Polish Elections

The conservative victory in Poland’s second round of presidential elections on Sunday is the first overseas political victory of the second Trump Administration. Dr. Karol Nawrocki, who heads Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance and was backed by the opposition “Law & Justice” (PiS) party, narrowly beat liberal Mayor of Warsaw Rafal Trzaskowski from the ruling Civic Coalition (KO). The electoral commission made the announcement early Monday morning: 50.89% vs. 49.11%.

Prior to that, Trzaskowski had already made a victory speech the night before but was forced to concede after the official results were confirmed, which represented a blow to the world’s liberal-globalist elite. Soros-connected foreign donors reportedly bankrolled a smear campaign against his rivals just before the first round in mid-May, which Trump-aligned US lawmakers urged the EU to look into, and he himself said during his last debate with Nawrocki that he prefers Soros over Orban. Ukraine also favored him too.

Trzaskowski supports second-time Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s domestic agenda in totality. This includes passing “hate speech” laws, curtailing legal restrictions on abortion (Poland’s are among the toughest anywhere in the West), and normalizing non-traditional sexual relations in society. Both are fervent supporters of Ukraine, including its refugees that fled to Poland after 2022, but moderated their rhetoric on them somewhat during the campaign season in an attempt to appeal to a wider electorate.

About Polish voters, they surprised observers after a total of 21.15% of them voted for either Slawomir Mentzen (14.81%) or Grzegorz Braun (6.34%), the so-called “far-right” candidates in the first round. It was their supporters who in turn handed Nawrocki the presidency during the second round after he came in second during the first round with 29.54% of the vote compared to Trzaskowski’s 31.36%. This speaks to the rising appeal of their ideas over the past few years and is a trend worth closely following.

With another PiS-backed President to replace outgoing Andrzej Duda after his term expires on 6 August, KO Prime Minister Tusk now has no chance of implementing his domestic agenda until the next parliamentary (Sejm) elections sometime in fall 2027, thus raising the prospect of early elections. That’s because KO doesn’t command the three-fifths parliamentary majority required to override presidential vetoes of the sort that Duda wasn’t afraid to wield to stop Tusk’s agenda and Nawrocki won’t be either.

Therefore, without early elections, the socio-political system that PiS implemented during their eight years in power as the ruling party till fall 2023’s parliamentary loss will remain intact for the most part. On the international front, this could lead to problems in Polish-EU relations, while also serving to restore Poland’s earlier reputation as a conservative bastion on the continent. Both outcomes would work against KO’s domestic agenda but so too would their potential loss of parliament in early elections.

Another important point to make is that Polish-Ukrainian ties might remain complicated since Nawrocki opposes its membership in NATO and the dispatch of Polish troops to the country in any capacity. As part of Tusk’s proactive electioneering even before the campaign started but also to an extent in response to the bilateral challenges that he inherited, he began taking a firmer line on Ukraine. This took the form of reviving the Volhynia Genocide dispute and deciding to only send more military aid on credit.

Regarding the first, Ukraine dragged its feet for the past three decades over Poland’s request that it exhume and properly bury the over 100,000 civilian victims (estimated by the Polish side to mostly be women and children) of World War II-era Ukrainian fascists. This was all the more infuriating after Ukraine did precisely such a service for dead Wehrmacht soldiers years ago by creating five large cemeteries that can hold up to 50,000 remains each.

As for the second, the Defense Minister announced last summer that Poland had already given Ukraine everything for free that it could, after which the Foreign Minister proposed a few months later to provide more on credit. Earlier in February, Duda published data on the official presidential website showing that Poland had given Ukraine more tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and aircraft than anyone else. All of this was for free, but Tusk recently reaffirmed that he now wants Poland to profit from its ties with Ukraine.

To be sure, it was under Duda and former PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki that Poland emptied its stockpiles for Ukraine for nothing in exchange, yet their party started taking a harder line towards Ukraine before fall 2023’s parliamentary elections. This was mostly over the escalating grain dispute at the time which saw the EU temporarily remove tariffs on this Ukrainian commodity out of solidarity but at the expense of local farmers. Mutual criticism on other issues then followed that one.

There was a brief thaw after Tusk returned to the premiership that December, but then his government started taking a firmer line on Ukraine around the middle of last year shortly after they signed a comprehensive security pact. Ties nevertheless remained manageable as proven by Ukraine asking Poland to help rebuild its maritime sector and then signing a cooperation agreement last month where Poland will help Ukraine join the EU in exchange for Ukraine helping Polish companies in the country.

These mixed signals might have made some Poles believe that the media drama over the government’s decision to revive the Volhynia Genocide dispute and only send military aid to Ukraine on credit was more for electioneering purposes than a sincere policy recalibration towards Kiev by Tusk. This whole time, however, he insisted that Poland won’t send troops to Ukraine under any circumstances. He maintained this stance even after what Trump’s Special Envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg said in mid-May.  

He told Fox that “We are talking about a ‘resilience force’… This involves the British, French, as well as Germans, and now the Poles, who will place forces west of the Dnipro River, which means they are beyond Russia’s reach”, thus prompting swift rebukes from the Defense and Foreign Ministers. Be that as it may, Trzaskowski’s victory could have led to an equally swift policy reversal since the President must approve the Prime Minister’s request to deploy troops abroad, and he likely would have if Tusk asked.

