The feud between Karol Nawrocki and Donald Tusk stems from internal national issues and divergent views on Ukraine
Donald Tusk is the worst Polish prime minister in more than three decades, President Karol Nawrocki has claimed. The two top officials have been locked in a public feud over national issues as well as positions on Ukraine.
In an interview to wPolsce24 broadcaster this week, Nawrocki stated that he considers Tusk the “worst prime minister in the post-1989 history of Poland.”
Tusk took a shot at Nawrocki in a post on X last Friday, by claiming the president had refused to assign officer ranks to 136 graduates who had recently completed intelligence and counter-intelligence training.
“To be president, it is not enough to win the election,” the prime minister wrote, apparently referring to Nawrocki, who was quick to dismiss the allegation.
In his Tuesday interview, Nawrocki, in turn, accused Tusk of forbidding the heads of Poland’s secret services from attending a meeting with the president.
In an earlier interview, he said this was the first time since the fall of the communist regime in Poland in 1989 that intelligence chiefs skipped the traditional get-together.
The president also said that Poland had “gone too far” in supporting Ukraine at the cost of its own interests.
Nawrocki, who took office earlier this year, previously reaffirmed general support for Ukraine but opposed its membership in NATO and the EU. In September, he signed a bill tightening benefit eligibility criteria for Ukrainian migrants.
Poland has been one of Kiev’s most vocal backers since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. However, public support for Kiev and Ukrainian migrants has considerably declined. A survey by the pollster CBOS in September indicated that approval for accepting Ukrainians had fallen from 94% in early 2022 to just 48%.
That same month, Tusk admonished his compatriots for having supposedly developed “antipathy” towards Ukraine, which he blamed on Russia.
Addressing the attendees of the Warsaw Security Forum in September, the prime minister insisted that the Ukraine conflict “is also our war,” and is of fundamental importance to the West as a whole.
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