Should Poland brace for the Putinism ahead?

Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, a liberal representing Prime Minister Donald Tusk's Civic Coalition, faced off against nationalist Karol Nawrocki, who billed himself as non-partisan but was in fact handpicked and promoted by Jarosław Kaczyński's Law and Justice party (PiS, far-right). 

Nawrocki won by less than one percent of the vote, overcoming numerous scandals and controversies that emerged in the final weeks of the campaign. The revelations in question were certainly damning. 

It seems that Nawrocki dishonestly took over an apartment in an attractive district of Gdańsk from an elderly man who was sent to a nursing home; that he had links inside football-hooligan circles, including their fascist factions; and that he once worked as a security guard at the luxurious Grand Hotel in Sopot, where he was responsible for organizing sexual entertainment for guests.

But everyone deserves a second chance, right? Who Nawrocki once was is less important than what kind of president he will be. There is no doubt that his worldview is that of the hard right, nor that he will manoeuvre for the speedy return to power of his patron, the PiS. And it cannot be ruled out that he will push even harder than that, in the direction of the radical-right Confederation party, whose candidate Sławomir Mentzen came third in the first round of the elections.

As of today, liberal Poland is in the throes of a festival of lamentation and recriminations, as Manus Jałosewski argues in Oko.press. Manifold post-mortems have sought to answer the question of how it could happen that “our candidate” lost the election. 

For many weeks, polls had given the clear lead to Rafał Trzaskowski, but everything went wrong in the final stretch of the campaign. The Warsaw mayor proved to be a weak candidate, trying to maneuver between different positions in order to please various (sometimes diametrically opposed) sets of voters. 

First, he veered to the right in a clear pander to Confederation voters. Only just before the second round did he remember his mainly left-leaning electorate. As a result, he ended up putting off both groups. Making things worse, Trzaskowski often appeared tired and listless at campaign events. Some, as Tomas Mateusiak reports in Onet are also pinning blame on his campaign staff for bungling their job of developing a coherent electoral strategy.

Behind Rafał Trzaskowski stood the feckless government of an unpopular prime minister, Donald Tusk. The ruling Civic Coalition was supposed to be a remedy for eight years of authoritarian abuses by Law and Justice. It mostly chose to pursue PiS's repressive policies towards activists, minorities and migrants. Now, notes Ewa Karbowicz in Gazeta Prawna, the government is teetering on the brink of collapse and Tusk has promised a vote of confidence. Most Poles who follow politics are waiting to see if and when early elections will be held.

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‘The Poland we know today will cease to exist and we will only be able to rebuild it once Russia loses its influence’ - Vitaly Portnikov

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The victory of Donald Tusk's democracy camp in the 2023 general election was meant to reverse the slide toward right-wing populism, both in Poland and across the region. After Nawrocki's victory, and given the current polls, we can be fairly sure that by 2027 at the latest the populist (and anti-Ukraine) radical right will be back at the controls in Warsaw. Poland may then join the axis of Orbán's Hungary and Fico's Slovakia.

Given its size and economic potency, Poland would be a significant prize for that alliance. It is still hard to imagine Warsaw making the kind of overtures to the Kremlin made by Orbán and Fico. But such a Polish government would surely play the anti-European card and stake its foreign policy on friendship with Trump. Washington officials, including Kristi Noem, who visited Poland for the CPAC conference a few days before the election, were open in their support for Karol Nawrocki, RMF24’s Karol Żak reports. During his campaign, the new president agreed with Confederation's demand to reject any Ukrainian membership of Nato. Such a move not only strikes at Poland's vital interests, but is one of Russia's explicit demands for an end to the war in Ukraine. We must therefore brace ourselves for the arrival of a kind of Putinism in Poland.

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Over a year ago, I talked with Ukrainian journalist Vitaly Portnikov. I asked him about the consequences for Poland of a Ukrainian defeat in the war with Russia. It was commonly believed that if Russia managed to subjugate Ukraine, Moscow would then strike further west, against Poland and the Baltic states. But Portnikov replied: “If Ukraine and other former Soviet republics collapse and Putin manages to restore his empire within the borders of the Soviet Union prior to its collapse in 1991, then Poland can forget about independence for decades. In such a scenario, politicians who advocate a pro-Russian policy of coexistence with Moscow will come to power. The Poland we know today will cease to exist and we will only be able to rebuild it once Russia loses its influence.”

That scenario now looks more plausible than ever. And yet Russia remains completely unable to defeat Ukraine and restore the USSR.