Lunch with the FT: Donald Tusk

Donald Tusk's arrival at Bar Przystan does not go un­noticed. The waiter's eyes light up. The owner smiles. And many of the elderly couples enjoying a quiet Thursday lunch in the Baltic Sea resort of Sopot nod or wave at the local boy who became democratic Poland's most successful politician.

Tusk is at ease. Two months ago, he resigned as his country's prime minister after seven years in the post; next week he begins his new job in Brussels as president of the European Council. Tusk's role makes him the EU's political point man, opposite Jean-Claude Juncker, who is head of its legislative functions. It is the first time an EU leadership job has gone to someone from the former communist eastern bloc.

In between, he has been happily unemployed for the first time in more than three decades. "Of course I am relaxed!" he says, "I am between jobs. For sure it is much more nice than being prime minister."

He is clean-shaven and tanned and, at 57, still wears the boyish smirk that made him the poster boy for a new generation of Polish politicians. Only the wrinkles around his twinkling blue eyes hint at the strains of his time in charge of Europe's sixth-largest economy.

"I do not have too many favourite restaurants to choose from - I'm sure you understand, being in office is a little bit like prison . . . But my wife and I came here when it first opened, around 20 years ago," Tusk says, as the waitress fills our water glasses. "Here is the best fish in Poland."

It certainly looks impressive. Salmon tartare, burbot roulade and pickled herring, a Polish speciality, are already on the table. This, I later realise, is just the warm-up.

Sopot, just outside Gdansk, is where Tusk's political journey began. The restaurant is on the beach just a minute's walk from where he lives. The view out of the window stretches across the cold sands, the lapping waves and the fog hugging Poland's northern coast.

"All my roots lie in Gdansk," says Tusk, in measured but steady English. When his new job was announced, there were mutterings that a weak command of the language might make him a poor choice to succeed the Belgian Herman Van Rompuy as one of Europe's top politicians. But such fears prove unfounded during a conversation that jumps between political philosophy, European history and Britain's future in the EU.

"Gdansk was a typical frontier town. You could observe many borders here between ethnicities. Around my home, during my childhood, were so many cemeteries. Muslim, Jewish, German, Polish, Orthodox," recalls Tusk, whose own family is Kashubian, a West Slavic ethnic minority with more than 1,000 years of history and its own language.

Growing up in communist Poland, he heard stories of how both his grand­fathers were sent to labour camps following the Nazi invasion in 1939, and of ancestors drowned on refugee ships sunk by U-boats.

"If you grow up in a multicultural or multilingual family, and if you feel the story of Gdansk, and the whole story of your ancestors . . . I remember I felt, even as a 12-year-old, that nothing is simple in life or in history. I was immune, even as a child, to every kind of simplification. And I realised, as a politician, as an adult, it was the best to be immune to every kind of orthodoxy, of ideology and most importantly, nationalism."

The waitress suggests a bottle of dry white wine. I nod. Tusk stares out of the window at Sopot's famous wooden pier, the longest of its kind in Europe.

"I remember this moment like it was yesterday. It was Sunday, sunshine. Seagulls were crowing. In particular, I remember the smell, of wood, tar and sea salt. I was eight, maybe nine. But I felt, I was 100 per cent sure, that this is the place, Gdansk, Sopot, where my life as an adventure would start. "

By the time Tusk was in his teens the city was struggling to come to terms with its past as the German city of Danzig, with its wartime destruction and with its Soviet overlords.

"As a child, as a young man, I was a typical hooligan," he recalls, as we begin to tuck in to the fresh, flavoursome fish. "We would roam the streets, you know, cruising for a bruising." He says he would often return home bleeding, from fights or football matches.

"A lot of my activities, including politics, are because I want something other than monotony. Our life under communism was so hopeless. Not because of terror. Not because of poverty. When you are not alone in these experiences, it is not so bad." He pauses. "What we suffered from was the monotony, the boredom. No hope for anything to change. To break this monotony was the desire, the temptation."

