Polish presidential election: vote of no confidence in the establishment

While Polish presidents do not hold nearly as much power as their French or American counterparts, the recent Polish election attracted enormous attention both in the country and abroad. Now, as the dust settles, one can clearly identify the real loser of this election. As the fall of the złoty and the Warsaw stock market shows: the establishment is rattled.

When the first exit polls came out on Sunday, the one thing that was clear was the sharp division in Polish society. Liberal Rafał Trzaskowski of PO (Civic Platform, part of the ruling coalition) was forecast to gain a razor-thin edge of about 1-2 percent over the right-wing PiS (Law & Justice) candidate Karol Nawrocki. The liberal camp rushed to pop open their champagne bottles, while Trzaskowski was announcing that he would strive to be the “president of all Poles”.

But Monday morning brought them a very nasty hangover. In the end, it was Nawrocki who won with a mere 300,000 vote majority, netting 50.89 percent against Trzaskowski’s 49.11 percent.

These elections were not really about the presidency itself. They were, in essence, an expression of a long drawn-out crisis of Polish capitalism. The matter at hand was not the most important – it was really an outlet for the underlying desperation of the masses for change: any change, for better or worse.

The wave of political instability and turmoil which has swept through the western world has finally reached the shores of Poland. And, while delayed, one can see how it will explode in the faces of the Polish establishment in the very near future.

Both camps of the ruling class whipped up enough panic around the election to muster a record 72 percent turnout.

The bourgeois media would have you believe this was a contest between the enlightened liberal Warsaw elites and backwards, uneducated bigots. We think the latter terminology should apply to the pundits peddling this kind of propaganda.

Trzaskowski’s camp fed voters a story of the “sensible establishment” – they were saying that at the very least, things would stay the same under a liberal president / Image: European Peoples Party, Wikimedia Commons

It is worth explaining, however, why half of the Poles still voted for the liberals, not all of whom are ‘elites’ living in Warsaw’s villas.

Liberal scaremongering

Trzaskowski’s camp fed voters a story of the “sensible establishment” – they were saying that at the very least, things would stay the same under a liberal president. To sell this lie when things are patently getting worse, they cynically whipped up a campaign of fear, using the threat of supposed fascism coming to Poland if the right-wing won, as well as the question of women's rights – which were severely restricted under the previous PiS government.

This use of the question of women’s rights is the concentrated essence of all unashamed liberal hypocrisy.

The current liberal government came to power a year and a half ago precisely because they were offering to bring back unrestricted abortion rights. In almost two years, not a single thing has budged on this matter – but now we were told this is because we lack a proper president! They have blamed the supposed obstinacy of the incumbent Andrzej Duda from PiS.

The liberals think we are fools, since not a single bill was presented to the incumbent. There was a quiet proposal of a bill floating somewhere in the Sejm (Polish parliament), but it was put in the freezer of one of its parliamentary committees. The heterogeneous internal composition of the ruling coalition, which includes both the left and right wings of the liberals, makes any change on women's rights entirely impossible.

During his campaign, Trzaskowski used the images from the Women's Strike of 2020 captioned, “do not lose what you fought for.” But precisely nothing has been won! The liberals of today promise at most to uphold the barbaric abortion law while feeding on the desperation of young women. For all those who remember the mass mobilisation against PiS, the liberals did not offer a way forward, but more of the same. This tactic is in equal measure effective and short-lived.

Nevertheless, with all the power of the media on their side, and a vicious election campaign, despite all the effort and capital thrown into it, and despite the fact the PiS is hated by many after its eight years in power, Trzaskowski still failed to get himself into the warmth of Namiestnikowski Palace.

Right wing

Those who voted for the actual right-wing demagogues in the first round came over to Nawrocki in the second. While weak and discredited, he is at least in the opposition and not the visible face of the present crisis.

However, Nawrocki and PiS are quite different from the likes of AfD, Reform UK, Rassemblement National, and other groups the media would usually brand as ‘far right’.

