WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland must put its own interests first during an era when “naive globalisation” is ending, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday in a speech that also sent energy stocks tumbling as he called for cheap power to take priority over profits.
European countries including Poland are looking to protect their interests after U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policies upended old certainties about global trade.
“If we want to build a safe state, we need to say loudly and clearly to ourselves and to others that Poland in this increasingly ruthless competition of egoists on world markets… will not be a naive partner,” Tusk told a business conference.
He said Poland would “brutally guard our interests and Polish companies”, adding that he had no problem with this being labelled “economic nationalism”.
He cited as an example the construction of Poland’s first nuclear plant on the Baltic Sea coast. The government decided Polish contractors would receive contracts for 53 billion zlotys ($14 billion) of the value of the project run by U.S. company Westinghouse Electric.
In another appeal to act in the national interest, Tusk said that state-controlled energy firms should prioritise providing cheap power over high profits.
This sent Warsaw’s WIG Energy Index, which comprises a number of state-controlled firms, down nearly 7%, even as the broader market rose.
“(The state company managers’) first task, for example in the case of energy, is to provide the Polish state with energy security, Polish families, Polish households and Polish entrepreneurs with the cheapest possible energy needed,” Tusk said at a business conference.
“Not necessarily to maximise the profits of a state-owned company.”
Commenting on the fall in energy firms’ shares, Ipopema Securities analyst Robert Maj said: “I think that investors are reacting to these words, because it could mean that the tariffs for the sale of electricity may simply fall below the costs of production.”
Tusk also sent the shares of bankrupt boiler-maker Rafako soaring 45% by suggesting its plant could start producing arms.
“There is nothing stopping us… from starting up armaments production, and I am talking about a very wide range, on the site where boilers used to be produced,” Tusk said.
($1 = 3.7774 zlotys)
(Reporting by Pawel Florkiewicz, Alan Charlish, Anna Banacka, writing by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
