Note from nonsense

I tried to translate the text of Jacek Lepiartz from “Deutsche Welle” yesterday. I found it when I was looking for Polish MPs. This is it:

“Zweimal um die Erde im Wahlkampf”.
Politics Poland
Donald Tusk – Return of the Alpha Male
Jacek Lepiartz (from Warsaw)
13/12/202313. December 2023

For a long time, Donald Tusk was considered a bon vivant who valued football more than hard political work. During the pre-election campaign, he proved that he could remove the right-wing populists from the Polish government. Now he is the prime minister again.
When Donald Tusk returned to Poland from Brussels two years ago, his Civic Platform (PO) party was in ruins. The liberal-conservative party, which lost power in 2015 to the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS), failed to even get 20 percent in polls.

At that time, no one gave PO a chance against PiS, which had an absolute majority in the House of Representatives. But then Tusk, who prematurely left the presidency of the European People's Party in May 2021, took over the leadership of the opposition party, which fell into a deep crisis, and started a systematic reconstruction work from scratch.
During the 2023 election campaign, the new leader of the opposition traveled 70,000 kilometers. A kilometer, which is almost as much as if he circled the world twice.

During hundreds of meetings in all parts of the country, he effortlessly entered into a direct dialogue with voters, including his opponents. There were no security barriers or police checks. Two large demonstrations in Warsaw attended by several hundred thousand people, which he called, played an important role in mobilizing voters. It is a record holder, almost 75%. The turnout in the October 15, 2023 parliamentary elections is largely due to him. “Election victory is his victory,” writes Gazeta Wyborcza.
After being elected head of government on Monday (11 December), Tusk thanked his political companion, former president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Walesa. “44 years ago, in December 1979, when I was young, we organized an illegal demonstration in a student dormitory in Gdańsk in front of a shipyard,” Tusk told the 80-year-old, who voted from a guest in parliament. a chair At that time, special services intervened and ended the action. “It was a formative experience. Then I realized that politics is important”, said the new Prime Minister.
Dissident from Gdansk
In fact, the roots of Tusk's political involvement lie in his hometown of Gdańsk, where he was born in April 1957. As a student of history, he supported the conspiratorial activities of the anti-communist opposition, which led to the founding of the trade union “Solidarity” in 1980. After graduation, the historian, by the way, made a living as a worker. Cleaning of factory chimneys. He published the political magazine “Przegląd Polityczny” – a forum for liberal ideas, which is still published today.
The fall of communism in 1989 opened up new opportunities for political activism for critics of the regime. Inspired by liberal ideas, Tusk founded the Congress of Liberal Democrats (KLD) after the democratic changes. For a while, his party belonged to the broader Christian-Democratic structure of his future opponent, Jaroslaw Kaczyński's Center Accord.
First steps in the parliament
In 1991, Tusk won his first parliamentary mandate and for some time served as the vice-president of the second chamber of the parliament, the Senate. However, his employees complain of lack of interest in systematic work and lack of discipline.
In 2001, Tusk founded his new party, Civic Platform (PO). He became a major player in Polish politics, along with Jaroslaw Kaczynski's PiS.
The liberal politician was the head of the government for the first time in 2007. Before that, he demonstrated his rhetorical skills by winning a televised duel with Kaczynski. Polish publicists compared his style of governance to the method of then German Chancellor Angela Merkel: “stuck on a vision”, i.e. a pragmatic policy of small steps without big visions. He himself declared that the goal of his policy was to provide people with “hot water”. This policy of small steps proved successful – he was the first Polish prime minister since 1989 to win re-election in 2011.
From Warsaw to Brussels
Before the end of the second parliamentary term in 2014, Tusk moved to Brussels, where he was the president of the European Council until 2019. Then he took the leadership of the European People's Party. In May 2021, he left this position prematurely and returned to Polish politics. There, his political opponents awaited him with ferocious determination to prevent his return to power. He was repeatedly accused of being a critic of European and German politics.
Donald Tusk in a white shirt with a red paper heart on his chest, holding a microphone
Tusk has been the target of anti-German propaganda in national conservative circles for decades. In 2005, his grandfather Josef Tusk was accused of volunteering for the Wehrmacht. In fact, he was imprisoned in the German Stutthof concentration camp and drafted into the German army. During the election campaign, PiS politicians called him a traitor and a collaborator. After Tusk was elected head of government, Kaczynski angrily shouted at him from the rostrum of the parliament: “You are a German agent.”
Tusk calmly responded to the slander campaign. His heart-shaped hands became a symbol of his election campaign. He and his supporters wore red paper hearts on their lapels during events and mass rallies – Million Heart March. He also used the symbol to greet his supporters and opponents in the Sejm after being elected head of government.

Jacek Lepiartz is a journalist of the Polish editorial office, specializing in Polish-German issues.

No comment. It looks like the link is no longer working. It appears to be “:deprecated”.

The illustration is also from this article.

Honik