Poland Just Sent an Ominous Signal to the World

New York Times

2 days ago

It wasn't a particularly memorable photograph. The image, which briefly circulated around the internet a few weeks ago, showed President Trump in the Oval Office beside Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist candidate in Poland's presidential election. Mr. Nawrocki looked, frankly, a little star-struck — like a tourist who had managed to snap a picture with a celebrity. We could find no footage of a conversation, no record of an exchange. Just a photo of two men awkwardly giving thumbs-ups.
In hindsight, it was more important than it looked.
On Sunday MAGA won in Poland. After voters rejected Trumpist candidates in recent elections in Canada, Australia and Romania — enough to suggest an international anti-Trump bump — Polish voters went the other way. Mr. Nawrocki, a conservative historian and a former boxer, narrowly defeated Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, who was backed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk in a runoff election. Just two short years after electing Mr. Tusk, Poland has once again swung right. Like the U.S. election in 2024, it was a bruising reminder that populism is resilient and sticky, and that liberal democracy has yet to find a reliable formula to defeat it.
For Poland's liberals, everything was on the line. In 2023 Mr. Tusk's centrist party, Civic Platform, managed to unseat the far-right Law and Justice Party in parliamentary elections — but only just, in a coalition. Mr. Tusk promised to 'chase away the darkness,' and Poland was cited as an example of a democratic comeback. The reality was more ambivalent: Law and Justice had won the most votes for any single party, and still had its ally Andrzej Duda as president. A party that had openly violated the constitution, subordinated the supreme court and turned the media into a tool of propaganda remained deeply embedded in Poland's political architecture, a permanent challenge to liberal rule.
The Tusk government had to govern under the looming threat of Mr. Duda's presidential vetoes as it attempted to reverse the effects of eight years of populist government. It had some successes: It started to restore the independence of the judiciary, which unlocked billions in postpandemic E.U. funds. But many promises went unfulfilled, including liberalizing an abortion law, a key pillar of voter support. Even sympathetic voters grew frustrated.
In foreign policy, the stakes were existential. Poland, which shares a long land border with Ukraine, is on NATO's frontier with Russia. The Tusk government increased domestic military spending to almost 5 percent of G.D.P. — the largest proportion of any NATO member, and over and above what Mr. Trump has insisted allies should be spending. It secured nuclear power technology from the United States and realigned its diplomacy toward Brussels. After almost a decade of acrimonious relations with the European Union, Mr. Tusk sought to cast Poland as a reliable European partner once more, summed up in another photo that made the rounds in May, in which Mr. Tusk was in Kyiv with Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, and the leaders of Britain, France and Germany. Poland looked like part of the spine of a new Europe.
Now the last two years in Poland, like Joe Biden's four years as president after Mr. Trump's first term in the United States, seem like little more than a liberal intermezzo in which some institutions were restored and some democratic norms reasserted. But voters' deep dissatisfaction and polarization had not simply disappeared; what looked like a restoration was just a narrow opening — and one that may be closing now.
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