The new government’s obsession with punishing the former Polish prime minister leaves it isolated in Europe 
Warsaw, March 10.─ Donald Tusk appointment as president of the European Council in 2014 seemed to cap Poland’s journey to the heart of the European Union. Twenty-five years after the collapse of communism and a decade after Poland led the accession of eight former Soviet-bloc countries to the EU, its prime minister was elevated by his peers to one of the most senior posts in Brussels. It was hard to imagine a more potent sign of the healing of Europe’s post-war scars.
The job of council president, which involves chairing summits of European leaders and channelling their tempestuous debates into compromise, is a profound test of political nous. Not everyone was happy with Mr Tusk’s early performance; some thought he was operating more like the Polish prime minister he was from 2007-14 than the consensus-seeking European they sought. But most came around as Mr Tusk coolly shepherded the EU through a series of sticky situations, from a Greek bail-out to the refugee crisis to Brexit. His election to a second two-and-a-half-year term, due at an EU summit on March 9th, looked like a formality.
Instead, Mr Tusk found his home country blocking the path, and a Polish political psychodrama imported to Brussels. Earlier this week Beata Szydlo, Poland’s prime minister, circulated an extraordinary letter to her fellow heads of government more or less accusing Mr Tusk of high treason. “He used his EU function to engage personally in a political dispute in Poland,” she wrote. “We cannot accept such conduct.” This may be a reference to a speech Mr Tusk made in Wroclaw last year that called on the government to “respect the people, the principles and values of the constitution”. Ms Szydlo nominated Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, an obscure member of the European Parliament who helped negotiate Poland’s EU accession, to replace Mr Tusk.
In the end the matter fell to a vote at the summit; itself an unusual development in a forum that prefers consensus. And despite speculation that Hungary, which often allies with Poland against Brussels, might support the Polish gambit, Mr Tusk was re-elected by 27 votes to one ...
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