Is There
Political Life After Populism? Poland May Be the Test.
The
government is a centrist parliamentary coalition. To undo its predecessor’s
democratic backsliding, it needs the presidency. The election starts next week.
Andrew
Higgins Steven Erlanger
By Andrew
Higgins and Steven Erlanger
Andrew
Higgins reported from Zamosc, Poland, and Steven Erlanger from Warsaw.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/world/europe/poland-election.html
May 15,
2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
The hecklers
showed up eager to make a scene. Dressed in black and pumping their fists in
the air, they handed out stickers reading: “Stop L.G.B.T. Aggression.”
But their
target, the liberal mayor of Warsaw and a front-runner in a pivotal
presidential vote this month in Poland, disappointed them.
The mayor,
Rafal Trzaskowski, at a campaign rally in Poland’s conservative rural
borderlands near Ukraine, made no mention of gay or abortion rights, or any of
the other issues dear to progressives in the Polish capital — and that serve as
a red rag to many right-wing residents of the countryside.
Instead, he
spoke about the war in Ukraine, the need for a “strong and powerful Poland” and
plans to upgrade the military. The crowd waved red and white Polish flags that
Mr. Trzaskowski’s team had handed out to ensure that TV cameras framed their
candidate in a patriotic tableau.
Much is
riding on Poland’s presidential election, the first round of which will be held
on May 18, the same day voters in Romania are expected to hand victory in a
runoff for the presidency there to a hard-right nationalist and admirer of
President Trump.
In Poland,
Mr. Trzaskowski hopes to slow Europe’s Trump-empowered tide of right-wing
populism — by wrapping himself in the Polish flag, at least at campaign stops
outside Warsaw and liberal cities in the west.
Though not
responsible for setting policy, the largely ceremonial Polish presidency has
veto powers that can make plenty of trouble for a sitting government. The
outgoing conservative president, Andrzej Duda, has used that power extensively
to derail legislation passed by Parliament.
And that
makes the election to replace him a critical test of whether Poland’s centrist
government, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, can unwind the legacy of its
populist predecessor.
Mr. Tusk has
been cited as an example of how to turn back the rising tide of right-wing
populist nationalism in Europe, or in countries as disparate as Mexico and the
United States.
Mr. Tusk, a
veteran centrist politician and former senior European Union official, took
office in December after the previous governing party, Law and Justice, lost
its parliamentary majority. He promised “to chase away the darkness” and repair
the damage he said had been done by eight years of hard-right nationalist rule.
The new
government, he pledged, would restore judicial independence, media pluralism,
women’s rights and civil debate, all of which Polish liberals see Law and
Justice as having severely undermined. The previous government introduced a
near-total ban on abortion, stacked the judiciary with loyalists, removed or
gutted independent oversight bodies and turned public broadcasting into a
propaganda bullhorn.
But Mr.
Duda, a firm ally of Law and Justice, has thwarted many of Mr. Tusk’s plans. He
has repeatedly vetoed legislation passed by Mr. Tusk’s center-right coalition
in Parliament or sent it for judicial review by courts stacked with the
previous government’s appointees. And Mr. Tusk’s coalition does not have the
three-fifths majority it would need to override his vetoes.
Last month,
Mr. Duda declined to sign a law expanding a ban on hate crimes to help protect
gay or disabled people and other minorities, and sent it to the politically
tainted Constitutional Court. When Parliament passed legislation in October to
overhaul the court, Mr. Duda referred it for review — to the tribunal being
targeted. The legislation died.
So much
depends on whether Mr. Trzaskowski can convince voters he speaks not only for
urban elites and beneficiaries of Poland’s booming economy but, as he said at
the recent rally, for “all Poles who want to see our country strong and
united.”
Bartek
Debski, a far-right activist who showed up to heckle Mr. Trzaskowski, said he
was “very happy to see people waving the red and white” Polish flag at the
rally in Zamosc, a 16th-century town in Poland’s conservative east.
But he
expressed disappointment that Mr. Trzaskowski had not given him anything to
attack. “Since he is the left-wing candidate, he should be waving L.G.B.T. or
German flags,” Mr. Debski complained, channeling a widespread view on the
Polish right that their opponents are stooges for Germany, cursed not only for
its past brutal occupation of Poland under the Nazis, but also for its current
Eurocentric liberal values.
The
18-year-old activist and fellow supporters of the far-right Confederation party
started shouting at a cluster of elderly women wearing Trzaskowski pins. “Get
back to Germany,” they yelled. The women shouted back: “Fascists, fascists.”
The showdown
ended without incident but reflected the deep divisions in a country where
rival camps largely agree on issues of defense and security but hurl insults
across a deep political and cultural divide.
Mr. Duda is
term-limited. But among the 13 candidates running, two conservatives who want
to continue blocking Mr. Tusk’s program are polling in second and third place,
behind Mr. Trzaskowski. They are Karol Nawrocki, a candidate backed by Law and
Justice, and Slawomir Mentzen of Confederation.
Mr. Trump
received Mr. Nawrocki at the White House in early May, granting him an honor
that has been denied to Mr. Tusk. They posed for photographs giving a thumbs
up.
While both
the liberal front-runner and the Law and Justice candidate have talked tough on
security, Mr. Nawrocki has had more success playing up his tough-guy
credentials, posting images of himself training in the gym, boxing and firing
guns.
Mr.
Trzaskowski, the multilingual son of a prominent jazz musician, has worked hard
to shake off his image as a privileged Warsaw progressive. But he has been
constantly reminded by his opponents that in 2019 he signed an “L.G.B.T.+
Declaration for Warsaw.”
At a debate
last month, Mr. Nawrocki presented the mayor with a rainbow flag, hoping to
embarrass him. Mr. Trzaskowski gingerly put the flag aside, prompting a
progressive candidate, Magdelena Biejat — who has no chance of winning — to say
she was “not ashamed of the rainbow flag” and would take it.
Waldemar
Podolak, a businessman who attended the rally in Zamosc to support Mr.
Trzaskowski, said he worried that many younger, progressive voters might not
bother casting ballots but understood why the Warsaw mayor has avoided divisive
issues.
He said the
Roman Catholic Church, a conservative force aligned with Law and Justice,
played a big role in swaying older voters in eastern Poland and liberals needed
to avoid antagonizing it openly. For many conservative priests, he added, “if
you are not with them you are a traitor.”
Victory for
Mr. Nawrocki, said Michal Baranowski, a senior official at the Ministry of
Economic Development and Technology, “would be a disaster” and leave Mr. Tusk’s
government unable to “correct what Law and Justice has broken.”
Radoslaw
Sikorksi, Poland’s foreign minister, described the power of the Polish
president as “only negative,” but said it had hamstrung the government’s
efforts to deliver on its election promises.
Without
either the presidency or a parliamentary supermajority, he added in an
interview, “We can’t carry out our program.”
Unlike the
nationalist presidential candidate in Romania, George Simion, Mr. Nawrocki
strongly supports military aid for Ukraine, a position generally shared across
Poland’s political spectrum.
Mr.
Trzaskowski has put security at the center of his campaign and pushed back
against claims that only Law and Justice can keep Poland safe because of its
good relations with Mr. Trump. “Our security is dependent not only on very good
relations with the United States,” he said in Zamosc, “but also on having a
leading role in the European Union.”
“Only then,”
he added, “will we be treated as a partner by President Trump’s administration
— only if we are really strong in Europe.”
Andrew
Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in
Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia.
Steven
Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in
Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France,
Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union.
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