Caught between two Wests, Poland tilts towards the Trumpian model

Warsaw, Poland: Tugged between two poles of Western power – the Washington of US President Donald Trump and Brussels as a champion of liberal democracy – Poland tilted towards the Trumpian model when a nationalist historian eked out a narrow win in a presidential election.

Karol Nawrocki, an ally of Poland’s populist former governing party, Law and Justice, defeated the liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, in the run-off held on Sunday, Warsaw time, after a polarised campaign. Trzaskowski had been supported by the country’s centrist and Brussels-steeped prime minister, Donald Tusk; Nawrocki by the Trump administration.

The result, announced on Monday, will have little immediate impact on Poland’s domestic or foreign policies, which the president does not control. The country will continue supporting Ukraine militarily, a policy both sides agree on. Nor will the change result in a move to leave the European Union.

On the campaign trail, Karol Nawrocki (above) assailed Prime Minister Donald Tusk for, in his telling, jeopardising Poland’s traditionally strong relations with the United States.Credit: Getty Images

But the election in Poland highlights a broader struggle faced by Europe, particularly in the formerly communist East. Battles have raged over divisive issues such as migration, abortion and LGBTQ rights. National sovereignty has also become a rallying cry on the right, against the power of the European Union to mandate changes many see as being in conflict with traditional values and, in Poland’s case, the Roman Catholic Church.

Jaroslaw Kuisz, a political analyst affiliated with the universities of Warsaw and Oxford, described it as a battle between “two Wests – two power centres that are ideologically very different”.

Poland, by choosing a Trump-aligned president who opposes a pro-European sitting government, he added, “has become a microcosm of a global conflict that divides the West in a way unprecedented since 1989”. That was when communism collapsed across Eastern and Central Europe, leaving liberal democracy as the only true path, according to both Washington and Brussels at the time.

No longer united by faith in a single model, Poland and other countries on the European Union’s eastern flank now find themselves caught between the populist nationalism of Trump and defenders of the old post-Cold War liberal order.

The Polish presidential run-off came just two weeks after voters in Romania rejected a nationalist candidate, George Simion, in a presidential election. Simion had declared himself a “candidate on the MAGA ticket”, and his defeat by a centrist raised the hopes of liberals that Europe’s right-wing populist wave was receding and the continent might return to a more stable, even keel.

Those hopes evaporated on Monday. Exit polling data on Sunday night showed a win for Trzaskowski. But once the ballots were counted, Nawrocki had 50.9 per cent of the vote.

It was hardly an emphatic triumph for what Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has proclaimed a “new era of the patriots of Western civilisation” led by Trump. But it showed that nationalism has staying power.

Rafal Trzaskowski had been supported by the country’s centrist and Brussels-steeped prime minister, Donald Tusk.Credit: Getty Images

Victory for Nawrocki, said Michal Szuldrzynski, editor-in-chief of Rzeczpospolita, a centrist newspaper, “heralds a period of great turbulence in Poland and in the world – the effect of the global wave of Trumpism”.

On Monday, Orban, an admirer of Trump and would-be leader of a European movement made in his image, welcomed Trzaskowski’s defeat.

France’s hard-right standard-bearer, Marine Le Pen, celebrated the result as a “rejection of a Brussels oligarchy” intent on imposing its policies “without any democratic will”.

Whether on the left or right, voters interviewed in Warsaw on election day said the importance of the vote went beyond just the largely ceremonial presidency. “That is peanuts,” Jan Brykczynski, 62, a psychologist, said of the presidency, after casting his vote for Trzaskowski. “The stakes are much higher.”

Krystina Kwiatkowska, 61, a health care worker forced into early retirement last year by government spending cuts, said she did not particularly like Nawrocki but voted for him because she wanted to make sure that Tusk did not have a free hand. It was good for Poland to stay anchored in both Western camps, she said.

Trzaskowski, she said, had done a good job as the mayor of Warsaw. But, she added, he was not his own man because “above him there is always this red fox”, using an expression the right often deploys to present Tusk as a conniving enemy of Poland’s national interest.

Piotr Buras, the head of the Warsaw office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Nawrocki had falsely framed the election as a choice between Washington and Brussels. He had done this “for domestic political purposes”, disconnected from the reality of a country that wanted good relations with both, Buras added.

“Ideologically and politically, Nawrocki represents the other concept of the West, the one defined by Vance in Munich,” he said, referring to a February speech in which US Vice President J.D. Vance accused Europe of retreating from shared values with the United States by trying to isolate hard-right parties.

(L-r) Poland’s Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron at the Presidential Palace in Kyiv, Ukraine last month.Credit: Getty Images

“A majority of Poles decided to go for a candidate who is close to Trump, but that was not their main motivation,” Buras said. Poland, he added, was “very divided, but voters were not consciously choosing any foreign policy orientation”.

On the campaign trail, Nawrocki assailed Tusk for, in his telling, jeopardising Poland’s traditionally strong relations with the United States, which has around 10,000 soldiers in the country and has long been viewed as the guarantor of Polish security. Last month, Trump received Nawrocki in the Oval Office, an honour so far denied to the Polish prime minister.

Emboldened by Trump’s frequent criticism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Nawrocki has recently given voice to deep currents of anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Poland. Those feelings, rooted in history, have been largely suppressed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with most Poles agreeing that Ukraine needs to be supported militarily as part of the defence of Europe from Russian aggression.

But Nawrocki has said he would not support future Ukrainian membership of either NATO or the European Union, neither of which is really on the table – though Orban and other European populists have used the distant possibility to bash their liberal opponents.

Zelensky, in a message written in Polish on social platform X, congratulated Nawrocki, reminding him that Poland “was and remains the foundation of regional and European security and a strong voice in defence of the freedom and dignity of every nation”.

The Polish presidency has no significant say in setting foreign, economic or other policy, which is the preserve of Tusk and his ministers. But it can act as a centre of opposition to the government by deploying its veto power over legislation and the bully pulpit provided by its role as head of state.

The departing president, Andrzej Duda, is also an ally of Law and Justice, and frequently vetoed laws passed by Tusk’s majority in parliament or sent them for review by courts stacked with loyalists of the previous government.

The election of Nawrocki, a pugnacious former boxer, to replace Duda is likely to harden the logjam. It could also exacerbate tensions within Tusk’s fractious coalition of liberal, leftist and conservative parties, which have a majority in parliament but not the three-fifths of the seats needed to override a presidential veto.

Nawrocki, said Kuisz, the political analyst, “is much more combative than Duda, and he is going to make life much harder for Tusk and Sikorski”, referring to Poland’s Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski.

Tusk, a former senior official in Brussels who is widely respected by mainstream European politicians, “suffers from Gorbachev syndrome”, Kuisz added, referring to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who co-operated with Washington to end the Cold War. “He is more appreciated abroad than at home.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.