Tusk's abortion bills were written to be vetoed. In Poland, the veto is now the point.

On Tuesday evening, Poland's Sejm did something Donald Tusk said in 2024 could not be done in this parliament. It passed two bills loosening the country's abortion law. One would restore abortion when doctors diagnose a severe and irreversible foetal abnormality, reversing the 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling that set off the biggest street protests since communism. The other would stop prosecuting people who help a woman obtain an abortion, an offence that currently carries up to three years in prison.

Supporters called it a breakthrough. It is a strange breakthrough, because almost everyone in Warsaw expects it to go nowhere.

The bills now go to the Senate, which can amend them but not block them. Then they reach President Karol Nawrocki, who is aligned with the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, has vetoed a record number of government bills and said during his campaign that he would not sign legislation easing abortion rules. His chief of staff, Zbigniew Bogucki, told Polsat on Tuesday night that the president would wait to see the final text, but noted that Nawrocki "supports the protection of life from conception to natural death". Overriding a veto takes a three-fifths majority in the Sejm. Tusk's coalition does not have one.

So the question is not really what these bills will do. It is what they are for.

Two years in a drawer, then a sprint

The timing gives part of the game away. According to Politico Europe, the bills "lingered in a parliamentary committee for two years before surfacing, spurred by the campaign heating up 12 months before the next general election". In July 2024, a similar decriminalisation bill failed by 218 votes to 215, after most MPs from the Polish People's Party (PSL), the most conservative member of Tusk's own coalition, voted with the right against it.

Nothing about that coalition has changed. On Tuesday, according to Notes from Poland, 14 PSL MPs again voted against decriminalisation, including their leader, Deputy Prime Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz. What changed was attendance. The bill passed 217 to 213, with 27 MPs absent, among them ten from PiS, including party leader Jarosław Kaczyński. Had they turned up, Notes from Poland reckons, the bill would probably have failed.

There is a lesson for PiS in that. A party that wants to be taken seriously on the protection of life could not get its own leader into the chamber for the closest vote of the autumn.

Everyone gets a fight, nobody gets a law

The bills are also smaller than the rhetoric around them. In 2023, Tusk's Civic Coalition campaigned on abortion on request up to 12 weeks. That is not on the table, because PSL will not have it. Even if both bills became law, Poland would remain, as Euronews notes, one of only two EU countries, with Malta, where abortion on request in early pregnancy is not legal.

The pro-choice camp has noticed. The campaign group Legalna Aborcja was blunt on X: "What does this mean for women who need abortions now? Nothing, because none of these projects would help them." Education Minister Barbara Nowacka was more honest than most about why she voted yes anyway: she backs "every change, even the smallest one".

The government's own side is not pretending the president will sign. It is already writing the reaction. "If he wants to hurt women, he will hurt them," Sejm speaker Włodzimierz Czarzasty said before the vote. "I think women will see that and hear that." That is a campaign line, delivered a year early.

Bogucki, for his part, accused Tusk of wanting to "rehash ideological issues in order to cover up his incompetence" on everything else. That is also a campaign line. And it is not entirely wrong.

Here is how Polish politics works in 2026. A centrist government with a thin, quarrelsome majority passes bills it knows the president will block. The president blocks them, along with a lot else, including, last week, a law on implementing judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Each side then tells its voters the other one is the problem. Polls, Notes from Poland says, consistently show most Poles want the abortion law loosened. Tusk is betting a veto shows those voters who stands in their way. Nawrocki is betting it shows the other half who stands up for them. Both may be right. The law stays exactly as it is.

The court nobody obeys

The deeper mess is the one Brussels prefers not to look at. The 2020 ruling these bills undo came from a Constitutional Tribunal packed with PiS appointees, including three whose appointments are widely regarded as illegitimate. Tusk's government now refuses to recognise any of the tribunal's rulings. Nawrocki and the tribunal's chief justice, in turn, refuse to accept the five new judges the Sejm appointed this year. If the president sends the bills to the tribunal rather than vetoing them, the government has already told us what it thinks of that tribunal's answers.

That is Poland's constitutional order in October 2026: a court one half of the state ignores and a parliament whose judges the other half rejects.

In February 2024, the European Commission declared that Poland's "efforts to restore rule of law" had paved the way for up to €137 billion in previously frozen EU money. In May 2024, Brussels also closed the Article 7 procedure it had opened against Warsaw in 2017, a case in which that same tribunal featured prominently. Poland got all this on the strength of a change of government and an action plan. Two and a half years later, the constitutional court at the heart of the original dispute is still not functioning, and it is now the governing camp, not just the opposition, that treats its rulings as optional. When PiS bent the courts, it was a European emergency. The same tribunal stand-off under a government Brussels likes has not cost Warsaw a single euro.

What happens next

The Senate, where the coalition is even stronger, is expected to pass the bills. Nawrocki will veto them or send them to a court that Tusk ignores. The coalition will then have the clean, simple election message it has wanted since 2023, which is a good deal simpler than defending its record on the courts.

Abortion is a matter for Poles to settle, through their own parliament and their own president, not for Brussels or Strasbourg. But settling it would require one side to win an argument and the other to accept the result. Poland's politicians have settled on something easier. They have built a machine for producing vetoes, and both sides have found it pays.