WARSAW — The godfather of Polish politics' bid to destroy the career of his hated rival Donald Tusk didn't just fail — it turned Tusk into the main political threat to Poland's right-wing government.

The sight of Poland's leaders and diplomats floundering to stop Tusk's re-election as president of the European Council marked the government’s biggest failure since coming to power in October 2015 and sent the opposition Civic Platform party soaring in opinion polls. It also confirmed Tusk's status as the only man who can defeat Jarosław Kaczyński, head of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) and the country’s de facto leader.

“Tusk’s re-election created hope in the liberal electorate that someone can beat PiS,” said Norbert Maliszewski, a political scientist.

Tusk hasn’t lost a head-to-head fight against Kaczyński in more than a decade, and last month’s reappointment for another two-and-a-half-year term as Council president turned into a fiasco for Warsaw. Despite a massive last-minute lobbying effort to undercut him, Tusk won the backing of 27 member countries, leaving only Poland voting against its countryman and former prime minister.

An opposition boost

Poles noticed. A recent poll by the Ibris organization had PiS at 29 percent with Civic Platform at 27 percent, a jump of 9 percentage points compared to a poll taken before Tusk's re-election.

The emboldened opposition party — which Tusk founded and led as prime minister for seven years — even pushed for a vote of no-confidence in the government. The vote failed — Law and Justice has an absolute majority in parliament — but it was a rare sign of confidence from an opposition that has struggled to find its feet and a compelling message since its 2015 defeat.

“You can say that you have an advantage and that you can win every vote,” Grzegorz Schetyna, the Civic Platform leader, said during Friday’s debate on the no-confidence vote. “That’s true, you do have a majority in the parliament, but it’s certain you don’t have a majority in Poland.”

Schetyna’s broader message was intimately tied to Tusk — the need to defend Poland’s place in a rapidly changing European Union.

There isn’t much room to fight Law and Justice inside Poland. The party’s signature economic policies — a cash bonus for larger families and lowering the retirement age — are very popular, although most mainstream economists have qualms about their longer-term consequences for public finances.

PiS has also done a good job of playing to Polish fears in areas such as migration — Poland hasn’t accepted a single asylum seeker from the 2015 migration crisis.

But the EU itself remains overwhelmingly popular in Poland, and that’s difficult terrain for Law and Justice. The party is embroiled in a battle with the European Commission — accused of violating the bloc’s legal principles in its fight with the country’s top constitutional court. Relations with Germany, Poland’s leading economic partner, are at a low ebb, and there is growing concern that a post-Brexit EU will leave members such as Poland and Hungary on the sidelines.

“Poles want a European Poland that is Euro-Atlantic, safe, with the rule of law,” Schetyna said.

Pro-EU Poland

Tusk touched on those themes during a hard-hitting speech in Wrocław in December, where he called on “those who really rule our country to have respect for people, for principles and constitutional values, procedures and good manners.” He warned that otherwise, Poland risks “isolation.”

It was an unusual speech for a Council president to give in his home country, and one that set a furious government on its effort to unseat Tusk.

An outraged Prime Minister Beata Szydło, in a statement to POLITICO, denounced Tusk as “a politician who openly and actively supports the opposition in his country.”

In the aftermath of the government’s failure to unseat Tusk, Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski even called for “drastically lowering the level of trust toward the EU” by blocking initiatives in an effort to change Polish public opinion about the bloc.

The opposition has seized on that, selling the idea that Kaczyński is mulling taking Poland out of the EU in a "Polexit."

Despite protests from the government that it has no such plans, the charge does hit PiS in a vulnerable place.

That's where the link to Tusk helps the opposition.

Tusk’s main job is to run the Council and deal with the crises buffeting the EU, including Brexit, migration, Greece, Donald Trump and more. But his obvious interest in his home country and his occasionally pointed messages to Warsaw make him a powerful symbol for the 70 percent of Poles who don’t support Law and Justice.

Tusk hasn’t lost a head-to-head fight against Kaczyński in over a decade.

“The presence of Poland in the EU is a fundamental need,” said Marek Migalski, a political scientist and a former PiS MEP who fell out with Kaczyński. “If Poland finds itself on the margins of the EU it endangers Polish needs to be seen as part of the European mainstream. Donald Tusk is a symbol of Europe and of Poland’s success, while PiS will be seen as a symbol of a petty Poland on the periphery.”

Tusk’s status as the Pole with the most powerful political job in his country’s history is gradually overshadowing memories of his 2007-2014 term as prime minister. The final years of his government were marred by scandal and a sense of drift, but now Tusk is back as Kaczyński's toughest rival.

The government is trying to bring Tusk back down to earth by embroiling him in the rough and tumble of domestic politics. Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz has accused Tusk of “treason” over his role in the investigation into the 2010 air crash in Smolensk, Russia, that killed Kaczyński’s twin brother, President Lech Kaczyński, and other Polish dignitaries.

A commission investigating a financial fraud scheme is talking of summoning Tusk to testify.

But barring an unforeseen turn of events, Tusk is again one of Poland’s most popular politicians. He’s the only candidate who looks capable of beating incumbent Andrzej Duda in a presidential election in 2020.

There are two big electoral contests before that, where Tusk can only play a marginal role: elections for the European Parliament in March 2019 and for the Polish parliament later that year.

It’s not even clear that Tusk would want to come back to Poland to run for the largely ceremonial post of president. He'd also have to return to a Civic Platform party dominated by Schetyna, an old friend turned bitter rival.

But that’s far in the future. For now, Tusk has become a symbol of hope for Poland’s beleaguered opposition.

“Tusk’s re-election was a breakthrough — both his supporters and opponents saw that,” said Migalski. “It was the moment that showed someone can defeat Kaczyński, and it showed Poles that they aren’t sentenced to an eternity of PiS.”