THE elevation of Donald Tusk to one of the top jobs in Europe marks a coming of age for his native Poland. Ten years after joining the EU, the country has secured the presidency of the European council and its prime minister has become the fixer for, and mediator between, Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, Matteo Renzi, David Cameron and other European leaders.

Tusk has already won the prestigious Charlemagne prize for leadership. The incumbent, Herman Van Rompuy of Belgium, described Tusk late on Saturday as a “European statesman”.

Quiet, unassuming, firm and politically ruthless, the German-speaking centre-right liberal from Gdansk, the cradle of Poland’s anti-communist, anti-Russian revolution, has been one of the EU’s most successful and most pro-European prime ministers of recent years at a time when faith in the EU has been tested.

The only Polish prime minister to win a second term since the collapse of communism in 1989, he has had a good crisis. Poland was the only EU country not to fall into recession as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, and the ensuing European debt and currency turmoil. Perhaps more importantly, under Tusk’s seven years in charge of Poland and with the help of his anglophile foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, the country performed a strategic shift, redefining the country’s national interest.

Coming into the EU, Poland was a natural ally of Britain: big enough, on the fringes, liberal, free market and, for historical reasons, wary of the Franco-German dominion that ran the EU until the 2004 enlargement.

Tusk inherited a Poland that was hostile to Russia and intensely suspicious of Germany, for good historical reasons. The alliance with the UK was reinforced by Britain’s championing of Poland’s membership against deep-seated west European reservations and by the UK’s open-door policy for Polish migrants from 2004 when most others restricted immigration.

Under Tusk and Sikorski, this has all changed. The keen pro-Americanism waned, leaving a sour taste. Tusk and Sikorski concluded that Britain and David Cameron in particular were making a mess of their tactics and strategy in Europe and with other EU governments.

Tusk bonded with Merkel, the EU’s first among equals, cemented a close Polish-German alliance, and concluded that Poland’s destiny rested on its closest possible European integration, setting it at odds with a UK travelling in the opposite direction.

What impact such policies and strategies will have on his stewardship of EU summits is not clear. By definition, the president of the European council is at the mercy of the other leaders. But the agenda-setting and mediation powers that go with the job also allow him to shape to a degree the EU’s direction.

“There are three big fundamental issues for the new president — the economy, Ukraine and the UK question,” said a senior EU official. “We may be on the edge of a new cold war with the Russians. There are huge economic challenges. And the UK issue will be very big.”

On all three, Tusk will have strong views. The rapid pace of change in eastern Europe over 20 years in the transition from communism to capitalism puts him on the Cameron reformist side of the economic argument.

On Ukraine and Russia, Tusk and Poland have led the hawks in Europe on getting tough with Putin, although he will not be able to take Germany, France or Italy to places they do not want to go.

On Britain, it will fall to Tusk to lead negotiations with Cameron, if he remains in power, on a so-called new deal rewriting the British terms of membership. “The future of the EU is not about making it smaller, about contraction,” he said after his appointment. “No reasonable person can imagine the EU without the UK.”

Tusk will not be the master of that negotiation, rather the messenger for what other EU leaders deem the limits in accommodating British demands. “Now the name of the game for Cameron is to get a strong portfolio in the new commission,” said the official, in a reference to the next stage of the jobs-trading in Brussels, the formation, by Jean-Claude Juncker, of a new European commission over the next fortnight.

Juncker has considerable powers of discretion here. While he has competing national demands to balance, his priority is to construct a team that will secure the necessary endorsement of a majority of the European parliament in October. “Juncker has the leverage now,” said the official. “Cameron can only blame himself for making the Conservatives a fringe group. The British are not playing it very strongly.”

The simultaneous appointment of Federica Mogherini, the Italian foreign minister, as EU foreign policy chief matters less for the simple reason that European foreign policy is still in gestation. Much will depend on what she is able to make of the job.

For Matteo Renzi, the new centre-left Italian prime minister, winning the post is double-edged. Domestically he will sell it as a triumph for Italy, securing one of the most prestigious posts. But the main decisions in Brussels affecting his country will be economic and financial within the European commission. Mogherini will be wrestling with foreign policy crises, clocking up a colossal number of air miles, and will largely be absent when those decisions are taken.

By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, September 2nd , 2014