The power he actually held
Donald Tusk has been prime minister since 13 December 2023, after a decade that included the European Council presidency and an earlier 2007–2014 premiership. A Council president chairs. A Polish prime minister directs a cabinet that still needs statutes, a president, and courts. He does not sit on the Constitutional Tribunal and he does not write Union regulations.
That limit is the first fact about his power. The second is that restoration methods still move welfare. A prime minister who seizes public media in December, replaces prosecutors in January, unlocks frozen Union funds, and keeps a hard Belarus-border line is not a commentator. The live score has to read those instruments as they were enacted, not as campaign adjectives about “Europe” versus “PiS”.
What went wrong, and what is proven
On 19–20 December 2023 the new culture minister took control of public television and radio. Staff were dismissed. TVP Info went off air. PiS called it a coup; the new majority called it reversing capture. Both the seizure and the prior capture are documented. A building occupation is not a murder. It is also not a clean statutory handover.
Prosecutor replacements sit on the same ledger: personnel change that can look like capture even when reversing prior politicisation. Courts later split on legality. Lex Tusk cut the other way while he was still in opposition: a PiS commission that could bar him from office. He did not write that law. He was its principal target. Recording it on his graph is an accountability event he suffered, not authorship.
As Council president he owned the 2018 migration conclusions more than any Green Deal file. That earlier restrictiveness stays. As prime minister he kept a hard Belarus-border line and later tightened asylum access there. Rights groups documented reduced access. A hybrid-threat justification does not erase the rights cost. The Ukrainian grain restriction is a complex file: PiS started the ban; he inherited farmer protests and did not fully lift it.
First-premiership costs remain on the paper. ACTA signature then a pause after protests. The 2012 retirement-age rise that PiS later reversed. Smolensk is a crash, not a proven assassination; the contested investigation became a durable polarising cleavage. 2025 cohabitation with President Nawrocki caps restoration statutes he does not solely control.
What improved, and how far
The 15 October 2023 election ended an eight-year PiS majority. Swearing-in in December completed the transfer. In May 2024 the Commission closed Article 7(1). Recovery disbursements started to move. Adam Bodnar presented a restoration plan. Those are official. A contested Tribunal and a later cohabiting president still cap what “restored” means.
Ukraine weapons continuation, the 500+/800+ child benefit he kept, administrative abortion-access guidance short of legalisation, and pressure against LGBT-free-zone resolutions are dated domestic and security acts. First-term cohesion motorways and the 2018 Withdrawal Agreement endorsement he chaired are earlier official files, not 2023 restoration.
Shared responsibility, and what the score does not say
Bodnar, Mateusz Morawiecki, Ursula von der Leyen, Viktor Orbán as the remaining Article 7 contrast, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy on grain and weapons are not extras. Article 7 closure is a Commission act naming Polish progress. Frozen funds were a PiS-era cost. Treating Tusk as sole author of restored courts, or as a bystander on the television seizure, would be the same error in opposite directions.
The score does not say PiS never captured courts. It does not say Tusk restored them by magic. It does not convert a television building occupation into a murder. It does not say Smolensk was an assassination. Confidence is high on the Article 7 closure, the December 2023 media dates, and the 2023 election, and only medium where unfinished judicial bills, a hostile presidential signature, and Border Guard practice sit between Warsaw and a welfare indicator.
