Donald Tusk

Which commissioners are likely to get a second chance – and which will not – in the next European Commission?

Might Kacyński trust his premier at a summit? France has scheduled a meeting of the European Council for 11-12 December. The summit will – in theory at …

EU has yet to respond to watchdog’s claim says that China’s human-rights record has worsened in the run-up to the Olympic Games.

Poles told to repay aid The European Commission yesterday (16 July) ruled that Polish shipyards must repay over €1 billion in state aid, but acquiesced to Prime …

European Commission grants Poland three months to revise restructuring plans for two shipyards.

European Commission praises leading figure in Poland’s communist-era opposition and in the European Parliament as a “European of exceptional greatness”.

Russia will feature prominently in deliberations when EU foreign ministers gather next week (28-29 March) in the Slovenian castle of Brdo for the traditional informal meeting that takes place during every presidency.

Poland and Lithuania are delaying attempts by the Slovenian EU presidency to agree terms for negotiating a partnership agreement with Russia at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on 10 March, according to diplomats.

The fall of communism in Poland produced many astonishing political careers as the regime’s former opponents emerged from cramped, book-lined apartments to take their places in roomier halls of power. Few, however, have followed as adventurous a trail as Radoslaw Sikorski, the foreign minister, who was once a bright schoolboy from Bydgoszcz, a provincial centre in the north-west.

Despite EU leaders’ positive political talk about the expansion of Schengen there is some trepidation about what the move will mean for security inside the EU.

The list of questions over which Russia and the EU disagree appears to be getting longer by the week. Russian backsliding on democracy, most recently exhibited in its parliamentary elections in early December, from which Western observers were in effect barred, its suspension of compliance with the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, its intransigent position on an independent Kosovo and various diplomatic tussles such as its expulsion of the British Council, a UK government-funded cultural organisation, all kept the bilateral temperature below freezing point.

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Poland’s former foreign minister, offered a damning verdict on his country’s diplomacy under the Kaczynskis. “If the bride is poor and ugly,” he said, “the least she can do is to be gracious.”

After the election as prime minister two years ago of the Kaczynski Brother – the one without cat hairs on his suit – two million young Poles voted with their feet, going to work in the UK, the Netherlands, France, and other old member states. Now the same young people, all over the old West, have voted him out.

Poland’s Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga arrived in the Portuguese seaside town on Viana do Castelo last Friday (7 September) with a shopping-list of changes for the reform treaty. Late on Friday evening the Polish parliament confirmed that elections would be held on 21 October, two days after EU leaders are meant to finalise the new treaty.

The fight over the chairs of the European Parliament’s committees, some of the most sought-after jobs in the assembly, should finally end this week after a drawn out period of some of the most bitter wrangling the Parliament has seen in a long time.

Polish MEP Janusz Lewandowski has a reputation among some of his colleagues for surrounding himself with pretty female staff.

Small, precocious and odious is a description often applied to child actors.

They may be themselves both on the right of the political spectrum, but ultimately the votes that truly counted for the two candidates for the Polish presidency on 23 October were those of two very different constituencies, the far right and social democrats.

Bird flu fever (this is a disease carried not by chickens, but by newspaper headline writers) sweeps Europe, but we turn instead to raw politics and the hard-fought Polish presidential election.

I’ve had a big postbag since my recent article about Anne Applebaum’s book Gulag.

At one end of the avenue that runs through Czestochowa, spiritual home of Polish Catholicism, is the icon of the Black Madonna and its pilgrimage monastery; at the other end a chimney stack rises over a new industrial city.