Poland’s election will cement or ruin its standing in Europe

THE CHEERS at Rafal Trzaskowski’s election party on May 18th sounded unconvincing. So was his margin of victory. The liberal mayor of Warsaw came away with 31.4% of the vote in the first round of Poland’s presidential election, compared with 29.5% for his main rival, Karol Nawrocki, the candidate of the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party. Mr Trzaskowski, backed by Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, and his centrist Civic Coalition (KO), had long been the front-runner. Ahead of the run-off, scheduled for June 1st, the tables have turned.

The reason is the strong showing by not just Mr Nawrocki but the entire hard right. Slawomir Mentzen of Konfederacja, a MAGA-ish libertarian party, took 14.8% of the vote. Grzegorz Braun, an open antisemite, got a scary 6.3%. Polish liberals are worried. Mr Tusk needs Mr Trzaskowski to win to continue rolling back the state takeover that PiS undertook while in power from 2015-23. But rather than breaking Europe’s populist wave, Mr Trzaskowski may end up being swallowed by it.

The election comes as Poland is stepping into the international limelight. The war in Ukraine has shifted the continent’s centre of gravity to the east. Poland is the region’s heavyweight, an economically thriving country of 37m. Its position in Europe is at its strongest in centuries, says Adam Szlapka, the country’s minister for the European Union. The question is whether it can take advantage of it.

Poland’s new confidence starts with its economy. Real GDP per person has risen almost uninterruptedly for over three decades. Adjusted for purchasing power, it was 3.1 times as high in 2024 as in 1995, compared with 1.5 for the EU as a whole. Unemployment is under 3%, according to Eurostat’s seasonally-adjusted figures. Poland boasts the EU’s tallest building (and its fastest-rising housing prices). Hundreds of billions of euros in EU aid have helped bring roads, agriculture and health care up to European standards. Its infrastructure contrasts with the deterioration in its western neighbour: Polish trains are now more punctual than German ones.

Prosperity has brought fast-rising tax revenues. Where other European governments are fiscally constrained, Poland’s has freedom to act. A decade-old universal child-benefit programme pays 800 zlotys ($212) per month per child. Defence spending leapt from 2% of GDP in 2019 to 4.7% this year, and will exceed 5% in 2026. Some strains are showing: the budget deficit hit 6.6% of GDP last year, but public debt is a manageable 55% of GDP, though growing.

Until recently, Poland punched below its weight diplomatically. That worsened under PiS-led governments. PiS’s leaders picked fights with Germany and aligned Poland with Viktor Orban, Hungary’s autocratic leader. They also imitated Mr Orban’s takeover of the public media and the courts, thus clashing with the EU, whose aid was blocked for years.

Things began to shift with the war in Ukraine. Within Europe, Poland enjoyed an “I told you so” moment, having long warned complacent Westerners about Russia. Meanwhile, its role as the main logistical partner for American military aid to Ukraine strengthened the transatlantic relationship. The return to power in 2023 of Mr Tusk, a former president of the European Council, patched up relations with the EU. A trip to Kyiv this month by Mr Tusk and the leaders of Britain, France and Germany showcased Poland’s central role.

The stumbling block remains politics at home. The outgoing president, Andrzej Duda, is aligned with PiS, and has used his veto to stymie Mr Tusk’s agenda—especially over restoring the rule of law. On taking power in 2015, PiS packed the constitutional court and seized control of the body that appoints judges. European courts say judges appointed under PiS are therefore illegitimate. Mr Tusk’s government promised the EU it would fix the problem as a condition for restoring aid. But Mr Duda blocked a bill to vet the new judges.

Where Polish liberals see an effort to restore the rule of law, backers of PiS see tit-for-tat state capture. Under Mr Tusk “democracy can be openly violated for supposedly pro-democratic goals,” says Piotr Glinski, a former deputy prime minister under PiS. Some such claims have merit. The government stretched constitutional bounds to fire PiS’s propaganda chiefs at the state broadcaster. It now leans the other way, though less blatantly. But most of the complaints seem unfounded and political. The head of the PiS-aligned constitutional court is investigating what he calls a “coup d’état”, despite lacking any authority to launch investigations. As for the judges, Adam Bodnar, the justice minister, says he is duty-bound to restore EU standards. He rattles off a list of prosecutions of former PiS officials for self-enrichment and abuse of office: “Should we forget about those cases?”

Polls show frustration. A victory by Mr Trzaskowski would let Mr Tusk push ahead. But on some issues his problem is division in his own coalition, which includes the progressive New Left, the centrist Poland 2050 and the conservative agrarian Polish People’s Party (PSL). Liberals want the new government to relax PiS’s draconian anti-abortion laws, but face opposition, mostly from PSL. Ukraine policy, too, has become hostage to electoral concerns. Mr Tusk has opposed sending peacekeepers in the event of a truce, and has conditioned Ukraine’s EU membership on its handling of historical disputes over massacres of Poles by Ukrainian partisans during the second world war. Mr Trzaskowski has pledged to restrict benefits for some Ukrainian refugees. “They’ve become more PiS than PiS,” snipes Jacek Czaputowicz, a former foreign minister under PiS. A victory by Mr Trzaskowski would give Mr Tusk room for manoeuvre, says Piotr Buras of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The two contenders both back Ukraine against Russia and the beefing up of Poland’s defences. But Mr Trzaskowski is much closer to Brussels than to MAGA-world. Mr Nawrocki has positioned himself as a Trump whisperer. This paid off in early May, when the American president hosted him at the White House. If Mr Nawrocki wins, Mr Trump will probably do business with him rather than with Mr Tusk, widening the chasm between the government and the presidency.

But the stakes are highest at home. As president, Mr Nawrocki would seek to undermine the coalition at every step, so as to position PiS for parliamentary elections scheduled for 2027—or to bring down the government even earlier. Some of Mr Tusk’s conservative allies might defect. A new hard-right government would mean a ruthless round of score-settling.

On June 1st much will depend on Mr Mentzen’s mostly young electorate. Mr Nawrocki will not get all of them. They like free markets; PiS is statist. Mr Trzaskowski’s supporters hope leftists and centrists will be galvanised by the threat of PiS’s return. But the Warsaw mayor is getting contradictory advice: some urge him to be true to himself and show independence from Mr Tusk, while others want him to pander to conservatives.

Messrs Trzaskowski and Nawrocki are now battling for voters, more than half the electorate, who backed neither of them. The two big-party candidates’ cumulative share of the vote in the first round was lower than in any presidential election since the 1990s. The rise of Konfederacja and Mr Braun may augur the end of an era that has characterised Polish politics for 20 years, though not in the way some had hoped. “We thought the end of our duopoly would yield a really nice centre,” says a senior government official. Instead, it has yielded a far right poised to play kingmaker. ■