Warsaw

Liberal Warsaw’s sympathies weren’t hard to discern on Sunday night.

As the exit poll for Poland’s presidential election was published, showing Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski ahead of his populist rival Karol Nawrocki by the thinnest of margins, a huge roar went up from the crowd assembled in front of the neoclassical presidential palace. “I am so relieved. Poland is a part of Europe and we need a pro-European government,” Martin Zielen, a programmer, told me.

But the euphoria didn’t last long. Two hours later, a more precise exit poll showed Nawrocki, a historian backed by the nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS), ahead. Official results trickled in throughout the night, confirming that Nawrocki would succeed Andrzej Duda, an ally of the same party.

The result means Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s centrist government will continue to be stymied. The presidency is a largely ceremonial role, but the president has crucial veto power over new legislation and can influence foreign policy as head of the armed forces during wartime.

Tusk unseated PiS two years ago in an election that liberals across Europe hoped would herald a retreat of the populist tide across the continent. But Duda used his powers to prevent the new government from implementing its agenda, including rolling back controversial judicial reforms and liberalising abortion laws. Crucially, Tusk’s four-party coalition lacks the two-thirds majority to overturn the presidential veto.

Nawrocki, who was plucked from relative obscurity to be the PiS-backed candidate, brushed off a series of revelations about his private life during the campaign. These ranged from accusations that he helped arrange prostitutes for guests of a luxury hotel to his dubious acquisition of a flat from a pensioner.

His bitterly fought win guarantees that Tusk will continue to be frustrated for the remainder of his term in office. The president-elect has said his Catholic faith compels him to believe in life from “conception to natural death”, while he opposes the government’s plan to legalise civil partnerships between gay citizens. Politicians from PiS — which remains the largest party in parliament — openly hope Tusk can be forced out of office, either through a snap election or by cajoling members of other parties to back the opposition.

Nawrocki’s victory is also a win for the international MAGA movement, after a string of recent electoral defeats for Donald Trump-aligned candidates in Australia, Canada and Romania. The final days of the campaign were rocked by the intervention of Kristi Noem, the US Secretary of Homeland Security. Five days before the vote, speaking at a Polish CPAC conference held near the border with Ukraine, Noem described Trzaskowski as a “hopeless leader” and tied the continuation of the US military presence in Poland to Nawrocki’s election.

On Sunday, at a polling station in Ursus, a district of Warsaw, Catholic hymns wafted out of an open window in a communist-era block of flats. Rafal Samojlik told me he was voting for Nawrocki because he is a patriot; Trzaskowski, meanwhile, is a “communist”. Samojlik’s wife Marta, a devout Catholic, said she opposed Trzaskowski’s Civic Coalition “removing religion from schools”.

Oxford-educated Trzaskowski sharply tacked to the Right during the election campaign, seeking to appeal to the conservative towns and villages where he is viewed as a big-city liberal. He pledged to crack down on immigration and courted the voters of far-Right candidate Slawomir Mentzen, who came third. But the strategy failed to pay off, costing him votes from both sides. Many younger voters in Warsaw who’d voted for the far-Left in the first round told me they were frustrated by Trzaskowski’s flip-flopping. In the end, the vast majority of Mentzen’s voters split for Nawrocki.

Tusk — the quintessential Brussels man, president of the EU Council from 2014 to 2019 — had hoped that his ally winning the presidency would finally allow Poland to make its voice heard as a major player in Brussels. Instead, it means the PM will now have to attend EU summits as a virtual lame duck. An added humiliation is that Nawrocki has taken a harsher line on Ukraine than his predecessor, with whom Tusk largely agreed on foreign policy. It seems the long-heralded eastern shift in the EU’s centre of gravity will have to wait a little longer.

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Ido Vock is a reporter and editor based in Berlin, specialising in Europe’s politics and economy. He was previously a senior journalist at the BBC and Europe correspondent at the New Statesman.

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