Unlike them, PiS is a party that already had a chance to prove itself in power. They had almost unchecked rule between the years 2015–2023. And while their government perhaps wasn’t necessarily the most pleasant, in particular with its demonisation of LGBT people, it was far from the horrors of supposed ‘fascism’ that the lefts and liberals always try to whip up, to – god forbid – save them from having to talk about class issues.

The PiS, therefore, cannot be considered a party from outside the establishment – it is establishment through and through, and many of Nawrocki’s voters, if not the majority, voted for their candidate only begrudgingly, as a protest vote. Nawrocki simply ended up being the least worst option for the anti-establishment voters.

Black campaign

The campaign itself was extremely toxic on all sides. But the liberal camp in particular threw everything except the kitchen sink at Nawrocki and his voters. He has been accused of everything: having scammed an elderly neighbour out of his flat, of having connections with criminal underground, and even of being a pimp, who procured prostitutes for guests of a hotel he worked at in the 2000s.

Nawrocki has been accused of everything: having scammed an elderly neighbour out of his flat, of having connections with criminal underground, and even of being a pimp / Image: Karol Nawrocki, Twitter

Regardless of the veracity of these allegations, they are laughable coming from any member of the Polish establishment. All of them represent post-transformation Poland, in which 100,000s were thrown out of their flats, where a whole generation of Polish girls were forced into prostitution, and where tenants' representatives were brutally murdered by the elements of that very criminal underground that they theatrically despise today.

Liberals, on the other hand, were accused of funnelling EU funds into supposedly unrelated NGOs that supported Trzaskowski’s campaign. Interestingly, this is precisely what the French establishment cynically used in the recent ruling against Le Pen to bar her from standing in elections. It seems the rule of law applies differently to the pro-EU parties and politicians.

In light of all of the above, the victory of Nawrocki – a candidate that PiS brought out of relative obscurity, who had no prior experience of big politics, and ran a rather mediocre campaign with milquetoast promises – is not so much to his merit, but rather a crushing indictment of the mere one and a half years of liberal rule. Indeed, as this article is being written, Prime Minister Donald Tusk is preemptively calling for a vote of confidence in his rule, as the ruling coalition plunges into damage control mode.

US-EU battleground

This election has also garnered unprecedented international attention. Trzaskowski gained patronage from the dying liberal world order whereas Nawrocki was supported by the right-wing populist wave that is rising from its corpse.

Nawrocki and PiS received an enormous amount of support from Donald Trump’s Republicans, who explicitly and shamelessly intervened in the election. At the beginning of May, the ex-athlete historian Nawrocki got a photo-op with the POTUS himself, likely bonding over them both having been endlessly lambasted as felons and criminals by the liberals.

Support didn’t end with one photo-op, however. The hardcore Trumpite ‘American Conservative Union’ decided to hold its international Conservative Action Political Conference in Rzeszów, Poland, of all places, only six days before the final vote. At the event, US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem spoke fervently in favour of Nawrocki, and called his opponent “a train-wreck”. It goes without saying that the rest of the right-wing populists internationally also lent him their support.

Nawrocki and PiS received an enormous amount of support from Donald Trump’s Republicans / Image: The White House, Twitter

Trzaskowski, on his part, had the implicit and explicit support of the liberal establishment in Europe and elsewhere. Aside from the financial irregularities already mentioned – the funding for adverts from the EU’s coffers and the telling silence of Ursula von der Leyen on the matter – he was given support by one of the newest ‘champions of democracy’ on the continent. Nicusor Dan, now president of Romania as a result of the rigged repeat election, went to Warsaw to speak in favour of his fellow ‘democrat’:

“Last Sunday, I won the presidential election in Romania. The Romanian people rejected isolationism and Russian influence. They chose honesty, integrity, and respect for the rule of law. They chose facts over words. These are the values I believe in, and these are also the values I see in Rafał Trzaskowski.”

On the week of the election, The Economist went on the offensive. Their weekly edition was a sickening love letter to the Polish liberals. It explicitly asked Poles not to “throw away” decades of achievements by electing a “hard-right” candidate. Perhaps realising that the tiny percentage of Poles who read their paper would already be voting liberal, it continued the charm offensive on social media on the weekend of the election, blatantly disregarding the electoral silence law, which bans any campaigning on the weekend of the vote.

