So how to make sense of last Sunday’s (June 1) Polish presidential elections, in which the candidate of the far-right, Karol Nawrocki of the Law and Justice Party (PiS), defeated the liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, from Civic Platform? I had a sense this would be the result, after first-round voting gave the combined far-right parties a near majority total. Yet the total mobilization of the “Stop Nawrocki” opposition seemed to gain strength, just like it happened in Romania two weeks earlier, suggesting a different conclusion. Yet in the end, Nawrocki won with 51% of the vote, the exact same result as five years ago when the same Trzaskowski lost to current president Andrzej Duda.
This defeat is even more serious, however, as there already seems to be a pattern: the first far-right victor softens the ground for an authoritarian power grab, and after a defeat the successor pushes even farther. This is obviously happening, such as with Trump II making people nostalgic for Trump I, and Nawrocki has all but promised to be a tougher and crueler president than Duda. If PiS wins parliamentary elections too, it will impose such restrictions on democracy as to make its 2015-2023 tenure seem tame.
The reasons for this comeback (Nawrocki started as a distant underdog) are similar to what happened in the United States last November: too many people are dissatisfied with Donald Tusk’s liberal coalition, just as they were with Biden. Tusk ran on a program of radical changes, little of which has actually taken place. Of course they needed a president to sign their good bills, but the Tusk government hasn’t even presented the bills for the president to veto. Supposedly waiting for a president who would sign them, Tusk’s inactivity served mainly to demoralize and demobilize young ardent proponents of change. Popular enthusiasm dampened considerably compared to 2023 when the Tusk coalition was elected, and the liberal-left turnout declined, just as happened in the U.S. in November.
As I see it, though, one key issue is that the liberal-left seems to have made the mistake, yet again, of focusing on the negative personal qualities of the opponent, rather than the policies. From the first day when PiS announced Nawrocki’s candidacy, we heard of his friendship ties to criminal gangsters and fascist thugs, or his past, which he admitted, as somewhat of a “soccer hooligan.” In the last phase of the campaign, the opposition focused on other aspects of his past: accusations, credible, that while working at a hotel he arranged prostitutes for guests. Endless social media posts, and not only, kept calling him a “pimp,” using two different colorful slang terms. But we also heard voices of criticism for his working class past: that he worked as a security man in a Gdansk hotel and was an amateur boxer. Why criticism? Well, that’s one of the questions hotly debated in the post-election avalanche of Facebook posts from emotionally crushed Trzaskowski supporters. One woman, a scholar of Polish antisemitism who often lacked an academic job and worked as a gardener in Berlin, berates her fellow liberals: “It’s for *these* reasons that you vilified him? Not because he’s a xenophobe, chauvinist, racist, or sexist? Not because he will further degrade women’s rights, further restrict asylum rights, promote corporal punishment of children, cut aid for Ukrainian refugees, and rehabilitate the reputation of interwar fascists?”
Of course, these things had all been noted in the past, and were reasons for the passionate opposition of half the country to his presidency. But in the final campaign stretch, when even undecided voters were paying attention, the opposition focused on his character, not his politics. And many did so in an obviously class-based way, basically saying that here’s an uncouth working class guy from the projects, of course we can’t have him as president. Which for many uncertain voters was probably what pushed them to give him their vote. The ‘funny’ thing is, though, that Nawrocki is not at all some casual worker. He advanced a long time ago – getting a Ph.D. in history, becoming director of a World War II museum (where he focused on the suffering of “Polish patriots” to the exclusion of almost everything else), and then head of the powerful Institute of National Remembrance, where he has pushed for nationalist education at all levels of schooling. By focusing on his past, his critics allowed this elitist to be seen as a working class man of the people.
The day after the election, Prime Minister Tusk called for a parliamentary vote of confidence on June 11, which may well lead to the dissolution of parliament and new elections, which PiS would be likely to win, in coalition with the “Confederacy” party that began as a right-wing opposition to PiS. Why would Tusk do that, when his government has two and a half years left in its term? When Macron did the same last year in France, after suffering defeat in European Union elections, it led to an even greater humbling of his party in the ensuing snap parliamentary elections. So why Tusk, and why now? There are different interpretations. The most favorable is that he gets the vote of confidence, knows his coalition is solid, and he’s ready to be more activist, forcing Nawrocki to veto popular bills. Unfortunately, this is probably not the best interpretation, since Tusk’s coalition is already somewhat wavering, with smaller parties wary of being co-responsible for an unpopular and now perhaps increasingly ineffective government (because of presidential obstruction). So maybe Tusk thinks a new election will consolidate him and Civic Platform as the main opposition, eliminating the Hołownia/PSL party and its 65 MPs. (The 14% vote this bloc got in 2023 was a fluke, as liberals flocked to it in the last days out of concern that it might not pass the electoral threshold, thus handing the election to PiS.) Tusk might well think opposition is a better role, allowing him to be more militant in reform rhetoric than he is in promoting reform policy.
Clearly something has to be done to prevent a loss in two years that could be even more devastating. Hopefully, though, that will be a successful vote of confidence plus agreement by the coalition partners to actually pass the various legislation they promised, including things like new spending on building homes, that they can “force” the president to veto. A lingering problem, though, is that the most conservative of the partners, PSL, might already be thinking of trying to jump ship and ally with PiS in the future. If no new government activism is possible, then all options are bad, and it’s hard to see how PiS doesn’t return to power, with a far more toxic and dangerous agenda.
David Ost is emeritus professor of Politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges who has written widely on labor, politics, and the radical right in eastern Europe, with a focus on Poland. His books include Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics, Workers After Workers’ States, The Defeat of Solidarity, and Class After Communism. He is currently completing a book (New Press, 2026) titled “Red Pill Politics: Right-Wing Populism from Fascism to Today.”
Poland’s Presidential Election, and the Dangerous, Uncertain Future