Morning Brief, Monday 12 October

Donald Tusk convened an emergency Sunday meeting after two school attacks, one fatal, and a wave of knife and machete scares pushed Polish parents into a grim weekend routine. The government said 10,000 officers were guarding school safety, with checks under way inside schools and nearby streets, after police had already inspected nearly 35,000 facilities, recorded 172 incidents and detained 76 people by early Saturday.

Tusk framed the danger less as a disciplined plot than as fast-moving imitation, which makes it harder to deter and easier to spread. He pointed to online activity and young people searching for violent Second World War-era content, then warned that officials were not chasing one large organised group.

Police patrols will return from Monday on foot and by car, enter school grounds and speak directly with staff and management until further notice. That buys reassurance, but it also risks making ordinary schools feel like semi-secured public buildings. The practical test is whether visible officers calm children faster than online rumours can frighten them.

Friedrich Merz entered the CDU presidium retreat under pressure from an awkward question: did members of his party secretly help elect an AfD politician as president of the Saxony-Anhalt Landtag? Tobias Rausch won more votes than expected in the 83-member chamber, while the CDU’s own explanations about abstentions and no votes failed to line up cleanly. The ballot was secret, which protects the voters but also lets suspicion eat the room.

Merz tried to slow the rush to judgment and floated the possibility that other parties had staged the embarrassment. The remark split his party, since loyalists liked the counterpunch while critics saw a chairman reaching for conspiracy rather than command.

The timing hurts. The CDU recently failed to clear the 5% threshold in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, suffered heavy losses in Saxony-Anhalt and polls below 20% nationally, down from 28.5% at the 2025 federal election. The weekend agenda reaches beyond one ballot, touching pensions, health, living costs, migration and the firewall toward both the AfD and the Left. His retreat begins not with a clean strategy memo, but with a locked ballot box and a party asking who inside it told the truth.

Poland’s school-security scare quickly spilled into a second argument, over what children see, share and imitate on their phones. Education Minister Barbara Nowacka asked teachers to talk with pupils in the coming days about danger, crisis situations and mental health, after pupils organised online and some brought dangerous objects to school on the day families had begun calling Black Friday.

The harder conversation sits with parents as much as schools. Journalist Sławomir Sierakowski called for sharp limits on children’s devices and argued that seven- and eight-year-olds should not automatically have phones. That is a blunt prescription, but the panic has given phone restrictions a sharper political edge because police can search bags while algorithms keep filling heads.

The phone is not the knife, but Poland has just been reminded that a screen can move fear faster than any patrol car.