vor five winters, an act of violence occurred in Poland that must have sent shivers down Donald Tusk's spine: an open-air massacre, on an open stage, during a benefit concert. It hit the mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz, Tusk's party colleague and friend. A criminal with multiple previous convictions stormed onto the stage during the Gdansk concert, pulled out a knife and stabbed. He shouted something to the effect that the liberal Civic Platform, Tusk's party, had “tortured” him. Then he allowed himself to be arrested. It offered little consolation that he was a lone perpetrator, a so-called copycat.
Donald Tusk, then EU Council President in Brussels, immediately rushed to his hometown on the Baltic Sea. The Long Market, with its magnificent backdrop of patrician houses, was full of people. The mourners, including Tusk, often lacked the right words. The highlight of the evening was when “Sound of Silence” played over the speakers, the song by Simon & Garfunkel: “Hello darkness, my old friend”.
Tusk's term in Brussels was coming to an end at the time, and he must have asked himself whether he should really return to Poland at the peak of his career and step into the same river again – especially now, after the murder of a nationally known party colleague. What would it mean for Tusk's family? Would “Sound of Silence” be played for him one day too? He had long since been declared the main enemy by the right-wing party in power at the time, the PiS, and its leader Jarosław Kaczyński. To the journeyman without a fatherland. To one of those liberal reformers who had given “shock therapy” during the turning point of the scarcity economy of socialism, with the collapse of large state-owned companies and mass unemployment as the first consequence. A friend or even a recipient of orders from the rich German neighbor and the powerful Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Tusk, born in 1957, had a biography that left no doubt: This man has a mind of his own and cannot be controlled from outside. Both of his parents came from the Danzig railway workers' milieu; Even his father had the unusual first name Donald, which goes back to an actor who was popular before the war. A formative experience for Donald Jr. were the shipyard workers' protests in 1970 against drastic increases in food prices, which the communist regime bloodily suppressed in the streets of Gdansk.
It wasn't just about bread, it was about freedom
In 1980 the workers protested again; now throughout Poland. This time they avoided street battles and remained on strike in their factories. And this time it wasn't just about bread, but about freedom. Now Donald Tusk was no longer a teenager but a recent history graduate. During those years he met the leader of the protests, Lech Wałęsa, saw the emergence of the Solidarity trade union, an independent mass organization for the first time in the Eastern Bloc, and he felt, as he later said, “that politics can be a wonderful calling”. The regime also crushed this movement, and Tusk spent the dark 1980s selling bread rolls and cleaning facades. But at the same time there was a conspiracy: Beyond censorship, i.e. illegally, Tusk and his friends published opposition magazines. The Latin heraldic motto of old Danzig was their guiding star: Nec temere – nec timide – Neither rash nor fearful.
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