Poland: imitation and discontent

Poland will remain a country divided in two. The narrow victory of Karol Nawrocki, a self-proclaimed eurosceptic and admirer of Orbán and Trump, in Sunday's presidential election confirms the polarization of the Polish electorate. The Law and Justice (PiS) party will remain Poland's leading force, leaving Donald Tusk's liberal-reformist administration in the lurch, another lame duck in European politics. Nawrocki's mission, from now on, will be to pave the way for PiS's return to power in 2027. Despite its limited powers, the presidency—as Andrzej Duda has demonstrated so far—has the ability to veto laws, and Nawrocki has already announced that he will uphold his predecessor's vetoes for recognition the following day. He advocates not toning down the abortion law, has said he will block Ukraine's efforts to join NATO, and has promised a referendum on EU environmental policies.

With a turnout of over 70% and in a scenario already familiar from recent electoral adventures in the European Union, Tusk's Civic Coalition candidate and Mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, achieved his best results in the country's major cities, while the majority of the vote was in small towns. This division of Poland into two halves continues to represent two opposing strands that already coexisted in the anti-communist movement. Jaroslav Kaczyński's PiS nostalgically yearns for the identitarian Poland in permanent opposition in both Russia and Germany, and Tusk represents the dream of a liberal Poland that has once again been challenged at the polls.

In 1998, Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki published a reference book on 19th-century Poland, which he titled A neighborhood on the outskirts of EuropeBut the social and electoral tensions Poland is experiencing today are anything but peripheral. They represent a structural fracture in the reality of an EU with an increasingly narrow political center. The radical right controls governments or shares power in Italy, the Netherlands, and Hungary; and is part of the main opposition bloc in Germany, France, Austria, and Portugal. The narrow victory of PiS represents a new boost for the Conservatives and Reformists political family, which controls Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and spurs on other radical right candidates such as the eurosceptic Czech opposition leader, Andrej Babiš, who is confident of returning to power in the October elections. French far-right leader Marine Le Pen declared that Nawrocki's victory certifies the "rejection of the Brussels oligarchy" that seeks to impose its "authoritarian policies and federalist ambitions."

Once again, the rebalancing of forces in the EU is leaning toward the radical right. Poland's return to the heart of European Union policymaking and the strengthening of understanding between Warsaw, Paris, and Berlin have not been enough to decide an election that was seen as a referendum on the government. The sense of dislocation (real or perceived) experienced by a significant portion of the electorate in the countries that participated in the major EU enlargement of 2004 remains present and is a determining factor in their complex relationship with the community project.

Political scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes long ago explained the fundamental weaknesses of this integration process, conceived more as the imposition of a model to imitate than as a real transformation. Imitation—and the importation of liberal-democratic institutions and their economic and social prescriptions—was understood as the shortest path to freedom and prosperity. But, according to Krastev and Holmes, the life of the imitator inevitably produces feelings of loss of identity, dependence, inadequacy, inferiority, and an endless torment of self-criticism.

Euroscepticism and institutional disenchantment have become a mobilizing factor in the so-called Visegrád countries, from the ultra-conservatism of PiS to the geopolitical challenge of Orbán, and the extremist populism of Slovak Robert Fico in the ranks.