Courtesy of The Financial Times, an article on Poland’s big bet on a new airport, project seen as the next big thing in the country’s economic development:

Before it can become central and eastern Europe’s largest transport hub, Poland’s new airport could first test the ability of its feuding politicians to stay the course on a big infrastructure project. 

In late June Prime Minister Donald Tusk approved the Central Communication Port (CPK using its Polish acronym), the plan to build an airport in the heart of Poland near the village of Baranów, alongside a new high-speed rail network linking it to Warsaw 40km away, as well as ?ód? and other more distant cities. The key reason to build the CPK is that Warsaw’s main Chopin airport is almost saturated and too close to the Polish capital to permit significant expansion.

The CPK’s promoters see several other benefits, including transforming the farming area around it into a new business region. On a national scale, after two decades during which Poland outpaced the growth of most other EU nations, the CPK is “the next big thing in Polish economic development”, giving the country a state of the art logistics platform to connect with its main trading partners, says Piotr Arak, chief economist at VeloBank. 

Even if not purpose built as a military base, the CPK should also provide Poland’s armed forces with another location from which to respond to Russian aggression. “Having the CPK is absolutely critical as a deterrent,” says Rajmund Andrzejczak, former chief of the general staff of the Polish armed forces.

Still, the CPK has already been debated for more than a decade and Tusk’s coalition is doing a U-turn on a project he denounced during his successful election campaign last year, when he replaced the rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) party in power.

At the time, Tusk called the CPK a “sick idea” of PiS to promote its ultranationalist agenda and a misspend of public money. After taking office in December, one of the Tusk government’s first decisions was to order a full audit of PiS’s draft plan.

However, checking the numbers proved surprisingly problematic. No independent firm tendered for a financial audit that also meant stepping into a political minefield. This left the government to do its own review.

Tusk’s administration now promises to build a bit slower but a bit better than PiS. The airport’s projected capacity has been cut to 34mn passengers a year from the 40mn targeted by PiS, while the CPK budget was slashed to 131bn zlotys (€30.7bn) from 155bn zlotys. The airport should open in 2032 — four years behind the original PiS schedule. 

But while the new airport’s benefits for Poland might appear compelling, there are still reasons to worry about its take-off. First, Tusk’s government is dithering over whether to retain the foreign consortium that PiS selected to help build the CPK last October, which comprises French construction company Vinci and Australia’s IFM Global Infrastructure Fund — the decision was announced only 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 alone — have their advantages as well as drawbacks”.

Since joining the EU in 2004, Poland has built some of Europe’s most modern motorways. Its rail and airport investment record is more patchy, however. A previous Tusk government bought Alstom’s Pendolino fast-trains a decade ago. But these trains continue to travel below their top speeds on most of the network because Poland has since struggled to upgrade its signalling and track infrastructure.

About 100km from Warsaw, Radom’s near-dormant airport also offers a cautionary tale. After Radom’s airport went bankrupt in 2018, PiS decided that building a new terminal and runway could revive the site. They were inaugurated last year, but only between one and three planes are now landing each day in reconstructed Radom.

Still, the government hopes the CPK will turn state airline LOT into a long-haul competitor for Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines, both of which now dwarf LOT. The Polish carrier wants to increase its fleet to not less than 100 by 2026 from around 80 now. But Polish aviation journalist Dominik Sipinski notes that by the time the CPK opens, the new airport may prove too big and arrive too late for the Polish airline to catch up with rivals.

Until then, the CPK will need to survive Poland’s divisive politics. There will be at least two more national elections before 2032, which gives time for whoever is in office to make more changes before cutting the inauguration ribbon.