Poland votes to lock its leaders in a constitutional cage match

Times

2 days ago

As Poland awoke to the news that Karol Nawrocki had taken the presidency, the mood of dismay and anguish among liberals was summed up by Agnieszka Holland, the prominent film director: 'The worst thing is that unaware, simple people with [only] primary education decided for us.'
Holland would, she wrote on X, support stripping the franchise from voters without higher education.
It is precisely this sort of sentiment shared by many metropolitan liberals that has helped to propel Nawrocki, 42, a right-wing, politically untested historian with a chequered past, into the office of Poland's head of state.
After trailing for months in the polls, Nawrocki ultimately inched in front of Rafal Trzaskowski, the centrist mayor of Warsaw, beating him with 50.9 per cent of the vote to 49.1.
Now Donald Tusk, the centre-right prime minister, will have to contend with an opponent in the presidential palace who is determined to foil his agenda and bring down his government. The result came as such a heavy blow to Tusk that he declared a confidence vote in parliament to try to hold his fractured coalition together, amid rampant speculation that he could be backed into calling an early election.
With turnout approaching 72 per cent, a record for any presidential election since Poland wrested back its democracy in 1989, the vote was a victory fuelled by extreme polarisation and a sense among millions of Poles outside the big cities that they would no longer tolerate an elite perceived as self-serving and patronising.
The speaker of the lower chamber of the Polish parliament and Tusk's junior coalition partner, Szymon Holownia, added to the growing sense of upheaval by suggesting on X that his party might abstain in the potential confidence vote.
Surveys by OGB, the polling firm, found dismally low approval ratings across the board for Tusk and his ill-matched coalition government.
The prevailing emotions felt by the electorate towards the Tusk administration were indifference and apathy at 23 per cent, followed by disappointment and resentment at 21 per cent. Satisfaction with the governing coalition came in third place, at 18 per cent.
Nearly 50 per cent of Poles judged the government as 'bad' or 'very bad', a level of dissatisfaction not wildly ­dissimilar to Olaf Scholz's ratings as German chancellor before he collapsed his own government last year.
People were, in effect, voting against Tusk, who is judged to have failed to ­deliver on the promises he made when he returned to power at the end of 2023. They have now locked him in a constitutional cage with a president who has vowed to use all of his powers to ­obstruct Tusk's agenda.
The education divide
In some ways the writing was on the wall in the first round of the election a fortnight ago, two hard-right candidates swept up more than 20 per cent of the vote. Lukasz Pawlowski, the political scientist behind OGB, said: 'Trzaskowski's campaign team had two weeks to draw the appropriate conclusions, yet they reached exactly the opposite ones: we saw more Donald Tusk. The increased presence of Tusk made little sense from a polling perspective.'
Alongside the long-familiar divide between rural and big-city Poland, another gap has opened between the educated classes and those without university degrees.
Trzaskowski was backed by 62.2 per cent of people with higher education, while 73.4 per cent of voters with only primary education voted for Nawrocki, according to an Ipsos exit poll commissioned by the broadcasters TVP, TVN24 and Polsat. The polyglot mayor of Warsaw was also derided by Nawrocki's backers as 'Monsieur Bonjour' on ­account of his cosmopolitan style and fluency in French.
Pawlowski said: 'The real division is between the top and the bottom of society, and Rafal Trzaskowski was the candidate of the establishment.'
Even by Poland's near-American standards of mutual suspicion and fragmentation in politics and the media, it was a messy campaign, but one that animated huge parts of the electorate.
Nawrocki won 10.6 million votes, which was in absolute terms the highest number any president has taken since Lech Walesa, the Nobel peace prize laureate and figurehead of the Solidarity movement that overturned the communist regime, and who became head of state in 1990.
Ewa Letowska, Poland's first civil rights ombudsman and an eminent ­jurist, said this was fundamentally a 'positive marker for our democracy' but it had been marred by tone of the debate. 'If only this engagement found reflection in the quality of debate and arguments put forward by the commentariat,' she said.
Letowska added: 'What stood out in this election was the dismal, divisive and populist tone of public discourse, the depreciation of serious argument, and the instrumentalisation of the law, reduced to a mere tool of short-term electoral propaganda.'
What it means for Europe
On the international stage, Nawrocki's win was celebrated by the populist right as a breakthrough and the start of a reversal in Poland, following Tusk's victory a year and a half ago. Nawrocki had been repeatedly endorsed by the Trump administration, with an invitation to the White House and a trip to Poland by Kristi Noem, the United States's homeland security secretary, who suggested he was the only candidate who could safeguard American troops in Poland. Tom Rose, Trump's ambassador to Poland, was jubilant, posting on X: 'CONGRATULATIONS'.
Nawrocki also received congratulations from Hungary's hard-right prime minister Viktor Orban, the only other world leader to have endorsed him for the presidency, and from Marine Le Pen, the leader of the populist National Rally in France.
In other European capitals, however, there is concern. After years of conflict between Poland and the European Commission, Tusk's efforts to rebuild relations and put his country at the top table alongside France and Germany have been well received.
Now his partners in Europe fret that he will be paralysed by political deadlock and on a permanent emergency footing.
Marta Prochwicz Jazowska, a Poland analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said the country would remain a 'rising military and economic power' but had not set out on a 'path away from Europe'. She also predicted that Poland's policy towards Ukraine, already subject to intense internal disputes, would become a 'battleground'.
Jazowska said: 'Nawrocki in office will 'spoil' Tusk's four-year term by ­vetoing his government's legislation on restoring the rule of law, social liberalisation, and strengthening ties with Europe.
'[He] will elevate his anti-European, anti-German and anti-migration rhetoric in public discourse while intensifying the anti-Ukrainian sentiment … Nawrocki supports a just peace in Ukraine and, unlike Donald Trump, clearly identifies Russia as the aggressor … But he will block any deployment of Polish troops to Ukraine and attach strict conditions to Ukraine's EU membership bid.'