Trump has won in Poland. The candidate supported by the US president, former boxer and ultranationalist historian Karol Nawrocki of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, narrowly defeated the liberal and pro-European Rafal Trzaskowski, mayor of Warsaw and candidate of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk's Civic Platform. It was a close call, but there will be another Trumpist president in the EU: Nawrocki obtained 50.89% of the vote, compared to Trzaskowski's 49.11%, with a high turnout of 71.6%. Poland thus joins the authoritarian axis formed by the Hungarian Orbán and the Italian Meloni, both in power, who also include the rising figures of Le Pen in France, Ventura in Portugal, Widel in Germany, and Abascal in Spain, among others. The US approach to continue fracturing and weakening the unity of European action, building an internal countervailing power, is cultivating new success. He recently failed to do so in Romania with the far-right George Simion.
During the campaign, despite threats against the EU over tariffs, Nawrocki has openly played the Trump card with the slogan "Poland First," celebrating the far-right vote and presenting himself as the heir to Andrzej Duda, the former president, also a PiS candidate. Duda's close relationship with the US president is well known, and so far he has made things difficult for Tusk. Nawrocki will continue the same harsh cohabitation with a centrist and reformist Tusk, demonized by the right, who, in contrast, inspires great trust in Brussels. Poland, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union and is a major player in the European Union and NATO, is once again becoming unreliable for a Europe that no longer trusts Trump and wants to move toward its own defense policy.
Nawrocki doesn't fit in at all with this Europe that is beginning to emancipate itself from its American friend. He is critical of the Franco-German engine, is against adopting the euro, opposes giving more powers to the EU, and is against both the European Green Deal and the migration pact and Ukraine's entry into NATO. In fact, the PiS has accused Tusk of endangering Poland's close ties with the United States by focusing too much on European partners. The security agreement between Poland and France could be undermined. Nawrocki, on the other hand, has promised, like Trump, to increase military spending to 5% of GDP.
Close to the tenets of President Trump's conservative MAGA movement in terms of morality, the new Polish president opposes abortion rights and the rights of LGBTQ+ communities, same-sex civil unions, and free morning-after pills without a prescription. And, of course, it is assumed that he will block the justice reform that Tusk wanted to push through.
Polish society, clearly fragmented in two halves, is settling into polarization and moving away from centrality and the fragile pro-European consensus.
