By Barbara Erling
WARSAW (Reuters) -Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced a cabinet reshuffle on Wednesday in a bid to regain momentum amid falling approval ratings and potential clashes with the new, opposition-backed nationalist president.
Since Karol Nawrocki’s victory over Tusk’s liberal ally Rafal Trzaskowski in June’s presidential election, dissension within the ruling pro-European coalition has grown, raising doubt about its future under a veto-wielding head of state.
Under the reshuffle, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski was promoted to deputy prime minister while keeping his current post. “We as a government need a very strong political figure in international relations,” Tusk told reporters.
To consolidate oversight of economic affairs, Tusk announced a new superministry combining finance and the economy to be headed by current Finance Minister Andrzej Domanski.
“The most important structural undertaking is building a viable financial and economic centre. There will be a single centre operating transparently and implementing a comprehensive economic policy,” Tusk said.
Milosz Motyka from junior coalition party PSL will head a newly created energy ministry. A judge, Waldemar Zurek, was named to run the justice ministry as it seeks to shore up rule of law standards that critics say deteriorated under the previous nationalist government.
Tusk’s coalition has steadily declined in opinion polls since mid-2024. This month, the share of government opponents has risen to 48% while the government’s support has held steady at 32%, the latest CBOS poll showed.
Polls have traced the government’s drop in popularity to public disenchantment with a lack of concrete achievements, with the opposition landing effective blows over a failure to stem undocumented migration into Poland.
The reshuffle drew criticism from the main opposition Law and Justice party, which lost power in the 2023 election.
“Reconstruction means nothing other than the further destruction of Poland. Some incompetents were replaced by others,” the party’s vice president, Mariusz Blaszczak, said in a post on X.
Nawrocki, who will be sworn in as president on August 6, has questioned the coalition’s pro-European, liberal agenda but said he is willing to accept moves to increase the tax-free pay threshold and deregulate parts of the economy.
“All laws that will be good for Poles will meet with my approval,” Nawrocki said in the televised interview on Monday.
Tusk, in his remarks announcing the reshuffle, called on supporters not to despair after Nawrocki’s presidential victory.
“No defeat, including the presidential election, justifies this mood or despair, this slackness, these thoughts of surrender … The time of post-election trauma definitely ends today,” the former European Council president said.
(Reporting by Pawel Florkiewicz, Barbara Erling and Anna Koper; writing by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; editing by Mark Heinrich)
