A shocking upset hands Poland’s presidency to a far-right populist with a scandal-ridden past and extremist allies.
It was the strangest electoral campaign in modern Polish history, with an obviously qualified candidate losing by a sliver to a man who had no business being on the ballot. Rafał Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, speaks five languages and has served as a government minister and a member of the European Parliament, whereas Karol Nawrocki, the head of the Institute of National Remembrance, was previously unknown.
Worse, reporting throughout the campaign revealed shocking facts about Nawrocki’s past. A violent former football hooligan and a friend of people convicted for serious crimes, his candidacy was conjured out of thin air by Jarosław Kaczyński, the longtime leader of the illiberal, populist former governing party, Law and Justice (PiS). Nawrocki has been accused of operating as a pimp at the Grand Hotel in Sopot two decades ago, and of extorting an apartment from a disabled elderly man. Are these the only skeletons in his closet? The answer hardly matters to Poland’s far-right voters. Like Donald Trump’s supporters, there is no level of criminality that would turn them against their tribe’s totem.
While exit polls on election night showed Trzaskowski in the lead (50.30% to 49.70%), the final results delivered a victory for Nawrocki (50.9% to 49.1%). Not for the first time, Poland has become a global laughingstock. We can fight wars and rise up against dictatorships – as Solidarity did in overthrowing communism – but apparently we are incapable of sustaining normal, serious governance. Whatever we build, we immediately set out to destroy.
Poles seem to have forgotten that their country once disappeared from the map of Europe; that their national security depends on competent, responsible government. Despite a revanchist Russia waging war on Ukraine next door, they have opted for feckless fanaticism yet again. For the next five years, the presidency will be controlled by populist right-wing forces sympathetic to friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin such as Viktor Orbán.
Moreover, PiS is not the only right-wing party to have had a good election. In the first round, Sławomir Mentzen of the far-right, nationalist, anti-Ukrainian Confederation won almost 15% of the vote, and the openly anti-Semitic Grzegorz Braun won over 6%.
Poland’s defeated democratic elites will need to reflect on these disturbingly strong performances. While the outgoing president, Andrzej Duda, was mostly a comical figure – a puppet dangling from Kaczyński’s strings – Nawrocki could be much more brutal and ruthless. And the threat that he poses will be magnified, because he will have the full-throated support of US President Donald Trump’s administration (which already interfered in the election by having Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem endorse him during a recent stop in Poland).
Thus, Nawrocki’s victory can be expected to sow instability beyond Poland’s borders. Polish-Ukrainian relations will undoubtedly be harmed. Nawrocki has openly declared that he would not agree to Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the European Union (echoing Putin’s own wishes), and he is known to have made viciously anti-Ukrainian statements in public and in private. Even more ominously, while the government oversees defense and foreign policy in peacetime, the president becomes the commander-in-chief of the armed forces during wartime.
How did Nawrocki win? One explanation is that such an extreme accumulation of scandals during the campaign had a Trump-like boomerang effect, creating the impression that the candidate was being attacked unfairly. At the same time, Trzaskowski’s campaign lacked a positive message, since it focused so much on exposing Nawrocki’s dark past. At Trzaskowski’s request, Poland’s liberal prime minister, Donald Tusk, stayed out of the campaign almost until the very end. Only in the final two weeks did he come out to urge Poles to open their eyes.
Perhaps the grimmest augury is that Poles under 40 opted for Nawrocki’s republic of xenophobes over Trzaskowski’s “modern Poland” (anti-establishment sentiment was decisive). What should Tusk do now? Since calling for a vote of confidence to confirm his mandate may lead to more chaos, he and his four-party coalition are likely to stay put until the end of this parliamentary term. In the meantime, they will need to develop a strategy for beating PiS and the Confederation in the 2027 parliamentary election.
In practice, Tusk’s government will be largely confined to an administrative role until then. Any more serious reforms will be nonstarters, because Nawrocki, like Duda, will simply veto whatever the Sejm passes. While the government still controls most of the levers of power, all the institutions that PiS dismantled between 2015 and 2023 will remain unrepaired.
Fortunately, because these institutions have been so discredited, they will remain marginal, which ironically broadens the Tusk government’s room for maneuver. The liberal parliamentary majority is not as helpless as it may seem. Tusk still has the greatest say in governing the country, and he can still position his coalition for success with voters.
It won’t be smooth sailing for Nawrocki. Narrowly defeating Trzaskowski was one thing; facing off against a politician as experienced as Tusk is quite another matter. For now, Nawrocki will be subordinate to the unpopular Kaczyński, because he will need PiS support if he hopes to be re-elected. Only in a second term would he be able to break away. But by then, the far-right Confederation, which is growing in strength, may have come to dominate the Polish right wing. The country’s war against itself is entering a new phase.
Sławomir Sierakowski, Founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement, is a Mercator senior fellow.