Author: Mike Nova

Make no mistake about it: The PiS Party, which ruled Poland from 2014 to 2023 and held the presidency thereafter is anti-women, anti-gay, anti-liberal and even embraced Holocaust denial.

It is also ultra-Catholic, banned abortion and objected to agreed EU policy on climate change and women or LGBT rights and opposed enlargement to take in Ukraine or West Balkan states.

Reason to worry

So, the fact that the PiS Party’s candidate, Karol Nawrocki, was just elected in a close race to become the next President of Poland provides ample reason to worry.

He opposes the euro and the Tusk government‘s liberal economics, including moves to reduce the healthcare contributions paid by business, while at the same time opposing any reduction in healthcare funding.

Nawrocki has also promised not to raise the retirement age, to ban businesses operating on Sundays, to provide more cash for farmers and to promote “patriotic economics” — whatever that may be.

As President, for now he has no power to fulfill any of these promises. He would need a parliamentary majority for that.

But he can certainly act like a spoiler, much like Andrzej Duda, the country’s current President, has done. The president of Poland has to counter-sign laws and can refuse to do so. He also controls the appointment of judges and other key posts from museum directors to the head of the Polish equivalent of the BBC.

A Polish Nigel Farage

Much like Nigel Farage in the UK, count on Nawrocki to spot an easy opening in the political market. After all, virtually all mainstream liberal politicians as well as many Social Democrats in Europe almost seem to have lost any focus on the working class’s existence and that poverty is ever visible in all of their countries.

Nawrocki will likely ally with other nationalist and hard-right populist parties in Poland as well as PiS in the hope for the right to win full government power in Poland in 2027. The true nightmare for the EU is the formation of a PiS plus hard right-wing extremist party after the 2027 parliamentary elections.

If that materializes, and the odds are that it will, the prospects for Poland playing a constructive role in Europe are bound to diminish gravely.

But the fact remains that ballot box fortunes of social democratic and liberal parties have been fading in Europe. Nawrocki’s election as president of Poland confirms this trend.

A question of culture

While the Civic Platform chose Rafal Trzaskowski, the Mayor of Warsaw, a nice liberal politician like London Mayor Sadiq Khan, to be its candidate for President, the PiS allowed Nawrocki to run as an “independent,” albeit one who, like PiS politicians, is an anti-abortion, anti-EU, anti-gay, anti-woke candidate.

Nawrocki has a Ph.D in Polish history and wrote books on organized crime during the Communist years 1945-1990. He also served as director of the Gdansk Museum of Second World War Remembrance.

In essence, he made a career as a right-wing historian by reminding Poland of her confiscated national history.

He also called for the replacement of monuments to Russian soldiers who are seen in Poland as Hitler’s allies in 1939 — invading from the east as German armies arrived from the west.

Bitter memories

For Poles, 1945 was less a year of liberation than the arrival of a new occupying power, Stalin’s Russia. Helped by collaborators inside Poland, it perpetrated cruelties against anyone who opposed communist imperialism.

Those issues may long be forgotten by Poland’s urban elites, but they are still very present in the Polish countryside as an anchor of personal and national identity. It is that Poland Nawrocki attracts.

Many rural folks do hate Putin, but they are fed up with one million Ukrainian refugees. They do not want to allow poor Ukraine into the EU to get a share of EU funds and use the Single Market and the freedom of movement to offer cheaper goods and labor than Poland currently does.

Conclusion

Truth be told: The election in Poland of a Nigel Farage type, Trump-admiring, Ukraine-distancing president reflects the seesaw politics of today’s Europe.

Distasteful as that may be to some, wishing otherwise will not help. All the more so as, whether in the United States or in Europe, the shift to the right cannot just be described as a matter of aging electorates.

Far more worryingly for the political center, it is an increasing trend especially among young men. They tend to vote for the easy, pseudo-bold answers often offered by right-wing politicians — in the rhetorically alluring, but realistically elusive hope of getting things done.

One final note

Nawrocki is known to have a hooligan past. However, Chelsea football fans can now claim that they are now represented in high office in European politics: Poland’s new president Karol sports a “Chelsea FC” tattoo.

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