What The Economist got right, however, is the importance of the country, which explains the amount of international meddling in this election. Poland is no longer an Eastern European backwater, but a significant, albeit still secondary, player in the region and on the whole continent.

As one of the biggest military spenders in NATO, with an army already eclipsing that of Britain, France and Germany, it would have to be the centrepiece of any European pro-Ukraine war effort.

While Nawrocki is no friend of Russia, he did rule out his support for Ukraine joining NATO or the EU until “some historical questions” were resolved. He was referring to the Volhynia massacres committed by Ukrainian nationalists in the course of WW2, which, until the war in Ukraine, were a central thorn in the relations between Warsaw and Kiev. He was also open about Poland expecting something in exchange for its support for the war, musing about special status for Polish investors in post-war Ukraine.

The western media therefore naturally took the result of the election in a hysterical manner. Nawrocki has been referred to as the “victorious hard-right candidate” of the new “MAGA Poland”. Adding some much-needed variety to their usual harping on about the imminent threat of the far-right, it is “hard-right” this time – whatever that means.

First round

The signs of what’s to come in the near future for the now utterly destabilised Polish political landscape could already be seen in the first round of the election in mid-May. A record 13 candidates stood in the election, a number not seen since 1995. This in itself signifies a fragmentation of support for the PO-PiS duopoly, which has been holding Poles hostage since 2007.

While most candidates outside of these two parties didn’t gain many votes individually, taken together they amounted to 40 percent of the vote, which marks a significant rejection of the mainstream parties.

Among the youth, however, the support for establishment melted to a feeble 22.5 percent. The two candidates that garnered over half of the youth’s vote were an actual right-wing populist, Sławomir Mentzen of Konfederacja, and the left-reformist Adrian Zandberg of Razem. As the weekly Polityka put it:

“The youngest don’t want the Poland offered by Tusk and Kaczyński. (...) They prefer someone who thunders about a new order and shape for the state.”

Among all voters – not just the youth – a quarter of Poles voted, in Polityka’s very interesting choice of words, for a “revolutionary, not reformist option”.

Between the two, it was Mentzen who had the most successful campaign. Learning from the right populists in the West, he was much more capable than Zandberg of capitalising on the anti-establishment mood. The left reformists were tarnished by their participation in the ruling coalition. While Zandberg decided to split away with his left wing and run his own campaign, it was too little, too late. Nevertheless, in the latter days of the campaign, his rallies did attract a not insignificant layer of the youth.

Revolutionary outlook

The final election results on either side are not to be considered love letters to liberal democracy, nor a turn to the right. They are an expression of massive desperation brewing in Polish society. There are already layers who are actively looking for a way out of the liberal swamp, and many others who despise the entire establishment. The future is not so bright for the capitalist class. Despite in the end voting for the hated compromise, the youth is desperately looking for answers.

As we write these words, both the government and the opposition are behaving like panicked cats in a sack / Image: Karol Nawrocki, Twitter

The scene is finally set for all the contradictions to some to a clash. As we write these words, both the government and the opposition are behaving like panicked cats in a sack, calling for votes of no-confidence and early parliamentary elections. Konfederacja – the populist right – has been strengthened by the strong result it received in the first round, and there are talks of its possible coalition with both sides of the duopoly. Liberals seem to have no qualms about ‘fascism’ if the supposed ‘fascists’ can be brought onto their side!

The left is fractured and weak as always, but many young people are flocking to it for answers. Zandberg’s result in particular could be a harbinger of something bigger, whether it comes from him or, more likely, a new accidental figure. At a time of a clear increase in the number of strikes and sharpening of class struggle, it is entirely possible for a new leading figure to emerge from within the workers’ movement.

The next two years, as the new parliamentary elections draw close, will be filled with splits at the top and the burgeoning of political consciousness at the bottom.

This puts us in a very favourable position. The revolutionary communists are the only ones who do not give in to the fear-mongering and point out the hypocrisy and lies of all the bourgeois politicians.

Today, the bourgeois politicians are using despair and hopelessness to save capitalism. Tomorrow, they will pay a heavy price for today’s charades, with severe interest.