Nationalist Is Elected Poland’s President, in a Setback for the Centrist Government

 

Nationalist Is Elected Poland’s President, in a Setback for the Centrist Government

 

The victory of Karol Nawrocki, who is backed by the previous right-wing governing party, will complicate Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s efforts to advance his liberal agenda.

 

Andrew Higgins

By Andrew Higgins

Reporting from Warsaw

June 2, 2025, 2:15 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/world/europe/poland-presidential-election-karol-nawrocki.html

 

A nationalist who is hostile to Poland’s centrist government has eked out a narrow win in a runoff election for the presidency, delivering a severe setback to Prime Minister Donald Tusk, according to official results released on Monday.

 

The winner, Karol Nawrocki, a historian and former boxer who is backed by Poland’s previous governing party, Law and Justice, captured 50.9 percent of the vote on Sunday, adding momentum to a right-wing populist movement in Europe. President Trump had endorsed Mr. Nawrocki before the election.

 

He came out just ahead of Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, who was supported by Mr. Tusk’s party, Civic Platform. Mr. Trzaskowski had 49.1 percent of the vote.

 

That outcome leaves Poland bitterly divided with two power centers — the government and the presidency — pulling in opposite directions.

 

The two sides agree that Poland should provide weapons to Ukraine for its war against Russia and build up its military, but diverge sharply on most domestic issues, including abortion, which was all but banned during eight years under the right-wing Law and Justice government.

 

The Polish runoff came just two weeks after voters in Romania rejected a nationalist candidate in a presidential election, a result that raised the hopes of Polish liberals that Europe’s right-wing populist wave was receding.

 

Mr. Nawrocki’s win left those hopes shattered and will also disappoint mainstream forces in the European Union, which are aligned with Mr. Tusk, a former senior official in Brussels with strongly pro-European views.

 

The Polish presidency has no say in setting economic or other policy, which are the preserve of Mr. Tusk and his ministers, but it has veto power over legislation that allows it to stymie the program of the separately elected government. Mr. Tusk, a veteran centrist, became prime minister in December 2023 after Law and Justice lost its parliamentary majority.

 

The departing president, Andrzej Duda, like Mr. Nawrocki, is an ally of Law and Justice, and frequently vetoed laws passed by Mr. Tusk’s majority in Parliament or sent them for review by courts stacked with loyalists of the previous government. He was ineligible to run again because of term limits.

 

The election of Mr. Nawrocki to replace Mr. Duda is likely to harden the logjam and further obstruct Mr. Tusk’s efforts to carry out his government’s agenda. The government, a fractious coalition of liberal, leftist and conservative parties, has a majority in Parliament but not the three-fifths of the seats needed to override a presidential veto.

 

There is little chance that Mr. Nawrocki, a pugnacious novice politician, will wave through laws that had been blocked by Mr. Duda.

 

These included measures to restore the independence of the Polish judiciary, particularly the constitutional court, which the European Court of Human Rights ruled had been compromised by the irregular appointment of judges under the previous government.

 

Mr. Nawrocki received strong backing during the campaign from like-minded foreigners, including supporters of President Trump.

 

Speaking just days before the election at a gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, near the Polish city of Rzeszow, Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, urged Polish voters to chose Mr. Nawrocki over Mr. Trzaskowski, deriding the Warsaw mayor as a “socialist” and “a train wreck of a leader.”

 

George Simion, the Romanian nationalist who lost to the centrist mayor of Bucharest last month, also attended the CPAC meeting. He warned against what he said was a plan by “globalists” to “steal” the Polish election.

 

It was the first time that CPAC, an influential assembly of conservatives, had met in Poland, a sign of the importance globally minded nationalists attached to the Polish election as a test of their movement’s strength.

 

Mr. Trump had also effectively endorsed Mr. Nawrocki, receiving him last month in the Oval Office and posing for a photograph with a thumbs up.

 

Mr. Trzaskowski won the first round of Poland’s election on May 18, finishing just ahead of Mr. Nawrocki in a crowded race with 13 candidates. His defeat in the runoff indicated that votes that went to far-right candidates in the first round had swung behind Mr. Nawrocki.

 

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.