Lessons from Poland

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Greetings. Poland’s presidential run-off election on Sunday was won by Karol Nawrocki, a Donald Trump-like outsider candidate supported by the rightwing populist Law and Justice. He narrowly defeated Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, who was backed by the liberal-centrist parties forming a coalition government since late 2023.

It was an election that exemplifies that faultline running down most western elections these days: liberal centrists against nationalist populists. So what lessons can the rest of the world draw from how Poles voted? Share your thoughts at [email protected].

Let’s start with what lessons not to draw from the election. Given how close the race was going to be, Nawrocki’s victory does not say much more about the electorate and the state of Poland than if Trzaskowski had won. Either way, about 10mn people, half the voting electorate (on a high turnout), voted for the Trump-styled candidate. A swing of a few hundred thousand could have changed the outcome, but not the underlying social phenomenon.

What caused that phenomenon? As in the US and other places where populist-nativist-right-adjacent movements have won power, there is a debate over whether it has largely cultural or economic causes. As long-term readers of Free Lunch will know, I find that economic mechanisms have a lot of explanatory force — which is not to say that culture and values don’t matter, but that there are economic reasons why culture and values become politically activated.

For the economics, the patterns in Poland are particularly unambiguous versions of those we see for populists’ vs centrists’ voter support elsewhere. A late election day poll showed that the higher a voting group’s education level or the bigger their municipality, the stronger its support for the liberal Trzaskowski. Conversely, Nawrocki’s vote share rose with falling levels of education and urbanisation.

The excellent economic geographer Andrés Rodríguez-Pose summarises the situation as follows:

What this result reveals is not a surge of ideological fervour, but the quiet, cumulative effect of places falling out of the economic conversation . . . Across Europe, the story is the same: inner peripheries, locked in long-term stagnation, turn to those who promise recognition rather than reform. [Nawrocki’s] candidacy, styled on strength and sovereignty, speaks to communities for whom Brussels has come to symbolise neglect masked as unity.”

He includes the chart below of the geographical spread of the vote:

It shows that the anti-establishment candidate won in more left-behind regions. While these may not always be strictly speaking declining — EU integration has been good for all of Poland — they are often at the sharp end of greater regional inequality and do not see the benefits of urban centres plugged into globalised knowledge services.

Clearly, the “promise of recognition rather than reform” also strikes a chord with voters too young to remember life under communism. Nawrocki did very well with voters under 40 (and just about won the very oldest); Trzaskowski won among those aged 40 to 59.

This economics of the left-behind — or put differently, the lack of a national Polish economy of belonging — explains the general voting pattern. But what was it that put Nawrocki over the top? Here is an extremely telling chart published by Gazeta Wyborcza:

The blue arrows mark districts where Nawrocki improved on the vote for parties that supported him in the 2023 parliamentary elections. The orange arrows, if you can find any, show where Trzaskowski improved on the 2023 vote of parties supporting him. Gazeta Wyborcza’s forest of blue arrows shows that virtually everywhere, the vote swung from governing liberal centrists towards the rightwing populist.

This echoes Trump’s countrywide swing in last year’s US presidential election. And it invites a further parallel: much like his American model, Nawrocki seems to thrive on accusations and revelations of his inappropriate behaviour. Trzaskowski’s supporters made a lot of these in the past few weeks of the campaign, but it does not seem to have helped their candidate anywhere.

There is an obvious lesson here: if a society is deeply polarised, making a candidate look even more anti-establishment is just going to solidify their camp. Like Kamala Harris’s campaign in the US, Trzaskowski’s may have fallen into the trap of alienating half the population by focusing too exclusively on the unsuitability and danger to liberal democracy of the opposing candidate.

When Donald Tusk won power as Polish prime minister in 2023, it was on a promise to undo the damage Law and Justice (PiS) had done to the rule of law and the integrity of the country’s governing institutions. But he aimed to do this through a confrontational rather than a conciliatory approach.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course, but we should still ask whether this election might have gone differently if more of an effort had been made to embrace more people on the other side of the country’s deep political divide. For beyond a certain level, polarisation benefits the illiberal insurgents, not the liberal democrats. Many commentators also think Tusk neglected to nurture his own coalition partners by treating Polish politics as centred around the struggle between him and PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński. In this personalised Manichean set-up, the government did not get enough done for the taste of many voters.

What happens next? Domestically, things will obviously get more difficult. Both politically — with a vote of confidence called and early elections mooted — and in terms of policy, where the conflict between the government and the veto-wielding presidency will harden. But doing more of the same will surely not lead to different outcomes, so it seems the government must at least try to offer some attempt at national reconciliation. As the FT’s editorial recommends, it could make an effort at healing divisions through “a more consensual programme, politically harder for the president to veto, that seeks directly to address voters’ main preoccupations, similar to those in many western countries”.

Internationally, the election result is clearly a feather in Trump’s Maga cap. Two Polish commentators put it crisply: “On Sunday Maga won in Poland.” And this is not simply a story of parallels playing out under their own dynamics in the US and in European countries. As economist Fabio Sabatini highlights, there is an express US strategy to help Maga allies win power in Europe, set out in official state department pronouncements.

So while there are direct implications for important EU policy decisions — usefully surveyed by my colleagues here — I suspect that the greater impact is through a stronger alliance of rightwing populists across the Atlantic. How much stronger will depend, then, on whether Poland’s government can win back support beyond one-half of its own people. Whether Poland can rebuild a national economy of belonging matters far beyond the country itself.

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