Is There Political Life After Populism? Poland May Be the Test.

 

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.