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“We won!” announced Rafał Trzaskowski to an ecstatic crowd of supporters. It was just after 9 p.m. this past Sunday, and the exit polls had declared the dashing mayor of Warsaw the winner of Poland’s hard-fought, high-stakes presidential race.
Trzaskowski’s rival, Karol Nawrocki, is a conservative historian with a past that would make notorious “Red Scare”-era Washington lawyer Roy Cohn proud. Weeks before the election, President Trump had invited Nawrocki to the Oval Office and blessed him. Then, just days before the vote, his homeland secretary, Kristi Noem, traveled to Poland to deliver a florid endorsement of his candidacy.
European mandarins who had watched the Trumpian encroachment with impotent rage welcomed Trzaskowski’s triumph as a much-needed middle-finger to MAGA.
Their exultation, alas, was premature. Two hours after Trzaskowski’s proclamation of victory came a more comprehensive poll that put his opponent ahead in the count. As the hours passed, his numbers rose. And by 1 a.m. this past Monday, it was clear that Trzaskowski had lost and Nawrocki — the Trump proxy — was on course to become the next president of what is unquestionably the most successful post-Cold War country in Europe.
The Polish presidency, though largely ornamental, matters because it is endowed with the power to paralyze the government. But the outcome of Sunday’s election is more than a domestic triumph for Nawrocki and the populist-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party that backed him; it has serious implications for Europe and the transatlantic relationship. To grasp its significance, consider Poland’s astounding transformation over the past quarter century.
Just over two decades ago, when Poland joined the European Union, it was a grim place that belched out emigrants and workers. Warsaw was a drab reliquary of communist architecture whose centerpiece was a Stalinist tower. Today, Poland’s GDP is approaching $1 trillion. The living standards of its people are the envy of the world. Its army is larger than the armed forces of Britain or France. Central Warsaw is clustered with glass-clad skyscrapers. Those who emigrated abroad in search of opportunity are gradually returning home.
Poles who value the EU’s role in their nation’s modernization view Nawrocki as a peril to Poland’s democratic gains and European alignment. When the PiS party was in power, between 2015 and 2023, it tightened Poland’s already severe abortion laws, packed the constitutional tribunal with loyalists, drifted toward “legal exit” from Europe and invited retaliatory sanctions from Brussels.
PiS was supplanted in the 2023 elections by a motley coalition led by Civic Platform, which has since been locked in a stalemate with the incumbent president, Andrzej Duda, also of PiS. A Trzaskowski triumph would have unshackled the more liberal-minded Civic Platform to pursue its legislative agenda, including the legalization of same-sex unions. Nawrocki’s win has thwarted this prospect.
Much like in MAGA-world, Nawrocki presents himself as a “family-first” conservative for whom marriage is “a union between a man and a woman.” Is he a danger to minorities? “Nawrocki holds strong political views, but he is certainly not an extremist,” explains Mikołaj Wild, an erstwhile high-ranking official in the prime minister’s office and one of Poland’s most respected civil servants. “He represents the views of the majority of Poles, which may appear radically conservative in some other European countries.”
Nawrocki is not so much an aberration in Poland as a product of a politics torn by clashing visions of identity. Poland’s success has reactivated religious, cultural and national impulses that had long been dormant. Flush with an economy their grandparents could scarcely dream of, Poles now fight over what it means to be Polish and European, Christian and modern. The presidential race has shown just how deep these divisions run.
The loser, Trzaskowski, is a Polish hybrid of Adlai Stevenson and John Kerry: A polished career politician who speaks half a dozen languages, he is well-meaning, well-bred, liberal, competent and admired in Brussels. He is also way more progressive. As Warsaw’s mayor, he didn’t stop at marching in Pride parades. He also ordered the removal of Christian crosses from government buildings — an overreach that, while earning him the adulation of Poles in the big cities, infuriated conservatives in the hinterlands who see their history as being inextricably bound up with the Catholic Church.
And their champion is Nawrocki. He was born into poverty in the port city of Gdansk. Ports, particularly in destitute places, draw organized crime, and Nawrocki was exposed to this world at an early age. He sought purpose in athletics, became a boxer and occasionally participated in football brawls. Working as a security guard at a hotel, he is alleged to have procured prostitutes for guests. This is not the curriculum vitae of a defender of Christian values.