By contrast, Nawrocki signed an eight-point pledge given to him by Mentzen after the first round that included him promising not to send troops to Ukraine under any circumstances and opposing its membership in NATO, among other issues like not ceding any more sovereignty to the EU. Therefore, provided that he stays true to his word, observers can expect with a high degree of confidence that Poland’s ties with Ukraine and the EU will remain complicated exactly as was earlier predicted.

Relations with Germany could also take a hit given that PiS chief Jaroslaw Kaczynski accused Tusk of being a “German agent” after fall 2023’s parliamentary election loss. Without veering too far onto a tangent, it’s enough for observers to know that Tusk’s closeness with Germany during his tenure as President of the European Council from 2014-2019 helped shape this perception. There are other factors too, such as his family history and political preferences, but they’re beyond the scope of this analysis.  

Ties with the US will remain strong with Nawrocki as President seeing as how he just met Trump at the White House last month in a clear sign of the latter’s endorsement. Although foreign policy formulation isn’t within the legal competency of the presidency, such figures do indeed play a very powerful informal role, and this can in turn either greatly aid or obstruct the government’s foreign policy. In this case, Nawrocki is expected to reaffirm Poland’s role as the US’ top ally in Central & Eastern Europe (CEE).

With regard to that region, which refers to every country east of the former Iron Curtain apart from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, Poland has the largest population, the largest economy, and now NATO’s third-largest army, all of which are attractive from America’s standpoint. While Trzaskowski would have still worked with Tusk to retain Poland’s privileged place in the US’ grand strategy, Tusk recently began flirting with France as a counterbalance, but Nawrocki isn’t expected to go along with this in that way.

Growing military-strategic ties with France will probably remain on track, but he won’t allow them to be instrumentalized in any way that risks the perception that Poland prefers France over the US, which will understandably please Trump. This observation segues into the future of Polish-Russian relations, whose nature will depend in part on the outcome of the fragile Ukrainian peace process upon which the US exerts some influence but is also independent thereof for long-standing historical and strategic reasons.

PiS despises Russia since Kaczynski blames it for the 2010 Smolensk air disaster that killed his twin brother, the then-President of Poland Lech Kaczynski, and a large number of government officials. Nawrocki also oversaw the destruction of many Red Army monuments across Poland in his role as President of the Institute of National Remembrance. There’s also the fact that Poland began emptying its stockpiles for Ukraine under PiS rule, which played a role in perpetuating the conflict to the present day.  

These policies are predicated on PiS’ perception of Russia as Poland’s irreconcilable rival, including over the space between them in today’s Ukraine and Belarus, which has radically hardened since the aforesaid air disaster that could have led to a rapprochement had it not happened. That said, Tusk has also come to harden his approach towards Russia from his more moderate stance during the Smolensk-era period, but that’s due to him being a liberal-globalist who hates Putin’s populist-conservatism.

For this reason, both Trzaskowski and Nawrocki were expected to preside over Poland’s continued border fortification megaproject known as the “East Shield” along Kaliningrad and Belarus, which Russia considers to be a needless initiative that’ll keep bilateral tensions high for years to come. Likewise, both presidential candidates were expected to preside over Poland’s continued self-assumed leadership of the “Three Seas Initiative” (3SI), which is a modern-day “Intermarium” aimed at linking together all of CEE.

Although officially aimed at apolitical economic integration, some of the infrastructure projects that are connected to it have dual military-logistics purposes that could facilitate the “military Schengen’s” plans of optimizing the dispatch of troops and equipment eastward to the Union State’s borders during a crisis. Under total KO rule, Poland might have tried to imbue this initiative with some degree of liberal-globalist ideology, but the continuation of Poland’s hybrid PiS-KO government will likely prevent that.

If early elections are held in which conservatives, populists, and nationalists end up controlling parliament, then the Polish-led 3SI could seek to galvanize like-minded CEE societies against Brussels in order to counterbalance the pernicious influence of the bloc’s liberal-globalists. In any case, regardless of its ideological disposition, the 3SI is considered threatening to Russia due to its unofficial connection with the “military Schengen” that Poland signed with Germany and the Netherlands in early 2024.

For these reasons, Polish-Russian relations aren’t expected to improve, but they might not deteriorate much further than they already have so long as Nawrocki stays true to his word by opposing any request from Tusk to dispatch Polish troops to Ukraine. The same also goes for him and the powerful PiS apparatus behind him exerting whatever influence they can over the military to prevent Anglo-American “deep state” subversives from provoking tensions along the borders with Kaliningrad and Belarus.

Under Nawrocki, Poland will likely continue Tusk’s policy of profiting from ties with Ukraine by extending more military aid on credit, not to mention exploring opportunities for Polish companies there. These are troubling policies from Russia’s national security perspective, but they’re comparatively much less so than the scenario of Trzaskowski approving Tusk’s speculative request to send troops to Ukraine after the elections. Once the Ukrainian Conflict inevitably ends, a new Polish-Russian modus vivendi might follow.

All things considered, both domestic and international, Poland’s elections were therefore a prominent geopolitical development in Europe. Relations with the EU, Ukraine, and even Germany to an extent might worsen, albeit to differing degrees and perhaps not too dramatically, while strategic ties with the US will strengthen. Relations with Russia will remain difficult, but they’re unlikely to lead to war since Nawrocki promised not to authorize the dispatch of troops there, so Poles can breathe a sigh of relief.