Tusk hits out at coalition partner for voting with opposition on president’s “mega-airport” bill

Sep 26, 2025 | Business, Politics

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk has expressed anger at one of his junior coalition partners for voting in favour of allowing a bill proposed by opposition-aligned President Karol Nawrocki to proceed for further parliamentary work.

Tusk says he “does not accept this voting”, which “bodes very poorly for the future”. The leader of the party in question, however, says that the bill was passed for “procedural” reasons and that they will not approve it when it comes to a final vote.

The Sejm, the more powerful lower house of parliament, on Friday afternoon voted on a bill put forward by Nawrocki shortly after he came to office in last month.

It is intended to ensure that the government completes construction of a planned “mega-airport” and transport hub, known as the Central Communication Port (CPK), that was a flagship project of the former Law and Justice (PiS) administration.

The national-conservative PiS is now the main opposition party and endorsed Nawrocki in his presidential bid this year. It has accused the current government of scaling back and delaying the CPK project, despite Tusk’s insistence that the investment is going ahead.

In Friday’s vote, most members of the ruling coalition – Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition (KO), the centre-right Polish People’s Party (PSL) and The Left (Lewica) – voted to reject Nawrocki’s bill at its first reading.

However, they lost the vote because nine MPs from the centrist Poland 2050 (Polska 2050), another coalition partner, joined PiS and the far-right Confederation (Konfederacja) in voting for the bill to proceed.

Given that the bill was approved by a majority of 211 to 203, those votes were decisive. However, the legislation has not yet received final approval by the Sejm. Rather, it now passes to the parliamentary infrastructure committee for further discussion and work before a possible final vote in the Sejm.

 

Speaking to journalists in parliament after the vote, Tusk expressed frustration with Poland 2050 and its leader Szymon Hołownia, who is also the speaker of the Sejm.

“I do not accept this voting by the MPs,” said the prime minister. “From my perspective, this is a bad sign on the part of Poland 2050 and speaker Hołownia.”

“I am sorry that the speaker and such a large number of MPs from his party have sided with President Nawrocki on this issue, because it bodes very poorly for the future,” added Tusk.

His government has regularly clashed with Nawrocki since the new president came to power and immediately began vetoing a series of bills passed by the ruling majority as well as attempting to play a stronger role in foreign policy.

Hołownia, however, sought to calm tensions, telling journalists that his MPs had approved the bill for “procedural” reasons. The speaker outlined that he “believes, as a member of parliament, that we must be extremely cautious about rejecting bills at the first reading”.

“The bill contains many mistakes” and “the infrastructure committee really wants to work on this bill to expose its absurdities”, added Holownia, quoted by financial news website Money.pl

“This is not adoption of the bill,” he noted. “We do not pass bills with the opposition, only with the ruling coalition.”

Tusk’s coalition, which ranges from left to centre-right, has generally maintained unity since taking power in December 2023. However, it has disagreed on certain issues, including a rebellion by PSL last year to vote against a loosening of abortion laws.

The government has argued that not only is Nawrocki’s CPK bill unnecessary – because Tusk’s administration is moving forward with the project – but that passing it would be a “recipe for mismanagement”, in the words of Maciej Lasek, the government’s plenipotentiary for CPK.

Tusk’s coalition accuses PiS of mismanaging the project during its time in power, wasting large amounts of time and money, and says that Nawrocki’s attempted interference would repeat such mistakes.

Those claims were recently echoed by the state audit office, which found that a series of “costly mistakes” were made under the PiS government that resulted in delays to the CPK project and hundreds of millions of zloty in lost revenues.


Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: KPRM/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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