Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk has warned a coalition partner that he will remove it from the government if it votes to dismiss a cabinet minister in a no-confidence vote due to take place this month.
Tusk told reporters on April 17 that an upcoming parliamentary vote on climate minister Paulina Hennig-Kloska would be a test of coalition loyalty and that he would not tolerate any rebellion.
“If it turns out you’re not with us, we’ll say goodbye,” he said, addressing Poland 2050, one of four parties that make up his coalition government.
Poland 2050 is a centrist party founded by TV celebrity and presidential candidate of 2020 Szymon Hołownia which formed the “Third Way” electoral alliance with the centre-right Polish People’s Party (PSL) in 2023.
That alliance came third with 14 per cent in the parliamentary elections of that year and formed the present centre-left coalition government with Tusk’s Civic Coalition and the Left Party.
The Third Way alliance split apart after the 2025 presidential election following the disappointing showing by its candidate and then Speaker of Parliament Szymon Hołownia who polled just under 5 per cent. In 2024 the alliance had also polled poorly, with under 7 per cent in the European Parliamentary election.
Following the break-up of the Third Way alliance, Hołownia turned down Tusk’s request to hold back on taking the oath of office for the opposition Conservatives (PiS)-backed President Karol Nawrock. Hre then announced he was quitting the leadership of his party to pursue his, as it turned out, unsuccessful quest to become a UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Hołownia also had to give up being Speaker of Parliament as result of the coalition agreement. That obliged him to give way to the Left Party in the second half of parliament’s four-year term.
The contest for the leadership of Poland 2050 held in January of this year turned out to be a bitter confrontation between two ministers in the Tusk government: Katarzyna Pełczyńska Nałęcz , who serves as the European and regional funds minister and Paulina Henning-Kloska, the climate minister.
Pełczyńska-Nałęcz won narrowly as most members of the party backed her vision of it retaining its autonomy over Henning-Kloska’s position of moving towards Tusk’s KO.
Within days of her defeat, Hennin-Kloska took half of the 30 Poland 2050 MPs with her to form a new parliamentary grouping called Centre.
Tusk’s ruling coalition holds 243 seats in the 460-seat strong parliament of which Pełczyńska Nałęcz holds 15. This means should Poland 2050 leave or be expelled from the ruling coalition, Tusk would lose his parliamentary majority.
The vote to remove Hennig-Kloska has been moved by both the PiS and the right-wing Confederation Party. Both accuse the minister of mismanaging a clean-air subsidy scheme and failing to protect Poland from the costs of European Union climate policy.
Pełczyńska-Nałęcz, whose relations with Tusk have been tense since his refusal to honour the coalition agreement over her party having a deputy prime minister in the government, met the PM on April 16.
They discussed the issue of the no confidence vote and her party’s campaign to raise the threshold for paying the second band of income tax from €25,000 to €30,000. But Pełczyńska-Nałęcz was told that there could be no discussion over policy until her party demonstrated its loyalty to the government in the no-confidence vote.
She rejected Tusk’s approach.
“First we had snide remarks at the cabinet meeting, now an ultimatum in the media,” she wrote on X.”The language of ultimatums is a breach of the government agreement. A coalition built on coercion is a road to disaster,” she added.
The Poland 2050 leader said her party would make its own decision on how to vote, depending partly on whether outstanding questions about the clean-air programme, including around €470 million in unaccounted funds, are resolved in the coming two weeks.
There has been speculation of late that Pełczyńska-Nałęcz and Hołownia are increasingly weary of the ruling coalition and want to build an alliance in the centre with the former PiS prine minister Mateusz Morawiecki and his faction as well as former allies in the PSL.
Her party, though, is currently at just 1 per cent in opinion polls. The PSL does not want to leave Tusk’s government and Morawiecki does not wish to exit PiS but rather to win power in it and with it.
