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Before Poland’s new airport can become the largest transport hub in Central and Eastern Europe, it could first test the ability of feuding politicians to stay on course on a major infrastructure project.
At the end of June, Prime Minister Donald Tusk approved the Central Communications Port (CPK, as the Polish acronym goes), the plan to build an airport in the heart of Poland, near the village of Baranów. A new high-speed rail network will also be built, connecting the airport with Warsaw, 40 km away, as well as with Lodz and other cities further away. The main reason for building the CPK is that Warsaw’s main Chopin Airport is almost at capacity and is too close to the Polish capital to allow for any significant expansion.
The initiators of the CPK see other benefits as well, including the transformation of the surrounding agricultural areas into a new economic region. At the national level, after two decades in which Poland grew faster than most other EU countries, the CPK is “the next big breakthrough in Polish economic development” as it provides the country with a state-of-the-art logistics platform to connect with its key trading partners, says Piotr Arak, chief economist at VeloBank.
Even if the CPK is not built as a military base, it should provide Poland’s armed forces with another location from which to respond to Russian aggression. “The CPK is absolutely crucial as a deterrent,” says Rajmund Andrzejczak, former Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces.
Yet the CPK has been debated for more than a decade, and Tusk’s coalition is reversing a plan he himself condemned during his successful election campaign last year to bring the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party to power.
At the time, Tusk called the CPK a “sick idea” of PiS to promote its ultra-nationalist agenda and a waste of public money. After taking office in December, one of the first decisions of the Tusk government was to order a full review of the PiS draft plan.
However, verifying the figures proved surprisingly problematic. No independent company offered to audit the financials, which also created a political minefield. The government was left with no choice but to conduct its own audit.
Tusk’s government now promises to build the airport a little slower but better than PiS. The airport’s planned capacity has been reduced from the 40 million passengers targeted by PiS to 34 million passengers per year, while the CPK’s budget has been cut from 155 billion zloty to 131 billion zloty (30.7 billion euros). The airport is scheduled to open in 2032 – four years later than PiS’s original schedule.
But while the benefits of the new airport for Poland seem compelling, there are still concerns about whether it will get off the ground at all. First, Tusk’s government is wavering over whether to keep the foreign consortium that PiS chose last October to build the CPK, consisting of French construction company Vinci and Australia’s IFM Global Infrastructure Fund. The decision was only announced after PiS lost the elections to Tusk’s coalition. Poland’s infrastructure ministry now says that “both scenarios – having a foreign partner in such a venture or going it alone – have their advantages and disadvantages.”
Since joining the EU in 2004, Poland has built some of Europe’s most modern motorways, but its track record of investment in rail and airports is patchier. A previous Tusk government bought Alstom’s Pendolino high-speed trains a decade ago, but these trains continue to run at lower speeds on most of the network because Poland has struggled to modernise its signalling and track infrastructure since then.
About 100 kilometers from Warsaw, the nearly defunct Radom Airport also offers a cautionary tale. After Radom Airport went bankrupt in 2018, PiS decided that building a new terminal and runway could revitalize the site. They were inaugurated last year, but now only one to three planes a day land at the rebuilt Radom.
Nevertheless, the government hopes that the CPK will make state-owned airline LOT a long-haul competitor to Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines, both of which currently overshadow LOT. The Polish airline wants to increase its fleet from the current 80 aircraft to at least 100 by 2026. However, Polish aviation journalist Dominik Sipinski points out that when the CPK opens, the new airport may prove too big and come too late for the Polish airline to catch up with its competitors.
Until then, the CPK must survive Poland’s divisive politics. There will be at least two more national elections between now and 2032, giving the incumbent time to make further changes before the ribbon-cutting.
