“Civilisation won! Civilisation won!” shrieked a supporter at an election night gathering in Warsaw. As I had left my hotel for the party, Rafał Trzaskowski, a centrist europhile and the mayor of Warsaw, seemed poised to win in what had been portrayed as the most consequential presidential contest in Poland’s recent history. Yet, by the time I arrived at the reception — a mere five-minute drive — the tide had turned. Karol Nawrocki, the conservative contender, had surged ahead. By one in the morning on Monday, an election official had confirmed that almost 99% of ballots had been counted. Nawrocki led by approximately 400,000 votes, a margin that, while not insurmountable, indicated a decisive shift. The conservative historian was on course to become Poland’s next president.
The Polish presidency, though largely ceremonial, matters because it is endowed with the power to paralyse the government. But yesterday’s result is more than a domestic triumph for Nawrocki and the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party that backed him; it has profound implications for Europe and the transatlantic alliance. To understand its significance, consider Poland’s extraordinary transformation over the past 25 years. It is arguably the most successful post-Cold War story in Europe. Just over two decades ago, when Poland joined the EU, it was a grim place that belched out people. Warsaw was a drab city dominated by a Stalinist tower. Today, Poland’s GDP is approaching $1 trillion. The living standards of its people are on a par (at least on paper) with Japan’s. Its armed forces are larger than the armies of Britain or France. Central Warsaw is clustered with skyscrapers. Poles who emigrated abroad in search of opportunity are returning home.
Those Poles who appreciate that so much of this would have been inconceivable without the EU regard the nationalist Nawrocki as a mortal threat to their country’s democratic progress and integration into the European project. When PiS was last in government, between 2015 and 2023, it tightened Poland’s already restrictive abortion laws, stacked the constitutional tribunal with loyal judges, set the country on a course of “legal exit” from Europe, and was sanctioned by Brussels. PiS was defeated in the parliamentary elections of 2023, when an ideologically kaleidoscopic coalition led by Civic Platform formed the government. That government has since been at loggerheads with the incumbent president of Poland, Andrzej Duda of PiS. A Trzaskowski victory would have cleared the way for Civic Platform to push through its agenda.
“The new president is the beneficiary of a deepening resentment among those Poles.”
Nawrocki, inevitably, has been painted by European media as an existential danger, the figurehead of a nationalist wave sweeping the continent. These concerns are not entirely baseless — Donald Trump blessed Nawrocki in the Oval Office in early May; his Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, travelled to Poland and endorsed him — but they are perhaps exaggerated. Nawrocki is not a fascist, nor is he an aberration. He is a product of a specific moment in Polish politics, which are riven by competing ideas of sovereignty and identity. Lord Lugard, the Governor-General of Nigeria from 1914 to 1919, once said of his restive subjects that “their very discontent is a measure of their progress”. And so it seems with Poland. Its success has bred the climate for the re-emergence of atavistic impulses — religious, cultural — that had been suppressed in its people’s pursuit of prosperity. Poles, possessing an economy that is the envy of the continent, are now squabbling over what it means to be Polish and European, Christian and modern.
The presidential race has exposed the depth of division over these questions. The loser, Trzaskowski, is a polished career politician. A member of the Civic Platform party and an Oxford alumnus, he is liberal, competent, fluent in English, and admired in Brussels. As Warsaw’s mayor, he marched in Pride parades and ordered the removal of crosses from government buildings — a choice that, while earning him the adulation of metropolitan Poles, infuriated conservatives who see their civilisational history as being inextricably bound with the Catholic Church. Their champion is Nawrocki. He was born into extreme poverty in the port city of Gdańsk. Ports, particularly in impoverished places, tend to become familiar with organised crime, and Nawrocki was exposed to this world at an early age. He sought release in athletics, became a boxer, and occasionally participated in football brawls. Working as a security guard at a hotel, he is alleged to have procured prostitutes for guests. This is not the curriculum vitae of a defender of Christian values.
