DONALD TUSK is Poland’s most successful prime minister since the fall of communism. Under his leadership his country has become the rising star of the European Union, and he has managed to build a close and cordial relationship with Germany, Poland’s most important trading partner and the EU’s power centre. He has maintained a reputation for personal integrity and even managed to keep his party, the centre-right Civic Platform (PO), away from the corruption scandals that are the scourge of many central and eastern European countries.

Yet since the beginning of the year Mr Tusk’s star has started to wane, as Poles have become worried about a slowing economy and disenchanted with the lack of reforms by the government. For most of the euro crisis, Poland has been an oasis amid ailing economies. But after nearly two decades of uninterrupted growth, the economy avoided recession by a mere whisker in the first quarter. Unemployment rose to 13.6% (see chart). “The slowdown has dented Mr Tusk’s credentials as an economic manager and fatigue with PO has set in,” says Wawrzyniec Smoczynski of Polityka Insight, a think-tank.

For the past six years PO has always led the polls, but in June CBOS, a pollster, found that 26% of voters supported the main opposition party, Law and Justice (PiS), and only 23% were in favour of PO. Earlier this month the PiS candidate for mayor in Elblag, a town near the Baltic coast, won the election with 52% after his PO predecessor had been voted out by referendum. Mr Tusk had travelled several times to Elblag to boost his party. On July 22nd campaigners for a referendum to recall Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, the mayor of Warsaw and deputy leader of the PO, submitted 232,000 signatures, almost double the number required, to the electoral commission for verification. (In the past tens of thousands of signatures in such recall initiatives have been invalid.) Warsaw’s mayor has a symbolic importance similar to London’s mayor, says Aleks Szczerbiak of the University of Sussex, so it would be a watershed if this PO grandee were thrown out by referendum.

Tusk, Tusk

Law and Justice has been making the most of the ruling party’s weakness. It has distanced itself from the conspiracy theories surrounding the plane crash in 2010 that killed Lech Kaczynski, then Poland’s president, and 95 others in Smolensk, in Russia. (Kaczynski’s twin brother Jaroslaw is the leader of today’s PiS.) As the previous PiS government was known mainly for its divisions and polarisation, it is trying to present itself as a responsible manager of the economy and politics.

“Until 2010 Mr Tusk had good reason not to be a reformist prime minister,” says Mr Smoczynski. Lech Kaczynski was president and repeatedly used his veto to block the Tusk government’s reforms. After his second electoral victory in 2011, however, Mr Tusk could have tackled difficult reforms, such as trimming the expensive national-insurance scheme for farmers or the pension privileges of coal miners. He claims that he had to focus on the crisis in the euro zone, but the more likely reason for his reluctance to initiate reform was the unpopularity of an increase in the pension age introduced last year. “This scared him off,” says Mr Szczerbiak.

Mr Tusk faces an election for the leadership of his party, which has been brought forward—presumably to strengthen his troops’ unity. In mid-July PO’s 42,000 members received packages outlining the voting procedure that will start in August, and giving them a choice between Mr Tusk and Jaroslaw Gowin, who was justice minister until he was sacked by Mr Tusk in April. Mr Gowin is running as the leader of a conservative faction of the PO that is disenchanted with Mr Tusk’s liberal stance on gay civil partnerships, in-vitro fertilisation and what they see as divergence from free-market policies.

Mr Gowin has hardly any chance of toppling Mr Tusk. Rafal Pankowski at Warsaw’s Collegium Civitas says Mr Gowin’s battle with Mr Tusk is more about making a statement than winning. Closer to the conservative Catholics in Law and Justice than the core of Civic Platform, Mr Gowin may defect with his followers to PiS. He could also try to create his own political party, possibly teaming up with “Poland Comes First”, a PiS breakaway group, and other dissidents from the two big parties.

Losing parliamentarians would be a blow to Mr Tusk’s coalition government, has only a five-seat majority (plus support from four other MPs). Yet in the long run Mr Tusk may benefit from a more unified party, as he is at present obliged to spend a lot of his time placating his right wing. The real task he faces is the need to reinvigorate the economy and get his government shipshape for elections in 2015.