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That feeling was reflected vividly in December 1970, when riots broke out in Gdansk following sharp increases in food prices. With his father lying terminally ill in hospital and his mother, a nurse, ordered to work round the clock treating the wounded, the 13-year-old Tusk was left alone as the protests were brutally suppressed. "It literally started right below the window of our house . . . I saw everything," he recalls. "It was a moment of change, and of freedom. I remember every hour.

"I saw policemen shooting people and soldiers shooting people . . . I remember this feeling very well: I had no doubt who was the right side, who was the bad side. From this point on, I knew that almost always people who are beaten are in the right. And people who beat are not right. In this moment it was very clear."

We have made barely a dent in the starters but the waitress arrives with the offer of further choices. Tusk heartily recommends the fish soup, which I order in appalling Polish that brings a smile from them both, with grilled halibut to follow. Tusk goes for barszcz, also known as borsch, followed by herring in cream.

He recalls his first political move, the founding in 1977 of a student committee that supported the anti-communist trade union Solidarity. Later, while working as a journalist, he brought food and water to dock workers striking at the Gdansk shipyard. But in 1981, when Poland's Moscow-controlled government, under General Wojciech Jaruzelski, enacted martial law, Tusk lost his job and was evicted, with his pregnant wife Gosia, from their home.

Two years later, after co-founding Przeglad Polityczny (Political Review), a liberal economic periodical for which he wrote using the pseudonyms Anna Barich and Tadeusz Donetski, he was jailed. "I am a very lucky devil," Tusk laughs, as the steaming barszcz and soup arrive. "It was funny. OK, not funny at the time. But three days after my arrest, Jaruzelski announced an amnesty for political prisoners . . . For me it was the best situation. I have my own experience of prison, what it means, but without any serious suffering."

Tusk relies heavily on this type of hindsight when he speaks of his youth and political awakening. Taken at face value, you could be forgiven for thinking that his subsequent rise to the top of Poland's government was preordained. In fact, things could have turned out very differently. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and 2005, he fell in and out of parties, won and lost his parliamentary seat and, at times, appeared to drift listlessly through the turbulent world of post-communist politics.

He began as a free-market, strongly libertarian liberal. One of his early political slogans was 'Neither the right nor the left, just straight to Europe'. That radical streak has faded. "I am more conservative today than 20 years before, I admit. But I am also more experienced."

It is, he muses between sips from his mug of rich purple barszcz, "much better to be radical young. I was really radical, I was a rebel. Against everything: church, family. Maybe I was too free . . . But I think it is much better in a political context to be radical young, and conservative when you are old . . . God save us from old, radical politicians."

By his forties, Tusk had risen to national prominence. After a chastening defeat in Poland's 2005 presidential election, he was elected prime minister in 2007 as leader of the centre-right Civic Platform party, despite never having held a ministerial post. Four years later, with his pragmatic policies helping Poland to become the only EU country to avoid recession during the global financial crisis, he was re-elected.

But Tusk had also made fierce enemies. His cocksure parliamentary demeanour verged on arrogance, and drew mocking rebuttals from rivals such as Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Law and Justice, the main opposition party. Last month, Ewa Kopacz, Tusk's successor as prime minister, described the relationship between the two men as a "curse of hatred".

As our main courses are brought to the table, I say to Tusk that in Poland his star has fallen dramatically since 2011. The twenty-something voters who had swept him into office, lured by the promises of liberal positions on gay rights and abortion, turned away as those promises were shelved. "Now they are disappointed with me. And they are right," he says. "It was a miracle in the Polish context to be prime minister for seven years." Before Tusk, the average Polish post-communist prime minister ruled for 13 months.

"I think I delivered huge parts of my promises . . . [But] OK, people tired of me. I accept it," he shrugs. "I am tired of me as prime minister. The opposition was so tough; I was not an opponent to them. I was a murderer. I was a traitor. I was a thief. And, after seven years, to have no defeat, now in fact I have a promotion. As I said, I am a lucky devil."

Tusk's eyes occasionally flick to the TV above my head. It is showing football, his third passion after family and politics. "I love football but football doesn't love me. It was my dream, but . . ." he trails off. Tusk, an Arsenal fan, is also an ardent follower of his local club.