But the new president is the beneficiary of a deepening resentment among those Poles who — convinced that their social values are being eroded and their sovereignty endangered by liberal elites pandering to Brussels — are willing to trade character for belligerence. This sentiment is particularly acute in places such as Radom. An hour’s train ride from Warsaw, Radom was once a proud centre of Polish political life. It was the site of the adoption of the 1505 constitution, the publication of the first codified laws, and the massive protests of 1976 against the communist government. Today, Radom is an object of mockery in the cities, “a national joke”, as one filmmaker in Warsaw put it to me. Its people are dismissed as gauche and gaudy.
Such snobbery reveals more than it conceals. Yes, compared to Warsaw or Kraków, Radom is a backwater. Its buildings are decaying, and despite the presence of a university and an airport, an outsider can feel overwhelmed by ennui. But the locals feel differently. The owner of a café and bar there told me that nowhere else in Poland or Europe did she feel the same sense of community. What galls its people, then, is the knowledge that so many of their own compatriots view them as inferior beings when they see themselves as a repository of so much that is worth preserving about their country. “A lot of Poles in the cities want to be British, French, or Italian,” one Radom resident told me. “We are proud to be Polish.” He was for Nawrocki. Trzaskowski laboured away in the final days of the campaign to court the nationalist vote. Rather than win them over, his flip-flopping only served to alienate his own voters.
Nawrocki profited too from a growing frustration with Ukraine in a nation that is still intensely hostile to Moscow. Since Russia’s invasion of 2022, Poland has granted a warm welcome to more than a million Ukrainian refugees. It has given them the same privileges as Polish nationals. Three years on, there is a tincture of outrage among Poles. As one Warsaw banker complained:“Some of them drive Lamborghinis, but what are they contributing to Poland?”
Emphatically not pro-Russian, Nawrocki is, in fact, on a list of wanted men in Russia for ordering the demolition of monuments to the Red Army in Poland. But his refusal to endorse Kyiv’s admission into Nato — a departure from PiS’s position — and his pledge not to send Polish soldiers to fight in Ukraine have worked to his advantage. “One million Ukrainian men have fled Ukraine,” a student at Warsaw University told me. “Why should we go and fight for them?”
Nawrocki’s Euroscepticism, and his alignment with US interests over EU integration, are bound to impair relations with Brussels, Berlin, and Paris. His election, reinvigorating the MAGA movement following the demoralising defeat of Trumpist candidates in Romania, Australia, and Canada, will also energise populist movements on the continent. And his cautious posture towards Ukraine could strain Nato’s eastern flank and push more responsibility onto Western European states, though Poland’s Nato and EU commitments should limit the extent of any drastic shift.
But at home, Nawrocki’s election ensures that PiS retains its stranglehold on Poland’s governance. The suggestion that it paves the way for a broader PiS victory in the next general election does ignore, though, the extent to which the duopoly of PiS and Civic Platform — the two default parties of government — has disillusioned and pushed many young Poles to the extremes. In the first round of the presidential poll, fewer than 25% of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 backed either Nawrocki or Trzaskowski. This is a steep decline from the presidential election of 2020, when almost 45% of that demographic cast their ballots for the mainstream candidates. According to one recent study, young Poles express the deepest connection to Poland, but 80% of them feel that the government is preoccupied with the concerns of the elderly at the expense of the youth.
Nawrocki’s great luck as he takes office, though, is the unwieldy nature of the government itself. Poland’s ruling coalition is a fragile alliance of social democrats, social conservatives, economic and social liberals, and centrists. He will continue the sport of obstructing government legislation or deferring its passage indefinitely by referring it to the constitutional court.
All of this means Donald Tusk’s reform programme — particularly his efforts to overhaul the judiciary — is effectively dead. His government, in power for two years, is increasingly unpopular: a recent poll by CBOS shows that just over 30% of the electorate approve of it. During the campaign, Tusk proved a liability more than an asset. For more than two decades, Tusk has been a domineering presence in the Polish political scene. Addressing the nation on Monday evening, he put on a defiant performance, promising not to “take a single step back” and calling for a vote of confidence in his government. Far from calming his critics, the call for a vote has angered his coalition partners. He has sufficient numbers in parliament to sail through, but the only way out of the gridlock for Poland is a reconciliation of sorts between Tusk and Nawrocki — or a collapse of Tusks’s government. Either way, what lies ahead for Poland is a period of political chaos. Saving civilisation doesn’t come cheap.
