Just a few hours after making this statement, in response to marginally positive exit poll results, the defeated Polish presidential candidate and Brussels favourite Rafał Trzaskowski tweeted ‘I congratulate Karol Nawrocki on his win in the presidential election’. Embarrassing.
Embarrassing not just for this Mayor of Warsaw who, in a live televised debate in April, quickly hid a rainbow flag, presented to him by rival Nawrocki to emphasise Trzaskowski’s championing of LGBT rights over those of socially conservative Poles. Embarrassing also for the current Polish Prime Minister Donald ‘special place in hell for Brexiteers’ Tusk, who has, since 2023, led a ragtag bunch of progressives down the primrose path to political defeat, having ridden to power on a promise of giving left-wing women all the abortions they could handle.
By proxy, of course, this means embarrassment for Tusk’s handler back at European Union headquarters, Ursula von der Leyen. VDL, while studiously declining to back political candidates publicly, was so delighted to see Tusk elected in 2023 that she immediately released 5billion euros, with tens of billions to follow, as Poland promised to restore the ‘rule of law’ after eight years of conservative rule. Of course, what the EU means by ‘rule of law’ is the supremacy of EU law over national law and allowing sexual and/or ethnic minorities to dictate social and legal norms. By seeking to wrest back judicial and political control over Polish affairs from its slavish EU-friendly judiciary and civil service, the pre-Tusk government was denied the scrapings from the bottom of the EU money pit by a resentful von der Leyen.
Now Poland is once again shaping up to be the naughty boy of Europe with the politically untested and inexperienced Nawrocki rising to power, scraping in Brexit-style with a 51 per cent share of the vote. Other than his widely shared hostility to talk of gay marriage, other reasons for his self-exclusion from polite Brussels salons will be his fervent belief in protecting unborn life, and his increasing scepticism towards the million-strong ‘refugees’ from war-torn Ukraine.
Indeed, while for obvious historical reasons, the Polish have never relented in their fear and loathing of the Russians (Nawrocki, as head of the Institute of National Remembrance, is on the Kremlin’s list of wanted criminals for destroying a Soviet-era monument to the Red Army), their view of the Ukrainians has changed considerably since they let millions of them in after February 2022. Even the EU-aligned Trzaskowski was moved to argue that they should not be receiving child benefit if they weren’t paying taxes in Poland. The idea that the Ukrainians are making the most of Polish hospitality while insulting their hosts is catching on very fast on all sides it seems.
Not that this necessarily means any change in support for the Ukrainian buffer zone against ‘Russian aggression’. Nor does any of the resistance to EU interference necessarily herald a revival of talk of ‘Polexit’, at least not so long as there are subsidies to claim. However, where the current dynamic is particularly interesting is that Nawrocki, who trailed Trzaskowski after the first round, and was therefore expected by pollsters to lose narrowly, turned his fortunes around by allying himself to the third-placed candidate’s party, Slawomir Mentzen’s Konfederacja (‘Confederation’).
Mentzen has been more forthright for longer on his opposition to the Ukrainian war, his hostility towards membership of the EU and, perhaps most vitally of all, his positive view of free-market economics and a smaller state. In return for Nawrocki signing up to eight pledges that included ‘no new EU treaty ratification’ and ‘no Ukrainian membership of Nato’, Mentzen was happy to endorse the candidate in the second round. An estimated 87 per cent of Konfederacja’s voters transferred their ballots to Nawrocki, tipping the scales dramatically in the latter’s favour.
Moreover, Mentzen, aged just 38, won a third of the electorate under the age of 30, and a quarter of those in their thirties, making him by far and away the most popular ‘youth’ candidate. The traditional view of what numbskulls like to call ‘extreme right’ voters is that they are part of that conservative generation which will soon die off. That a mainstream European politician can bargain for influence with a successful presidential candidate using a youth vote vehemently opposed to taxation and central bank digital currencies has to be a beacon of hope in a stiflingly statist world. That an elected president might then need to rely on support from a substantial electorate more committed to freedom and traditional values than even he is could mean the pull to the right will keep him from straying leftward in the time-honoured manner of ‘conservative’ leaders the world over.
Of course, we have already seen populist politicians, previously branded ‘EU-incompatible’, quickly establish their credentials as Brussels-friendly statesmen and women (I wrote about one of them, Giorgia Meloni, here). Nothing disappoints more regularly than an apparently iconoclastic opponent of the deep state who ends up valuing his power and salary over any pre-election promises. Poland has always been a little bit different, though; a holdout against oppression that has kept the faith longer and harder than it might ordinarily be expected to.
History books tell us that we once fought a war to save the honour of the Polish people. Perhaps it will soon be they who will save ours.
