Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party. He runs Article7 – Intelligence for democrats.
I found Warsaw subdued this week.
Its mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, had narrowly lost the presidential election to a football-hooligan turned nationalist historian, and son of a toolmaker, Karol Nawrocki.
This was the second round in which the top two candidates from a fragmented field faced off.
Poland’s main parties are the centrist-liberal Civic Platform (PO), who currently lead the governing coalition headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and the Catholic-nationalist Law and Justice (PiS). Though Poland’s presidency is notionally above politics, this is a fiction (most obviously when Lech Kaczynski held the presidency while his twin brother, Jaroslaw, was Prime Minister).
The President represents Poland abroad on ceremonial occasions, but, crucially, can veto legislation.
Nawrocki, backed by PiS, retained the presidency for them despite a plague of scandals: not only his football hooligan past (a youthful indiscretion, naturally) nor his apparent resort to working as a pimp to put himself through university (there but for the grace of God we all go surely, surely) but a sordid incident in which he appears to have scammed an elderly man out of an apartment, under the pretext of caring for him.
The man was found to be living in a state care facility having been relieved of his home by the president-elect.
How to account for the Warsaw mayor’s second failure? Trzaskowski had also been defeated narrowly by PiS’s stolid Andrej Duda at the previous election
The Trszazkowski supporters I spoke to often began with the most immediate reaction to electoral defeat — ‘if only the campaign had done more of what *I* believed in, we could have won.’
Whether the campaign had said too little or much about the war; given too much or too little attention to the countryside (a Warsaw mayor has to try doubly hard of course); focused on young men instead of young women (or vice versa) or not enough on turning out the elderly — to vote; turning the elderly out of their homes seems more to have been Nawrocki’s thing.
Maintaining the coalition that returned Donald Tusk to power, which stretches from left wing feminists radicalised by the previous government’s draconian anti abortion ban to farmers voting for what Poles still refer to colloquially as the “peasants party”, would always have required considerable skill.
But it is not as if Nawrocki’s support did not itself comprise a coalition. The traditionalist Catholic Russophobes of Law and Justice made strange bedfellows for the anticlerical libertarians supporting Slawomir Mentzen of the pro-Russian Konfederacja: 88 per cent of Mentzen’s voters switched to Nawrocki in the second round.
Moreover, Poland has always had a nationalist far-right fringe admixed with its extensive network of football ultras. Its independence day on 11 November usually features violent demonstrations by nationalist extremists. Many of them probably voted in the first round for Grzegorz Braun, notorious for setting fire to a Hannukah menorah in the Polish parliament. A portion of young men, certainly, have been stunned by the huge social advances made by Polish women in recent decades: Konfederacja’s openly misogynist rhetoric evidently appeals to them.
Women, in contrast, were disappointed by the Coalition’s failure to even get abortion reform through the parliament (they would have expected President Duda to veto it, but in the end the Coalition wasn’t able to hold its own parliamentary caucus together on the issue).
Disillusion was broad. As Katarzyna Węzyk of Newsweek puts it: “the Coalition didn’t deliver for basically anyone — didn’t deliver abortion and same sex unions for the left, didn’t deliver deregulation and lower healthcare social security charges for the more neoliberal minded. And its champion in the election during which many people were angry at the establishment was a politician who couldn’t embody the establishment more if he tried.”
This failure to deliver was compounded by a lacklustre campaign. The huge mobilisation that preceded Tusk’s victory in 2023 was nowhere to be seen. The campaign slogan “Wygra Cała Polska” (All Poland Will Win) belonged ill-suited a candidate whose main vulnerability is smugness. In the end Trzaskowski’s campaign polled 10 per cent fewer votes than Donald Tusk’s for Prime Minister in 2023. He lost votes across the board.
The defeat is a serious warning for Tusk’s coalition, which has struggled to defend its own agenda. Particularly baffling, observes Ben Stanley, associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at SPSS University Warsaw has been Tusk’s refusal to appoint a government spokesman on the grounds that “in such a heterogenous coalition it was better for the parties each to speak for themselves.”
It now has two and half years, in which it won’t be able to pass defining social or constitutional legislation, to sharpen its message and begin delivering for enough of its supporters. The PO in particular will need to identify new leaders that can carry forward its argument that Poland’s future is best secured by being a fully functioning democracy participating in the EU. A sliver lining is that it can control economic policy (the president can’t veto the budget) so will have a relatively free hand to distribute the proceeds of Poland’s continued strong growth. PiS meanwhile needs to find a way to renew itself if it is to keep ahead of Mentzen, who will be well-placed to dominate the nationalist vote. It would have to moderate its position on Russian order to win in a country as suspicious of Russia as Poland, but if it did, it would destabilise Europe’s leading land power.
The Kremlin will be getting its plans ready.
