Every Election Is Now Existential

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A few days before the Polish presidential election on Sunday, a Polish friend of mine received an unexpected message from someone she had not seen for 20 years. The woman had found my friend on Facebook, noticed that she was supporting the candidacy of Rafał Trzaskowski—the mayor of Warsaw, a liberal centrist—and begged her to change her mind. She asked her to vote instead for Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist historian, former boxer, and veteran of street fights that he describes as 'noble battles.' She sent my friend a copy of an anonymous appeal that has shown up elsewhere on social media but seems to have been one of many similar warnings spread widely by email. It began like this:
Before you put your ballot in the ballot box, call up your memories. Open your eyes, clear your mind, reach for the truth—not the one on TV, but the one you carry in your heart, the truth acquired from life, from work, from the blood spilled on this land.
Because I am married to the Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, and because he was briefly a presidential candidate in the past, I have read a lot of this kind of thing before (and, of course, hereby make a declaration of interest). Nevertheless, the appeal that my friend received seemed to me a particularly striking, almost paradigmatic invocation of the blood-and-soil nationalism that is now part of Polish politics, American politics, and European politics.
The message listed all of the crimes allegedly committed by a series of Polish center-right and center-left governments, twisting the record and rewriting the history of the past 30 years into a story of trauma and victimization. One statement accused Trzaskowski and his ilk of having 'allowed foreigners to rob Poland and humiliate us, forcing young people to emigrate in exchange for bread.' In truth, Poland has been a major beneficiary of both foreign investment and European Union funds, has grown consistently for 30 years, and is now one of the fastest-expanding economies in Europe. The level of social spending has grown too.
The appeal did not go into these details. Instead, it warned against impending treason: 'Wake up from your lethargy! Look how Poland, your motherland, is being torn apart by external and internal forces. Don't let her be abused, don't let her face be as sad as the soil of a graveyard.'
The language used by Trzaskowski's campaign and his supporters was very different. On the day after the election, which he lost, the Warsaw mayor wrote that he had wanted to build a 'strong, safe, honest, empathetic Poland. A modern Poland in which everyone will be able to fulfill their goals and aspirations.' It was an optimistic message—but also a message that, at least among a large part of the population, could not compete with blood, graveyards, humiliation, and treason. The election was so close that exit polls predicted a narrow win for Trzaskowski on Sunday evening. But by Monday morning, the tiny majority had swung the other way. Nawrocki won with 50.89 percent of the vote, to Trzaskowski's 49.11 percent.
Poland's constitution has some peculiarities, so the impact on policy and politics is not straightforward. The Civic Platform party, to which Trzaskowski belongs, now runs the government as part of a three-party coalition of the center left and center right. The coalition won parliamentary elections in October 2023, following eight years of governments led by the Law and Justice party, which nominated Nawrocki. During its two terms in office, Law and Justice politicized the Polish court system, as well as the civil service and public media; it created a string of taxpayer-funded foundations designed to support the party and enrich some of its members. The current government has been unable to reverse all of these policies because President Andrzej Duda, also aligned with the previous regime, has vetoed or threatened to veto all of the changes.
The election of Nawrocki does not change Polish foreign policy. The Polish prime minister, not the president, will continue to control domestic policy, budgets, and trade. But because the president can veto legislation and pardon criminals, Nawrocki's election probably means that the courts cannot be repaired, and that those who broke the law or stole from the state will not face any consequences. For people who spent the past decade trying to fix Poland's judicial system and protect Polish democracy, this is dispiriting, even devastating, and the same kinds of recriminations and anger that followed the 2024 American presidential election are echoing around Poland this week.
But for anyone fighting creeping authoritarianism anywhere else, there is a larger lesson: The language of blood and soil, which has once again become central to public debate in many democracies, is very powerful. It helps many people explain a complex world. It cannot easily be defeated or dismissed in one electoral cycle. The triumphant election of a centrist coalition in 2023 did not remove it from Polish politics, just as the election of Joe Biden in 2020 did not weaken its power in the U.S.
At the same time, the election of Nawrocki also does not mean, as so many will now be tempted to write, that nationalism in Poland or Europe is 'on the rise.' In fact, this knife-edge election result in Poland is almost exactly the same as the knife-edge result in the country's presidential election five years ago.
Had Trzaskowski won an additional 0.9 percent of the votes, that would not have spelled final defeat for authoritarian populism. Other narrow victories in other places don't either. When a centrist candidate defeated an authoritarian populist in Romania a few weeks ago, some were trumpeting that as the possible start of a trend. But the same challenge will emerge in Romania during the next election too, and will once again be the defining argument of the campaign.
And that is how all elections will look, for a long time to come. Although many hoped otherwise, we do not seem to be returning to a world in which the center left and the center right compete over tax rates or budgets. Economic and policy arguments just don't matter as much to people right now as these deeper cultural divides. That's why all elections are now existential: Small numbers of voters swinging one way or the next will decide the nature of the state, the future of democracy, the independence of the courts.
Every time we go to the polls, politicians will say that every election matters and every vote counts. They will be right.
Article originally published at The Atlantic