BERLIN — It’s no secret that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz prefers to work with that other Polish leader, centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
But on Tuesday he’ll be receiving Polish President Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist backed by the opposition populist right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which demands that Berlin pay reparations for Nazi Germany’s World War II invasion and occupation of Poland.
Relations between Poland and Germany have seesawed between close cooperation and open friction in recent years. While the two countries have strong trade relations and increasingly cooperate on defense, Nawrocki and PiS politicians have railed against the EU’s influence over Polish affairs and have stoked lingering resentments over the historical destruction that Nazi Germany wrought on Poland.
The relationship is acutely sensitive, said Knut Abraham, a coordinator on Polish relations at the German foreign ministry.
“A half sentence wrongly uttered can lead to major upheavals,” he said.
Nawrocki, a former boxer, in many ways personifies the brand of Polish populism that most disconcerts Merz and his allies. The Polish president was elected in June on a “Poland first” platform that included calls for Merz’s government to pay reparations — a demand the German government has repeatedly refused.
A common foe in Russian President Vladimir Putin has also failed to more broadly unite German leaders and Poland’s populist right, even after Russian drones entered Polish airspace last week in what European leaders called a deliberate plan to target NATO. Nawrocki has in fact attempted to tie the reparations demand to the joint European fight against Russian aggression.
“Reparations will not serve as an alternative to historical amnesia, but Poland as a frontline state, as the key country on NATO’s eastern flank, needs justice and truth [and] clear relations with Germany,” Nawrocki said earlier this month during a World War II commemoration.
Nawrocki will “certainly refer to the issue” during his Berlin visit, said his spokesman, Rafał Leśkiewicz. The Polish president is scheduled to meet Merz as well as German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. No press conferences are planned, limiting the opportunity for open displays of discord.
Trump’s man in Poland
Despite the tensions, Nawrocki could prove useful to Merz and other European leaders in one sense: He has the ear of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Trump endorsed Nawrocki ahead of this year’s Polish presidential election, and received him with great accolades at the White House earlier this month.
Following the incursion by Russian drones into Polish airspace last week, Trump called Nawrocki, not Tusk. When Trump earlier this month held a call with leaders of the “coalition of the willing”— countries that have pledged security guarantees to Ukraine — the White House connected with Nawrocki, not Tusk, according to a European official familiar with the meeting.
This despite the fact that Nawrocki’s position in Polish politics is somewhat ceremonial. While the Polish president has the power to veto legislation — and has used it to block Tusk’s agenda — it is Tusk and his ministers who preside over foreign policy and defense matters.
Trump’s apparent effort to bypass Tusk has been a source of tension between the Polish government and the Polish president. “There cannot be two foreign policies,” Paweł Wroński, Poland’s foreign ministry spokesman, said earlier this month.
Given that dynamic, German and European leaders are unlikely to do anything that could be seen as undermining Tusk’s position.
Memory politics
After Tusk’s government came to power, it dropped the demands of the previous PiS government that Germany pay €1.3 trillion in reparations — a figure Nawrocki continues to back.
The Tusk government, while believing there is a moral case for reparations, maintains they are legally a non-starter and argues that pursuing them undermines Poland’s ties with Germany, its largest export market.
Instead, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski has suggested that the German government give a “visible sign” that Germany acknowledges the damage Poland suffered during the war, such as “a documentation center, a center for dialogue that recognizes the suffering of the Poles and is also a memorial.”
In April, a temporary memorial involving a 30-ton boulder was erected in Berlin to commemorate the Polish victims of Nazi Germany. There are plans to erect a permanent memorial, though the German Bundestag must first pass a resolution.
But such gestures are unlikely to satisfy demands by PiS politicians for reparations, given how many Polish voters back the party’s stance. A survey by SW Research for news portal Onet found that 54 percent of respondents backed reparations while some 27 percent opposed the idea.
Given that fact, Nawrocki is unlikely to back down from the demand, despite the fact that it may raise tensions between NATO allies at a time of war, critics say.
“One of course might want to use this issue to make a name for oneself in domestic politics. Fair enough, that happens everywhere,” said Rolf Nikel of the German Council on Foreign Relations and Germany’s former ambassador to Poland. “But the point is that we currently have a situation of war on our external borders, and that’s why we must do everything we can to ensure that Germany, Poland and the other Europeans stand together.”
“Anything that stands in the way of that only plays into Mr. Putin’s hands,” Nikel added. “When Mr. Nawrocki comes, he has to decide which tune he wants to play.”
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