This month's cover story explores what the election of right-wing nationalist Karol Nawrocki as Poland's next president means for the country's democracy and its relationship with the EU.
Poland’s nationalist right staged a comeback this week, with Karol Nawrocki narrowly defeating pro-European candidate Rafał Trzaskowski in a bitterly fought presidential runoff.
Nawrocki, a political newcomer backed by the hard-right Law and Justice (PiS)
party, secured just 50.89% of the vote. But his victory is already reshaping Poland’s political trajectory. As The Parliament’s Arno Van Rensbergen reports from Warsaw for this issue’s cover story, the result is expected to further paralyse Donald Tusk’s beleaguered government — thwarting the prime minister’s rule-of-law reforms and efforts to strengthen ties with Brussels.
The role of the Polish presidency may be largely ceremonial, but it comes with
real tools of obstruction. The outgoing president, PiS stalwart Andrzej Duda, has repeatedly used his veto pen to block Tusk’s efforts to restore civil rights and judicial independence after nearly a decade of PiS rule. Nawrocki is likely to do the same. “We can expect him to be very loyal to the PiS party,” said political scientist Monika Sus, “and block Tusk’s agenda the same as Duda did.”
But this election was about more than just a domestic tug-of-war. It also revealed the limits of the EU’s political clout.
Nawrocki ran as a Donald Trump-style conservative populist, even visiting the US president at the White House last month. Endorsements from US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán followed at the Conservative Political Action Conference, held in Poland in late May.
Nawrocki’s campaign made Brussels the scapegoat for Poland’s ills, calling EU
climate policy a threat to Polish sovereignty and warning of rampant illegal immigration. And it worked — especially among younger Poles. More than half of voters between the ages of 18 and 39 cast their ballots for Nawrocki.
But he arguably won “on matters that do not concern daily Polish politics,” the
University of Warsaw’s Spasimir Domaradzki said. “He used narratives like the Green Deal and migration as an endless source of cheap political mobilisation.”
While Warsaw has become a rising power within the EU — a military heavyweight and key supporter of Ukraine, with the bloc’s fastest-growing economy — its internal politics remain fractured. And once again, its commitment to the EU’s legal and democratic standards is in doubt.
— Christopher Alessi, Editor-in-Chief