Karol Nawrocki, Poland's MAGA president
France elected a socialist prime minister – and then almost simultaneously a conservative president. Italy elected a far right prime minister, Georgia Meloni, who obeys Italy ruling economic elites who depend on EU membership for their investment and profits. Europe now has several of these tandem governments, where different parties control different parts of the state and promote contradictory policies. Poland can now be added to that list.
Poland's new president, Karol Nawrocki, admires Trump, is cool towards Ukraine and sports a 'Chelsea FC ' tattoo. He also embodies the dizzying, see-sawing politics of today's Europe.
Fifteen years ago I spoke on a platform with Donald Tusk, the long – probably too-long – leader of the centre-right-liberal Civic Platform party, and current prime minister. Back then, Tusk was cheered at an economic conference, as he promised he would take Poland into the euro. It hasn't happened. Like every other EU leader, Tusk has a transactional relationship with Europe.
When Tusk, first elected prime minister two decades ago, now 68, returned to power in 2023 he had to work with a president, Andrzej Duda, from the europhobic Law and Justice Party (PiS) headed by Lech Kaczynski.
The president of Poland has to countersign laws and also controls the appointment of judges and other key posts, from museum directors to the head of the Polish equivalent of the BBC.
The American writer, Anne Applebaum, is married to Poland's foreign minister Radek Skiorski and is the historian of the Soviet Gulag system. In her fine and very readable book Twilight of Democracy, written in 2022 she examined the political-social forces that gave birth to the Polish union Solidarity, which signalled the end of communist rule in Poland 40 years ago. The book goes on to show how that new political settlement fell apart in the face of the muddy compromises ushered in by the new of democratic era.
The PiS Party which ruled from 2014-2023 is anti-women, anti-gay, anti-liberal and even embraced Holocaust denial. It was ultra-Catholic, banned abortion and objected to EU policy on climate change and LGBT rights. It opposed enlargement to take in Ukraine.
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There was an upsurge in the 2023 election similar to the enthusiasm that took Labour to power last year. Young voters, women, liberals, and greens voted out PiS, but Tusk did not know how to convert this youth-led wave into a new politics of change. The old parliamentary game-playing returned.
Polish workers who joined Solidarity en masse in 1981 now turn their backs on trade unions, whose membership is among the lowest in Europe. There is no effective social democratic politics in Poland.
Into this situation stepped Nawrocki, who has a PhD in Polish history and speaks English, and who made a career of reminding Poland of her confiscated national history. He wrote books on organised crime that had taken place during the communist years 1945-1990. He called for the replacement of monuments to Russian soldiers who are seen in Poland as Hitler's allies.
He was elected a local councillor and headed a town council for a few years. He then was director of the Gdansk Museum of World War 2 Remembrance. The UK has just celebrated VE day but for Poles 1945 meant the arrival of a new occupying power, Stalin's Russia, helped by collaborators inside Poland and cruelties against anyone who opposed communist imperialism.
It is this Poland that Nowracki appeals to. While the Civic Platform chose the Mayor of Warsaw, a nice liberal Sadiq Khan type politician, to be its candidate for president, PiS allowed Nawrocki to run as an independent anti-abortion, anti-EU, anti-gay, anti-woke candidate.
His pre-election rally used the slogan MPGA – Make Poland Great Again. Poles are Americanphiles to the point of exaggeration. They hate Putin, but are fed up with 1 million Ukrainian refugees and don't want to allow poor Ukraine into the EU to get a share of EU funds.
Like Nigel Farage (and, ahem, Sir Keir Starmer) Nawrocki backs large infrastructure projects, especially rail links. He opposes the euro. He opposed the Tusk government's liberal economics including reducing the healthcare contributions paid by business, while at the same time he opposed any reduction in healthcare funding.
He has promised not to raise the retirement age, to ban businesses operating on Sundays, and to provide more cash for farmers and promote 'patriotic economics.'
As president he has no power to legislate on any of these promises. But like Farage he can spot an opening in the political market as all mainstream liberal politicians as well as social democrats, from Poland to the British Isles, have forgotten that poverty exists.
Nawrocki will ally with other nationalist populist parties in Poland as well as the PiS who hope to win full government power in 2027. Social democratic politics has been fading in Europe ever since the democratic left allowed the EU to become a centre-right liberal project. Nawrocki's election as president of Poland confirms this trend.
Denis MacShane is the UK's former Minister of Europe. He wrote the first book on Polish Solidarity in 1982 and was briefly imprisoned in Warsaw for running money to the underground Polish Solidarity opposition movement
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