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"I suffer. My local team, Legia Gdansk, they never win. It is worse than Tottenham, you know? We always suffer." I tell him that the editor of the FT is a Spurs fan. "Fuck!" he exclaims, demonstrating again that his command of English is just fine.

Throughout our lunch, Tusk pauses to smile and gesture at people who wave to him as they stroll past the restaurant windows. But when he spots a photographer on the beach, he tenses up. It's probably a tourist, I suggest. He is not convinced.

Maybe they think I am a Russian spy? I joke. "For sure!" he laughs.

We are both only half-joking. Tusk's career, both in Warsaw and in Brussels, may come to be judged by his relationship with Moscow. That relationship was thrust into the headlines last month after Radoslaw Sikorski, Tusk's foreign minister, said that Russia's Vladimir Putin had, in 2008, offered Tusk a deal to divide Ukraine between them.

Tusk, with furrowed brow, denies any such an offer being made. "What I told Radek [Sikorski] after this event was that in politics, in diplomacy, like in ordinary life, it is much better to know a lot and to talk a little. Never vice versa.

"[But] if it comes to the essence of the relationship between Russia-Ukraine-Poland-Europe, of course Sikorski was right. After Bucharest [a 2008 Nato summit where Putin made a speech questioning Ukraine's independence], I never doubted that the geopolitical game between Russia and Europe, and between Russia and Poland, was about Ukraine.

As a prime minister, Tusk was one of the most outspoken of those EU leaders who criticised Russia. His appointment as President of the European Council has been seen by some as a statement that hawkish policies towards Moscow will continue. "For Putin, and Russia today, the EU is a problem. And we have to understand, and I think we are close to this moment, that Russia is not our strategic partner. Russia is our strategic problem."

In Brussels, Tusk will work closely with German chancellor Angela Merkel, with whom he has formed a close bond. "She is a unique person for me, and me for her. Nobody knows in Europe that we are from the same place. The grandfather of Merkel was a Danziger. Her grandfather was a senator in Danzig when my grandfather lived here," he says, pointing towards the beach. "If we can talk of friendship in politics, and especially in diplomacy, then I think we can say this is a deep and unique friendship."

Tusk's appointment was supported by major EU states that wanted someone who could both strike compromises and enforce discipline. It also pleased states like Poland that are either on the EU's periphery or outside the eurozone. I am keen to talk about his plans for his European presidency but first we must deal with the shots of Goldwasser he has ordered. He assures me that the liquor, complete with flakes of floating gold leaf, is not only a local delicacy but also has health benefits. To my embarrassment, he sips his shot after I have downed mine in one.

"Am I a federalist in the European context? No," he says. "I do not like ideologies, I do not like 20-year strategies. It is bullshit. You have to be ready to react to every situation. You have to protect the substance, the elementary values."

I suggest that while Van Rompuy had a tough job handling the aftermath of the financial crisis, Tusk's could be harder still: the Ukrainian crisis, a stagnant eurozone economy and fears over a potential British exit from the EU are among the challenges that lie in his in-tray.

"I was born for difficult things, I think," he says, smiling. Alluding to the prospect of a potential "Brexit" if Britain holds a referendum on the issue, he says: "Great Britain is a key partner, a key element . . . I appreciate [David Cameron's] attempts, his efforts, because I believe his declaration that he is pro-European."

"If [Brexit happens] it will not only be a question of the European Union. It could be, as a final result, the greatest crisis of our western civilisation as a whole," he says. "At the end of the day, it will be the choice of Great Britain . . . But from my heart and my mind, I give help and co-operation."

I notice that the waitress and Tusk's security detail are hovering. We have been talking for almost three hours. There is time for one more shot of Goldwasser, and a final question about whether his move to Brussels could be seen as a cynical way of avoiding a re-election battle that many think he would have lost.

"I am a true believer in Europe. Not as a euro enthusiast or a naive federalist, but because I am a Polish patriot. And this is why I have no conflict in my conscience," he says. "Today, and also in the next five, 10 years, European Union interests are 100 per cent the same as Polish interests . . . This is why I do not feel guilty. If I do my job well in Brussels, it will result in good effects for Poland."

Henry Foy is the FT's central Europe correspondent

Illustration by James Ferguson

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