In 2017, the Polish government set out to build one of the largest airports in Europe on the outskirts of Warsaw. The project, known as the Central Communication Port, or CPK, was meant to combine a new international airport with a high speed railway network, connecting the Polish capital and the country’s peripheral regions. With the austerity of the communist era fading from memory, the CPK has come to symbolise the rapid development of Poland, a nation which has risen from political obscurity to become the EU’s sixth largest economy and one of Nato’s strongest military powers. Following last year’s parliamentary elections, and the subsequent change of government, conflicting visions for Poland’s future have brought the entire project to a standstill.
On 29 April, Maciej Lasek, a liberal politician who oversees the CPK on behalf of the government, announced a new investment in Warsaw’s Chopin airport worth 2.4 billion złoty (£500 million). The announcement coincided with a decision to postpone the opening of CPK from 2028 to 2035 at the earliest. Many believe that the announcement is in fact a veiled attempt to smother the project.
The airport represents a chance to emerge from the long shadows cast by Poland’s powerful neighbours
There is no doubt that many within Poland’s ruling party, Civic Platform (PO), are overtly hostile to the CPK. During the parliamentary campaign, Donald Tusk, now prime minister, had called the 42 billion złoty project a ‘sick idea’, and attributed its very existence to megalomania on the part of the previous, right-wing government. Tusk had made the vague promise to review the CPK during his first 100 days in office, but, apart from replacing the management board and announcing a series of audits, remarkably little was said about its future until the postponement was announced.
The Law and Justice party (PiS), which championed the CPK during its eight years in office from 2015 to 2023, had often associated the CPK with their conservative, nationalistic vision for Poland. But support for the CPK among Poles is not limited to PiS voters. Earlier this year, Lasek’s predecessor, Marcin Horala, a PiS MP, established ‘Yes for Growth’, a parliamentary group advocating for public investment in the CPK, nuclear energy, and an expansion of Polish marine ports. The group’s membership spans the political spectrum, including MPs from PiS, the nationalist party Konfederacja, and the left-wing Lewica, which sits in coalition with Tusk’s government. All of them have expressed frustration with the government’s infrastructure policies. Paulina Matysiak, a Lewica MP, told me that the issue of public infrastructure in Poland cannot be divided between left and right. ‘The development of our country should be the priority. CPK guarantees that in two ways. First, by offering Polish citizens better public transport, and secondly, by boosting the Polish economy’.
There are some in Poland who believe that the delay of CPK is related to back-room deals made between the Polish and German governments; the project would threaten Germany’s dominance in the European air-travel market. Krzysztof Bosak, the leader of Konfederacja, has gone as far as accusing Tusk’s government of colluding with Germany over the delay of CPK during a televised debate with members of the ruling party. ‘Behind the political scenes, they say that your government has reached an agreement with the Germans so as not to compete with them,’ Bosak said.
Last Saturday, Szymon Holownia, the leader of the centrist party Poland 2050, publicly endorsed the CPK. Holownia is a prominent figure in Tusk’s coalition, and having him on board is a major victory for supporters of the project. Holownia says that he wants to build the airport by the end of the decade, along with its high-speed rail component. ‘We will convince our partners in the coalition to do this, because it is good for Poland,’ he wrote in a public statement. ‘There can be no development of Poland without modern infrastructure.’
Since the change in government, the CPK has grown increasingly popular among the wider public. According to a recent poll commissioned by the newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Poles are overwhelmingly in favour of the CPK. Fifty-eight per cent of respondents said that they supported public investment in the project, while a mere 23 per cent were against. A further 19 per cent of those surveyed said that they were undecided.
