VIENNA – Political Europe was closely following the Polish presidential election campaign, which ended on Sunday evening with the victory of the conservative-sovereigntist candidate, Karol Nawrocki.
The 43-year-old historian, director of the Polish National Remembrance Institute (IPN), won the presidential race despite polls foreseeing his defeat, gathering 50.9% of the votes while his liberal rival, Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, received 49.1%. Nawrocki’s victory is considered a serious blow to the European Union and to the Polish pro-EU center-left government led since December 2023 by Donald Tusk, former president of the EU Council.
The elected Polish president, who ran as an independent candidate, was backed by the former ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS). But he owes his victory to the alliance of sovereigntist, nationalistic, and extreme right parties, “Konfederacja” (Confederation for Freedom and Independence).
Slawomir Mentzen, a controversial leader of the Confederation and its candidate for the presidency, finished third in the first round of the election, scoring almost 15% of the votes – double the support his party won in the last general election of 2023. Becoming the “kingmaker” of this presidential election, Mentzen invited both leading candidates – Nawrocki and Trzaskowski – to an interview on his popular YouTube channel.
The platforms campaigned on in Poland
He presented to the two a declaration that included eight points, which he considered essential to the future of Poland: commitment to opposing the EU Green Deal, to rejecting the introduction of new taxes, to refusing the adoption of the euro in Poland, to opposing Ukraine’s accession to NATO, to preventing the transfer of additional powers to EU institutions, to maintaining cash as a legal tender, to resisting censorship and upholding freedom of speech, and to refusing to send any Polish troops to Ukraine under any circumstances.
This document is clearly an anti-EU manifest. Nawrocki not only committed to all the included points but even signed it. His liberal rival rejected four of the eight points, thereby disapproving of the document.
Mentzen avoided endorsing any of the candidates but called his followers to vote for “the person they think will be the best.” By doing so, Mentzen assured Nawrocki’s victory. Taking into consideration the antisemitic and racist elements within the Confederation, one of Nawrocki’s first tests after being sworn in will be to clearly and openly distance himself from these tendencies.
Nawrocki, who is said to share the political views of US President Donald Trump and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, is expected to continue the defiant line of his predecessor, the conservative president Andrzej Duda, in confronting the current Polish government and blocking its planned liberal reforms.
Despite the fact that he headed the National Remembrance Institute, which was at the center of the “Holocaust crisis” between Israel and Poland, Nawrocki will most probably continue Duda’s warm and friendly approach to Israel. The “Holocaust crisis” broke out in January 2018, when Nawrocki served as the director of the World War II Museum in his birth town, Gdansk.
An amendment to the National Remembrance Institute Law, adopted by the Polish parliament, was interpreted by Israeli historians and politicians as aiming to censor historical research into the participation of Poles in the Holocaust. The amendment was later vetoed by Duda, but relations between the countries reached an unprecedented low since the resumption of diplomatic ties after the fall of communism in Poland.
Only the war in Ukraine enabled a normalization of relations between Warsaw and Jerusalem, to which Duda contributed much together with his Israeli counterpart, President Isaac Herzog.
However, since the Tusk government was formed, relations between the countries seem strained again. The Polish center-left government was one of the few governments in Europe that did not express solidarity with Israel after the massacres of October 7 by sending any of its members to visit Israel.