Tusk, now 66, is unlikely to make the annual game of football that his close circle has been playing for the last 40 years, always at noon on New Year's Eve. But at the final whistle there is likely to be a tentative third toast offered - to Tusk's return as prime minister and the end of Poland's disastrous flirtation with a populism that has ploughed deep divisions in society, undermined democratic institutions and driven a wedge between Warsaw and the EU.
Tusk's return after eight years of rule by the Law & Justice party (PiS) will be a moment of satisfaction for many of those playing, who have supported him since his time as a student organiser working with the anti-communist Solidarity movement that emerged from strikes at the local shipyards. But they will also recognise that Tusk's second coming is far from guaranteed to succeed; communism did fall in Poland, but the performance of Lechia Gdańsk never did match its fans' passion.
Yesterday, a day after parliament voted in favour of making him prime minister, Tusk presented his government, an ungainly coalition of his Civic Coalition group with the agrarian conservative Third Way party and the New Left. He could take office as soon as today. "We'll fix everything together," Tusk told parliament. "From tomorrow, we will be able to right the wrongs so that everyone, without exception, can feel at home."
AIthough he will once again gain access to Willa Parkowa, a handsome official residence near the chancellery in Warsaw, his friends say they expect him to spend more time in his family's ground-floor apartment in Sopot, a prosperous city on Poland's Baltic coast, just north of Gdańsk.
It is where Tusk and his wife, Małgorzata, also 66, brought up their children, Michał and Katarzyna, now 41 and 36.
Esta historia es de la edición December 13, 2023 de The Guardian.
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