European Council President Donald Tusk | Ben Stansall - WPA Pool /Getty Images Forum Polish clash: Should Tusk stay or go The ruling party calculates whether to back the Pole for a second term as European Council president.

WARSAW — Most countries would be thrilled that a native son is the head of a powerful institution like the European Council and try to keep him there as long as possible. Not Poland.

The prospect of another two-and-a-half-year term for Donald Tusk as Council president is creating a tricky political problem for the government in Warsaw.

Tusk is a bitter enemy of the current Law and Justice party (PiS) currently running Poland, and it has to make a calculation whether its interests are better served by Tusk spending a few more years in Brussels, or if it makes more sense to bring him home early. Warsaw has to figure out if it will officially back Tusk for another term next spring.

Because Tusk is only the second person to hold the post of president, there isn’t much of a tradition to fall back on. The head of the EU’s rotating presidency — in Tusk’s case Malta, which holds the post in the first half of next year — is supposed to sound out the rest of the bloc on who should be nominated.

The president is then chosen by a qualified majority, although in reality it takes a consensus among all 28 member countries to get the nod.

Tusk gets little love from home

Normally, a candidate is first backed by their home country. In Tusk’s case that’s up in the air.

“I didn’t have the backing of PiS, and probably in the future I won’t have the backing of PiS on any issue,” Tusk said recently when asked if he could count on the ruling party’s support. “I can live with that.”

Leading Law and Justice politicians have made their feelings about Tusk pretty clear.

Opinion polls in Poland show that Tusk is negatively viewed by 56 percent of those surveyed while 32 percent see him positively.

Stanisław Karczewski, speaker of the senate, recently called Tusk a “traitor,” arguing he bore some of the responsibility for the 2010 airplane crash that killed President Lech Kaczyński — twin brother of PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński — and other senior officials.

All evidence shows that the crash was a tragic accident, but it has become an article of faith among the core electorate of PiS that the disaster was a plot, possibly conceived by Tusk in cahoots with Russian President Vladimir Putin. A milder version of the theory holds that Tusk is to blame because the flight to the Russian city of Smolensk was poorly organized and he was prime minister at the time.

Jarosław Kaczyński has accused Tusk of trying to eliminate the memory of his brother and of the air disaster. “It did not succeed. Forgiveness is needed, but only after pleading guilty and imposing the appropriate punishment," he said earlier this month at a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the crash.

Warsaw weighs its options

Law and Justice is weighing two scenarios.

The first is for the government to deny Tusk a second term. He then returns to Warsaw in 2017, where he could unite fractured opposition parties that have been very ineffective in trying to block PiS.

The second scenario assumes Tusk remains in Brussels for a second term until late 2019. He would return to Poland just ahead of presidential elections set for the spring of 2020. He’d be a potential candidate against the PiS-backed incumbent Andrzej Duda, whose support is steadily eroding.

Tusk has had some friction in his relations with Germany, backing a tougher line against asylum seekers than Merkel.

Duda is closely identified with PiS and is seen as following Kaczyński’s commands — especially in the divisive crisis over the country's top constitutional court. If the current atmosphere persists for several more years, center and center-left voters could turn completely away from Duda.

That could help Tusk if he decides to run. Coming back to Poland after five years in one of Europe's highest profile jobs and standing against an unpopular president tied to a controversial ruling party could hand Tusk the presidency.

The dilemma for PiS is which scenario is better for the party.

Should he stay or should he go

An April opinion poll by the Adriana organization found that 51 percent of Poles want the government to back Tusk for another term as Council president, while 33 were against. That means a decision not to support Tusk would be opposed by a majority of society, but not by PiS’s core electorate.

However, there is a calculation that if Tusk jumps back into national politics next year, not long after quitting as prime minister in 2014, he may not be effective. Memories of his eight years in power are still fresh, and many Poles have mixed feelings about the way his Civic Platform party governed.

Opinion polls show that Tusk is negatively viewed by 56 percent of those surveyed while 32 percent see him positively.

Leaving him in Brussels may work to Tusk's advantage.

There’s an example of that dynamic in Poland’s recent political past. Jerzy Buzek left office in 2001 after a four-year term as prime minister, and at that time was negatively viewed by many Poles. A long stint in Brussels, where he served for a time as president of the European Parliament, has dramatically changed that perception, and he is now one of Poland’s most respected politicians.

The same dynamic may apply to Tusk, so PiS is being very careful.

If the government doesn't support a Pole for such a senior post it would set a ground-breaking precedent. For that reason Zbigniew Kuźmiuk, a PiS MEP, suggested that Prime Minister Beata Szydło is monitoring how Tusk is doing his job, and will decide to back him if he first gets the support of France and Germany.

That’s an effort to minimize any political damage for PiS and to shift responsibility from Warsaw to Paris and Berlin. If Tusk gets a second term, PiS could tell its voters that the blame lies with Angela Merkel, and he could be portrayed inside Poland as a puppet of the German chancellor.

If, however, he doesn’t continue as Council head, then he could be tarred with the responsibility for not doing well enough at his post to gain the support of France and Germany.

The view from the rest of the EU

While Warsaw tries to figure out what to do with Tusk, there are also calculations taking place in Brussels and other European capitals.

Tusk has had some friction in his relations with Germany, backing a tougher line against asylum seekers than Merkel.

There’s also the internal politics of the EU.

By 2017, Martin Schulz, a Socialist, will no longer be head of the European Parliament — which could put all of the bloc’s top offices in the hands of the European People’s Party, to which both Tusk and Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker belong. Normally, that would imply that a Socialist should get Tusk’s job, but the EU may be content to leave him in place at a time when it is dealing with a host of crises.

One of those crises is the EU’s rule of law procedure launched in January against Poland out of worry that the new government is violating the bloc’s democratic norms. The procedure won’t be concluded with Poland losing its Council voting rights because Hungary has promised to block such a step.

However, Europe’s elites may want to poke PiS in the eye and keep Tusk around for a second term.

And that means Tusk may be in for a second term as Council president not because of Warsaw but in spite of it.

Maliszewski is a political scientist at the University of Warsaw.