Mild Manners Mask Iron Will

A carpenter's son from the Baltic port of Gdansk, the cradle of Poland's anti-communist uprising, Donald Tusk appears mild-mannered and diffident. But friends say the easy outward manner belies a steely ambition that gained him the leadership of his Civic Platform party and now the prime ministership of Poland.

Ten days ago, the 50-year-old historian went head-to-head in a television duel with Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the wily prime minister. The broad expectation was that the blunt-talking populist would wipe the floor with the courteous Tusk. But Mr Tusk routed his opponent calmly and systematically. The TV debate was the turning point in an extremely bruising election campaign. The neck-and-neck polls shifted to give the Platform a 10-point lead.

"He was tough, decisive and calm," said Tomasz Wolek, a former newspaper editor from Gdansk who has known Mr Tusk for decades. "Donald had a Kaczynski complex and he's finally freed himself of it. He allowed himself to be blackmailed and was put on the defensive. Now he's got tougher."

Mr Tusk, a keen amateur football player viewed in his youth as a promising striker, operated in the underground as an anti-communist student leader in Gdansk in the late 1970s before joining the Solidarity movement. After the communists imposed martial law in 1981, he worked on building sites. Both his parents had been forced into slave labor under the Nazi occupation of Poland.

As Solidarity splintered following the 1989 defeat of communism, Mr Tusk became a right wing liberal and keen advocate of Europe. Mr Tusk entered the upper house in Warsaw in 1997 for the Freedom Union party and became a founder of the Civic Platform in 2001.

Sunday's victory was revenge for his defeat at the hands of the Kaczynski twins two years ago. His party narrowly lost to Jaroslaw Kaczynski's Law and Justice party and he also failed against Lech Kaczynski for the presidency.