongside their election ballot paper, voters will decide on hot-button issues linked to security and migration – and PiS’s public enemy number one: Donald Tusk.
The liberal opposition leader served as a one-term prime minister before heading the European Council in Brussels. Now back again in Warsaw as head of the liberal Civic Platform (PO), Mr Tusk hopes to oust PiS – but not if Mr Kaczyński has anything to do with it.
“Donald Tusk is the personification of evil in Poland, pure evil,” announced Mr Kaczyński at a public event this week. When a member of the crowd suggested Mr Tusk should be “exterminated”, the PiS leader suggested his political rival should instead be “morally exterminated”.
Though such robust rhetoric is commonplace in Polish politics – on his return in 2021, Mr Tusk promised in to sideline the “evil PiS” – talk of “extermination” carries uncomfortable baggage.
In January 2019, Pawel Adamowicz, the sitting mayor of Gdansk and a long-time “traitor” in PiS-lead culture wars, was fatally stabbed during a charity concert.
The long-running PiS interest in Mr Tusk stepped up further in June with a government proposal to give MPs powers to question in parliament anyone they considered a Russian stooge.
Dubbed Lex Tusk by its critics – who argued the draft law had been tailor-made to undermine the opposition leader – it was challenged by the EU and eventually watered down after pressure from the US.
Amid that U-turn, ongoing protest over rigid abortion laws and an unresolved standoff with the EU over judicial reforms – Mr Tusk is an ideal distraction and preferred PiS political piñata. Earlier this week, prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, momentarily forgetting Russia, described the Polish opposition leader as “the greatest threat to Poland’s security”.
National security looms large in referendum questions PiS want to put to voters in October. One, a perceived broadside at a planned pan-EU asylum system, asks: “Do you support the reception of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, in accordance with the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?”
The proposal, already backed a majority of member states and now before the European Parliament, allow EU capitals provide alternative forms of assistance if they decline a quota of asylum seekers.
Another proposed referendum question for polling day, about whether Poland should sell off state holdings, prompted Mr Kaczynski to suggest in a campaign video that “the Germans want to install Tusk in Poland in order to sell off our common property”.
Mr Tusk responded on social media with an image of a Polish state oil company manager and PiS loyalist, Daniel Obajtek, who sold off Polish state assets last year to Saudi and Hungarian interests.
Though the 66-year-old Mr Tusk has brought PO back from the political wilderness to about 29 per cent support, his performance as prime minister-in-waiting has alienated smaller opposition political parties and would be coalition allies.
Complicating matters further is the third-placed populist Confederation party. It has doubled its support to 12 per cent in polls by dialling down its far-right nationalist rhetoric – “we oppose Jews, homosexuals, abortions” – to emphasise libertarian low-tax and low-welfare policy.
With 80 per cent of 18-21 year-olds frustrated with the status quo in Poland, one third are set to give their first vote to Confederation and its 36-year-old leader Sławomir Mentzen. His major political promise: “to send Kaczyński and Tusk into retirement”.
