Poland's new president is bad news for Europe
A bitterly divided country will be hamstrung just when Europe needs it most
History of the Present (week ending Monday 2 June 2025)
Shortly after 9 PM Central European Time on Sunday 1 June, I watched on Polish television as the liberal, internationalist, pro-European candidate for president, Rafał Trzaskowski, declared to a delighted crowd of supporters that he had won the election and that with him 'all Poland' had triumphed. As the night went by, it turned out this was not to be. At about 8:30 AM CET on Monday 2 June, I watched on the same channel as the electoral commission officially declared that the anti-liberal, nationalist, Eurosceptic candidate, Karol Nawrocki, had won by 50.89% to 49.11%.
Another of those 51:49 results that seem to be characteristic of the politics of our time, this is very bad news for Poland and Europe. After a sigh of relief rose from liberal Europe following the second-round result of the presidential election in Romania, we now hear a shout of joy from the anti-liberal Europe that is energetically supported by the MAGA president and movement in the USA.
Nawrocki is a 42-year-old nationalist historian and historical propagandist with virtually no international experience and an extremely dubious past as a young man (violent football hooliganism, strong connections with gangsters on the Baltic coast, an unsavoury story about more or less tricking an old man into handing over his council flat, alleged involvement in pimping prostitutes to guests at the hotel he was working at as a bouncer). He lacks, to put it mildly, the professional qualifications and personal qualities one would hope to see in the head of state of an important European country at a crucial turning point in European history.
More consequential, however, is the fact that he is totally and aggressively signed up to the agenda of the Law and Justice (PiS) party of Jarosław Kaczyński, the political force that attempted state capture in Poland - on the model pioneered by Viktor Orbán in Hungary - over eight years after 2015, until it lost a knife-edge parliamentary election on 15 October 2023. (Read my account of that happy day here.) Given the veto powers of the president, this means that the current liberal coalition government of Donald Tusk – Kaczyński's bitter enemy and leader of the other largest party, Civic Platform (PO) - will find it extremely difficult to complete the restoration of the rule of law (for example, a properly appointed constitutional court) and push through other reforms, such as a modest liberalisation of the country's extremely restrictive abortion law.
More broadly, it means that the bitter, poisonous shouting match between these two parties, and the media and parts of society that support them – think today's USA only even more hysterical – will continue unabated until the next parliamentary election. This is not due until autumn 2027, although the presidential power to veto the budget might just give Nawrocki the chance to try to force an early election. Every single move in Polish politics, from both the government and the president, will now be about positioning for that election. The most bad-tempered French ‘cohabitation’ of president and prime minister will look like a miracle of harmony by comparison. As in the US, this hyperpolarisation both reflects a divided country and itself deepens those divisions.
Many younger Poles are fed up to the back teeth with the hyperpolarised political 'duopoly' of PO and PiS – which they regard rather as teenagers might look at constantly feuding parents – but they are going to have to endure it for the foreseeable future. In the first round of the presidential election last month, their votes went disproportionately to parties of the hard right or hard left. In the second round, slightly more of them supported Nawrocki than Trzaskowski (53%: 47% of 18-29 year-olds). Who knows where they'll go next time.
For Europe, this result means that one of its key countries, especially when it comes to European defence and facing the threat from Russia, will be a weaker, less united, less certain partner – both in the EU and in the 'coalition of the willing' of Germany, France, Poland (aka the 'Weimar triangle') and Britain that is now crucial to the future of Ukraine. (In the context of an altogether worrying reemergence of Polish-Ukrainian tensions, Nawrocki has declared himself opposed to NATO membership for Ukraine.)
I will write in more detail about all this after a planned trip to Poland later this month. At this moment, I’m again filled with foreboding for a country whose extraordinary transformation - overwhelmingly for the better - I have followed for almost a half-century, ever since that first visit in 1979.
Poland is just one example of how finely balanced in today's Europe are the forces of integration and disintegration, liberalism and anti-liberalism, internationalism and nationalism. Which side prevails in this larger European contest we may only know at the end of the decade.
Last night, as it became clear that there was a very real possibility that Trzaskowski was going to lose, I could no longer concentrate on my reading because all I could think about were Giedroyc and Mieroszewski. Mon dieu, they worked for years to plan everything down to the last detail so that when the moment arrived they could rush to Poland and move quickly to join NATO and later, the EU. What they accomplished really was a miracle. As I was reading about that story several months ago in Prof. Snyder's "The Reconstruction of Nations," it seemed almost unbelievable to me that what they and Solidarity did could even work. I remember that I had to remind myself to breathe. I marveled at the way they addressed every problem that came their way with delicacy and professionalism. Helmut Kohl: "We're giving up our imperialism, and so must you." Lithuania: "No, we really mean it. Vilnius is yours, not Poland's." Their goal was integration after empire, that is, Europe. What just happened breaks my heart.
Democracy is so difficult. I often wonder if it is too fragile to be left to the voters, so easily led to believe things which are totally untrue, fed dreams that are impossible to achieve, and, in most cases, as with Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss in the UK, quite unable to believe that their decision led to any harm.