(JTA) — Poland is heading to the polls in a neck-and-neck presidential election that will shape the country’s future on the world stage — and its approach to history.
On Sunday, voters are casting their ballots in the decisive runoff between Rafał Trzaskowski, the liberal-centrist mayor of Warsaw, and Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing historian who has helmed a nationalist effort to rewrite Poland’s role in the Holocaust.
The candidates offer starkly different visions for Poland. Trzaskowski promises cooperation with the European Union and social changes, such as loosening restrictive abortion laws and allowing civil unions for LGBTQ people. He would clear a path for Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who came to power with the centrist Civic Platform party in 2023, to deliver democratic reforms.
Meanwhile, Nawrocki, who has the support of US President Donald Trump, is backed by the right-wing Law and Justice party that led Poland from 2015 to 2023. The party isolated Poland from the EU, was scrutinized for undermining democratic norms and tightening government control over the judiciary, the media and Polish history.
Law and Justice promoted historical narratives about Polish victimhood and resistance to the Nazis, while delegitimizing research on Polish antisemitism or Poles who killed Jews. In 2018, the country passed a law that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes. Although the infraction was downgraded from a crime punishable with three years in prison to a civil offense, critics say it had a chilling effect on historical research.
Nawrocki heads the Institute of National Remembrance, which gained a reputation for advancing nationalist narratives about the Holocaust under the Law and Justice government. He has centered that version of history in his campaign.
Right-wing politics in Poland
One hot-button issue for Nawrocki is the 2021 trial of historians Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, who were accused of defaming a late Polish mayor in their book about Polish collaboration with the Germans, “Night Without End.” The scholars appealed and won the case, but they still attract fury from some right-wing politicians like Nawrocki.
“He’s saying a lot that Poles should be proud of our history,” said Maria Ferenc, a Holocaust researcher at the University of Wrocław. “He also referred to the Righteous Among the Nations during a debate with Trzaskowski, saying that we have to defend the good name of the Poles from researchers.” (Righteous Among the Nations is an honorific for non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust.)
Trzaskowski won the first round of the presidential race by an unexpectedly narrow margin on May 18, earning 31% of the vote against Nawrocki’s 30%. Far-right candidates Sławomir Mentzen and Grzegorz Braun came in third and fourth, giving Nawrocki a larger pool of right-wing voters to draw on in the runoff.
Nawrocki hasn’t wasted time courting those voters. He signed a list of Mentzen’s demands, such as refusing to ratify Ukraine’s entry to NATO, send Polish soldiers to Ukraine or expand EU powers.
He has also sought favor from Braun, who made antisemitism a feature of his campaign, asking his rivals in a televised debate last month what they planned to do about the “Judaization” of Poland. In 2023, Braun used a fire extinguisher to blow out Hanukkah candles in parliament and violently stormed a lecture by Grabowski. This year he disrupted a moment of silence for the Holocaust to denounce “Jewish genocide in Gaza.” His campaign posters showed him posing with a fire extinguisher.
Nawrocki told Braun that he would fight “all the disgusting attacks” on Poland by Holocaust scholars, and has previously promised to end the tradition of lighting Hanukkah candles in the presidential palace. He has not responded to Braun’s demand that he conduct exhumations in Jedwabne, where hundreds of Jews were killed in 1941.
A 2000 book by Jan Tomasz Gross, “Neighbors,” asserted that Polish civilians carried out the Jedwabne murders and sparked intense national debate. Polish nationalists like Braun insist that Poles were not involved in the killing and call for exhumations. The Institute of National Remembrance investigated the site in 2000 and confirmed that Poles perpetrated the massacre, but exhumations were stopped because Jewish law forbids disturbing the dead.
Presidents have a limited governmental role in Poland, where power is dominated by parliament and the prime minister. But the next president will be more than symbolically important. He can veto almost any law passed by parliament, aside from the budget, and commands the army. Presidential elections also have much higher participation than parliamentary elections, said Ferenc, making them a more reliable barometer of public sentiment.
The president wields another power that can influence historical research: signing off on awarding professorships. In one case, current Law and Justice-aligned President Andrzej Duda refused to appoint Jewish scholar Michal Bilewicz, who researches antisemitism, as a full professor at the University of Warsaw.
Dariusz Stola, a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences, was the first director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Under the eight-year Law and Justice government, he refused to cooperate with political interventions in the museum’s activities. He was pushed out in 2019, despite winning a competition to extend his tenure.
Stola said the fear that the government instilled in academia and cultural institutions affected a generation of people who decided that studying Polish-Jewish history was not worth the risk.
“How can you count unwritten articles?” said Stola. “How can you count unwritten dissertations or research grants that no one applied for, even if he or she wanted to, but had second thoughts — because, well, do they really want to be called a traitor?”
Sebastian Rejak was working at Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, focusing on Jewish Diaspora relations, when Law and Justice came to power. He left in 2017 to work at the American Jewish Committee and later Krakow’s Jewish Community Center, rejoining the ministry only under the current government in 2025.
“I realized that the Foreign Ministry was no longer interested in taking advantage of my experience in relationships with the Jewish community globally, with Jewish organizations,” Rejak said about his decision to quit eight years ago.
It was only in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell, that Poland began efforts to reconcile with the murder of 3 million Jews there and the intertwining of Jewish and Polish history. But many projects of “memory activism” were cut short by the right-wing government. Processes that were easy to crush are much more difficult to rebuild, according to Rejak.
“What had been achieved by 2015 was the hard work of more than a generation of people, and not just a few brave historians or sociologists, but sometimes people taking care of Jewish cemeteries or doing some little local research,” said Rejak.
He added, “It took just a few years to reverse that, and it will take again 10 years, 15, 20, to go back to where we were in 2015 — because a lot of people in Poland have come to believe that Polish history is almost exclusively heroism and martyrdom.”