Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s new president, has a shadowy past

IN 2018 TADEUSZ BATYR, a previously unknown author, published a book about the life of a notorious gang boss in communist Poland. “His biography is a ready script for an action film,” wrote Mr Batyr. Appearing in disguise in a televised interview, he praised Karol Nawrocki, a historian, for having inspired him to write the book.

Mr Nawrocki, then director of Poland’s Museum of the Second World War, returned the compliment. He confirmed that he had met Mr Batyr to help with his writing. Then, in March 2025, it emerged that there was no “Tadeusz Batyr”—it was a pen-name used by Mr Nawrocki, who was by then a front-runner in Poland’s presidential election.

The 42-year-old conservative, who on June 2nd was declared the winner of the run-off with 50.9% of the vote, may have had good reason to keep his interest in the underworld hidden. During the campaign it has come out that his knowledge of the shadier sides of Gdansk, his home city, is more than an academic pursuit.

When the populist-nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party picked Mr Nawrocki as their candidate in November, he was relatively obscure. After leaving the museum in 2021 he directed the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a state agency tasked with archiving and prosecuting Nazi and communist-era crimes. What he lacked in political experience, the party reckoned, he could make up for in earnest patriotism. Conservative commentators at the time praised his “strength of character” and his “humble and working-class background”, overlooking his rigid speaking style and lack of charisma.

PiS, now in opposition, hoped to repeat its success of 2015, when a little-known member of the European Parliament, Andrzej Duda, won the presidential race (and was re-elected in 2020). Mr Nawrocki, who has never been a member of any political party, would be untainted by any failures of the PiS government that was booted out of office in 2023. Now elected, he is expected to wield the presidential veto to obstruct the centrist government’s reforms, in an attempt to spur PiS’s comeback in parliamentary elections in 2027.

Mr Nawrocki’s clean image was quickly scuffed up. In January, a newspaper revealed that, as museum director, he had stayed in his institution’s luxury guest flat for over 200 nights. Perhaps more seriously, other reports alleged that Poland’s security services blocked his access to classified information while at the IPN, something his critics, including Donald Tusk, the prime minister, called a “red flag”.

A new onslaught came in the final weeks of the campaign, beginning with allegations that Mr Nawrocki had defrauded a pensioner, which he denies. Then, in an interview on May 16th, he admitted that he had in 2009 taken part in illegal pitched fights of football hooligans. Mr Nawrocki was a junior boxing champion, but many of his companions in “manly combat”, as he described it, are thought to have been mobsters. And finally, last week, journalists alleged that Mr Nawrocki arranged prostitutes for guests while working as a hotel security guard in the early 2000s.

Mr Nawrocki called this a political smear campaign. He has played down his overnight stays and the brawls. He denies the allegations of procuring sex workers for others too. But critics point out that he declined to challenge the claims in a special Polish election court, even though it could have returned a verdict in 24 hours, clearing his name ahead of the vote.

Despite the scandals, Mr Nawrocki squeaked past the liberal mayor of Warsaw, who had won the first round of voting. That is in part because Mr Nawrocki is won over more of the hard-right voters (a total of 22% of the vote) whose preferred candidates had been eliminated from the race.

He eagerly courted them. Last month Mr Nawrocki was interviewed on YouTube by Slawomir Mentzen, a hard-right candidate who came third in the first round. He happily signed Mr Mentzen’s list of political demands, including vetos on tax rises or attempts to liberalise Poland’s draconian abortion rules. He agreed with his host that Ukraine should for now be kept out of NATO, a sharp departure from the pro-Ukrainian line of previous PiS-backed presidents.

But the starkest contrast with Mr Trzaskowski is perhaps in his approach to the European Union. “We don’t want to be a European Union province,” he told a rally in April. He has promised to veto the EU’s Green Deal, a policy to eliminate or offset greenhouse gas emissions, calling it “eco-madness”, and has denounced the bloc’s migration pact, a collective package to reduce and redistribute asylum-seekers. He says he stands for “a sovereign, ambitious Poland, not one that listens to voices from Brussels, Berlin and Paris”.

Mr Nawrocki looked eagerly to America’s president, Donald Trump. In April, he visited Mr Trump at the White House to seek an endorsement. Mr Trump did not openly back him, but on May 27th at CPAC, a global MAGA gathering in Poland, he received fulsome support from Kristi Noem, Mr Trump’s homeland security secretary. She said Mr Nawrocki would make “just as strong of a leader” as her boss, making no effort to maintain any diplomatic neutrality in foreign elections. Two days later Viktor Orban, Hungary’s pro-Russian prime minister, also chimed in: “Long live Nawrocki!” Such endorsements, and Mr Nawrocki’s past, will alarm liberal-minded Poles. They must now come to terms with the fact that he is the president.■