No matter how much PiS sought to claim ownership of the CPK, it was never really theirs to begin with. There’s been talk of building an international airport in central Poland as far back as the 1970s, during communist times. In 2003, the first preliminary studies concerning a possible location for the future airport were written, and in 2009, the consulting firm PwC was hired to determine the economic viability of the airport. Their final report was submitted to the Polish government in 2011, at the cost of £2.2 million. The report established the site of the project in Baranow, a farming village 25 miles south-west of Warsaw. In 2012, during Tusk’s first premiership, the then infrastructure minister Slawomir Nowak scrapped the project, citing budgetary constraints and a lack of demand for air travel. At the time, he believed that it wouldn’t be necessary for another 20 to 30 years. Subsequent events have proven him wrong.
Poland’s passenger volumes have steadily increased while the limitations of Poland’s existing infrastructure are increasingly apparent. The PiS government’s decision in 2017 to build the CPK, with its capacity for 40 million annual passengers, was largely a result of pressure from Lot Polish Airlines, the national carrier, which was struggling to find avenues of growth through Poland’s existing airport infrastructure. In 2019, Lot established a secondary hub in Budapest. ‘We were acutely aware of the fact that Chopin airport will not enable us to grow, and if you don’t have any possibility to grow in your home market, the best thing you can do is to get into a market where you do have the ability to grow,’ says Rafal Milczarski, who served as Lot’s CEO from 2016 to 2022.
Chopin airport, Poland’s largest, ranks only 31st in Europe in terms of annual passengers, behind the leading airports of smaller countries like Denmark and Austria, which have a fraction of Poland’s population. It has two intersecting runways, and, thanks to the dense urbanisation of the surrounding area, lacks the ability to expand much beyond its current capacity of approximately 20 million passengers per year. Lasek’s proposal to further expand Chopin’s capacity by 50 per cent begs the question: how?
Some say that Modlin airport, which serves the budget carrier Ryanair, could also be expanded to relieve the constraints at Chopin. But any attempt to establish a dual-airport system between Chopin and Modlin would be a logistical nightmare. It would eliminate the competitive advantages for international travellers offered by the CPK. Many passengers from abroad would have to obtain a Schengen visa in order to transfer between the two airports, complicating the journey to the point of impracticality. Today, the inhabitants of central and eastern Europe must travel through places like Frankfurt, Munich and Amsterdam in order to reach their overseas destinations. Lacking competition in the region, the CPK could become the preferred hub for as many as 180 million people living in the eastern half of the EU.
Poland has become the centre of gravity of Nato’s eastern flank, a role similar to the one played by West Germany during the Cold War. The CPK was planned with this role in mind, as a dual purpose site capable of supporting a major Nato airlift in the event of a major conflict. As tensions between Nato and Russia continue to escalate, Poland’s overall military readiness has come into question. Rzeszow’s sleepy Jasionka airport, which had served just a handful of budget airlines before the war, now receives the majority of air cargo en route to Ukraine. The CPK would resolve these pressures by providing the Poles with an airfield capable of handling much higher volumes of military aircraft, while quickly dispatching soldiers and equipment along newly built rail links.
Poland’s infrastructure has been hampered by numerous historical factors. Partitioned between the German, Austrian and Russian empires until 1918, much of the early road and railway infrastructure was designed to serve the imperial metropoles rather than to bolster ties between the Polish cities. These problems have not entirely gone away. ‘Right now, we are 106 years after the partitions, and we still haven’t consolidated the Polish railway system, and it still reflects the interests of our partitioners and not the interests of Poland,’ Milczarski told me.
For many Poles, the CPK presents an opportunity to rectify these historical shortcomings and propel the country into a new era of economic growth. But it also represents a chance to emerge from the long shadows cast by Poland’s powerful neighbours. German hubs and airlines continue to dwarf their Polish competitors, while a significant portion of Poland’s air cargo passes through Germany en route to overseas markets. For many Poles, the CPK is not just an investment in public infrastructure, but a point of national pride; a tool with which Poland can project its growing economic and political power in Europe and across the world. ‘The young generation of Poles demands ambition from the government and a gripping vision of what this country may look like in 10 or 20 years’, says Maciej Wilk, a Polish airline executive who leads ‘Yes for CPK’, a public association that campaigns in favour of the project. ‘We are not interested in hot tap water as the top of our aspirations.’
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