WARSAW — Relief in the form of Donald Trump is coming for Poland’s battered populists.
The country’s nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party lost last year’s parliamentary election, many of its top officials are under investigation for alleged misdeeds during the eight years the party was in power, the country’s election body slashed PiS’s subsidies thanks to improper accounting, and its key achievements such as toughening abortion laws and politicizing the courts are under threat from the new government of PM Donald Tusk.
But Trump’s victory in the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election is giving PiS hope that the tide of liberal democratic restoration may have reached its zenith — giving the party a head of steam before next year’s Polish presidential election.
The elation is palpable.
When last week’s session of the Polish parliament got underway, the PiS caucus suddenly began clapping and chanting “Donald Trump! Donald Trump!”
Enthusiastic congratulations for the president-elect flowed in via social media. Polish President Andrzej Duda was one of the first to rush in — unlike four years ago when he congratulated Joe Biden, but also followed Trump’s narrative by saying he was waiting for a formal nomination by the Electoral College.
Duda, who is aligned with PiS and whose second and final term ends next year, talked to Trump by phone Nov. 11, Poland’s Independence Day, saying he had called to “congratulate him on his historic comeback and decisive victory in the presidential election.” He added that the two are due to meet next year.
Ahead of the election, senior PiS leader Mariusz Błaszczak even called on Tusk to resign in the event of a Trump victory.
“If Donald Trump wins, I think the government in Warsaw should change immediately, because Germany is not able to support us when it comes to defense, and the United States can,” he said on Polish TV.
Tusk fired back after the election, calling Błaszczak’s comments “embarrassing and very humiliating.”
“Who governs in Poland is decided by Polish voters, and in the United States by American voters,” Tusk told reporters. “For obvious reasons we will respect without any problem the democratic verdict in the U.S.”
In contrast to PiS, Tusk’s reaction to Trump’s triumph was muted. He sent congratulations on Nov. 6, adding: “I look forward to our cooperation for the good of the American and Polish nations.”
But Tusk is also leading the European response to Trump.
“There is no doubt that the new political landscape is a serious challenge for everyone, especially in the context of a possible end to the Russian-Ukrainian war as a result of an agreement, for example, between the president of Russia and the new president of the United States,” Tusk said last week before flying to Budapest for an informal EU summit, which discussed the EU’s response to Trump.
Echoes of the past
PiS is now digging up anti-Trump comments made by the government, which aren’t difficult to find. It’s a tactic being used by opposition parties around the world.
Former PiS PM Mateusz Morawiecki, for example, resurrected a clip of Tusk calling Trump “pro-Russian.”
The party has also not spared the American wife of Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, the journalist and author Anne Applebaum, for likening Trump’s rhetoric to that of “Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini” in a recent column in The Atlantic.
“President Trump cooperated with the PiS government best. Today’s presidential candidates [from Tusk’s camp] only kept insulting him,” Morawiecki said on X earlier this week.
May’s vote is crucial to Poland’s political future. Duda has been blocking many of Tusk’s legislative efforts, so Tusk is hoping that a member of his party in the presidential palace will allow him to finally undo most of PiS’s legacy. For PiS, it’s crucial that the party hang on to the presidency as it works to recover from last year’s parliamentary election defeat.
Trump has now become a key factor in one of Europe’s most pro-American countries.
While Tusk and his Civic Platform have long been Trump skeptics and closer to the Democrats, PiS put its money on Trump.
PiS even sent Dominik Tarczyński, a member of the European Parliament for the party, to the U.S. to follow Trump on the campaign trail.
Trump’s victory is infusing PiS with hope.
“‘Let’s make Poland great again!’ The slogan, inspired by Donald Trump’s triumph overseas, could accompany our domestic election race and the campaign led by the Polish right,” Morawiecki said last week.
With the war in neighboring Ukraine in its third year, and Poland now the top defense spender in NATO by share of GDP, military and security issues are high on the agenda — something PiS hopes to use to its advantage.
In his Independence Day speech, Duda called the idea that Europe can stand on its own on defense a “pipe dream.”
“In its current state, in the face of resurgent Russian imperialism, [Europe] is unlikely to be able to ensure its own security without the United States,” he said.
That’s a message PiS is likely to continue hammering home.
The goal is to persuade Polish voters that it makes sense to choose a candidate with warm ties with Trump, rather than risk alienating the president by handing more power to Tusk and his liberals.
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