Nawrocki, however, became a beneficiary of a deepening resentment among Poles who — believing their social values were being eroded and their sovereignty endangered by liberal elites pandering to Brussels — were willing to overlook supposed defects in his character in favor of his commitment to put “Poland first.” He spoke for a people who, as Wild puts it, “are conservative and disagree with the socially progressive agenda of Rafał Trzaskowski.”
This attitude is particularly strong in places such as Radom. An hour’s train ride from Warsaw, Radom was once a proud center of Polish political life. Today, it is an object of mockery in the cities, “a national joke,” as a filmmaker in Warsaw called it. Its people are dismissed as gauche and gaudy.
Radom voters I met seemed fed up with the condescension that comes their way. The owner of a café and bar there told me that nowhere else in Poland or Europe did she feel the same sense of community. Radom has a great deal in common with Rust Belt America. And what galls its people — like in the US — is the knowledge that so many of their own compatriots view them as inferior beings when they see themselves as a repository of so much that is worth preserving about their country.
“A lot of Poles in the cities want to be British, French, or Italian,” one Radom resident told me. “We are proud to be Polish.”
He was for Nawrocki. Trzaskowski, for all his liberal theatricality, proved disconcertingly flexible in the final days of the campaign as he attempted to court Nawrocki’s voters by speaking their language. Rather than win them over, however, his flip-flopping alienated his own voters. “Poles saw through the hypocrisy,” says 29-year-old entrepreneur Filip Krzewski.
Nawrocki profited too from a growing frustration with Ukraine in a nation that is still intensely hostile to Moscow. Since Russia’s invasion of 2022, Poland has sheltered more than a million Ukrainian refugees. It has granted them the same privileges as Polish nationals. Three years on, there is a tincture of outrage among Poles.
As one Warsaw banker complained to me: “Some of them drive Lamborghinis, but what are they contributing to Poland?”
As a nationalist historian Nawrocki is alert to Poland’s unresolved history with Ukraine. But he is emphatically not pro-Russian. In fact, he is on a list of wanted men in Russia for ordering the demolition of Red Army monuments in Poland.
He has, however, refused to endorse Kyiv’s admission into NATO in a departure from PiS’s earlier position. And his pledge not to send Polish soldiers to fight in Ukraine has worked to his advantage. “One million Ukrainian men have fled Ukraine,” a student at Warsaw University told me. “Why should we go and fight for them?” Nawrocki’s win is a gain for Trump’s “peace plan.”
Domestically, Nawrocki’s victory cements PiS’s chokehold on Poland’s governance. His great luck as he takes office is the unwieldy nature of the government itself. Poland’s ruling coalition is a brittle alliance of ideological antagonists led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Barring a miracle, Nawrocki will almost certainly obstruct legislation. Polish democracy is alive. Its health, however, depends on its democratically elected leaders’ ability to work together.
Abroad, Nawrocki’s Euroscepticism, combined with his alignment with Trump against EU integration, is certain to impair relations with Brussels. His posture toward Ukraine could strain NATO’s eastern flank and push more responsibility onto Western European states—though, to be sure, Poland’s NATO and EU commitments should limit the extent of any drastic shift. And his election, reviving the MAGA movement following the demoralizing defeat of Trumpist candidates in Romania, Australia, Germany and Canada, will also revitalize populist movements across the continent and beyond.
Trump has already heaped praise upon himself for Nawrocki’s victory. “TRUMP ALLY WINS IN POLAND, SHOCKING ALL EUROPE,” he posted on Truth Social after the result.
Going forward, Warsaw’s relationship with Washington — a nonpartisan concern until now — looks destined to degenerate into a partisan sport. Democrats will console Tusk; MAGA luminaries already see Nawrocki as a missionary of their brand of nationalism.
And what of Trump, who has long nursed his own grievances against Europe’s political masters in Paris, London and Brussels? Well, he has just become equipped with a powerful weapon to wield against them for his entertainment.
English (US)