Poland is heading towards an extraordinarily close presidential runoff on 1 June between Warsaw’s liberal mayor Rafał Trzaskowski and conservative historian Karol Nawrocki, after neither candidate won a majority in the first round on 18 May. Trzaskowski represents the pro-European political camp surrounding Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose coalition removed the nationalist Law and Justice party, or PiS, from government in 2023 after eight years in power. Nawrocki is formally independent but backed by PiS and has presented himself as a socially conservative, nationalist counterweight to Tusk, with stronger rhetorical affinity towards Donald Trump’s political movement in the United States. The presidency is less powerful than the premiership, but Poland’s president possesses a legislative veto, influence over appointments and a significant role in defence and foreign affairs. That means next Sunday’s election could determine whether Tusk finally gains enough institutional alignment to implement his programme or spends the remainder of his term governing against another hostile president. The deeper issue is therefore larger than which candidate wins: when voters remove a government but important institutions remain controlled by the defeated political camp, how quickly should democratic change be allowed to transform the state without turning institutional reform into partisan capture in the opposite direction?
This problem has defined Polish politics since Tusk returned to power in December 2023. His coalition promised to reverse judicial and institutional changes introduced during PiS rule that the European Union and domestic critics argued weakened judicial independence, public-media pluralism and checks on executive authority. Yet outgoing President Andrzej Duda, a former PiS politician, retained the power to veto legislation and has obstructed parts of that programme. Tusk therefore possesses a parliamentary mandate but not unrestricted institutional control. A Trzaskowski victory would remove a major veto point; a Nawrocki victory would preserve it. Reuters notes that this is precisely why the presidential election matters so much despite Poland being primarily a parliamentary system: the president can block legislation, and Duda’s veto has already impeded the government’s reform agenda.
There is an obvious democratic argument for allowing Tusk to implement the programme on which his coalition was elected. Elections become less meaningful if governments win office but institutions constructed by previous governments prevent them changing policy. Yet there is an equally important danger. A government elected to “restore institutional independence” can begin defining independence as replacing officials associated with its opponents with officials associated with itself. The state moves from partisan capture by Party A to partisan capture by Party B while both sides describe their intervention as restoration. This is one of the hardest problems in democratic repair because the government needs to change institutions partly because those institutions have become politicised, but every intervention undertaken to depoliticise them can itself look political.
The judiciary illustrates the dilemma. PiS argued that Poland’s courts contained unaccountable post-communist elites and required democratic reform. Its critics argued that PiS used reform as justification for increasing political control over judicial appointments and discipline. Tusk now argues that these changes need to be reversed to restore the rule of law. But judges appointed under the previous system cannot simply cease to exist without creating enormous uncertainty about thousands of legal decisions. Institutional repair therefore has a path-dependence problem: even if the original reform was flawed, society has subsequently built contracts, prosecutions and judgements around the institutions it created. Reversing the clock exactly is impossible.
This is why democratic restoration requires something harder than replacing personnel. It requires constructing rules that the current government would accept if its opponents returned to power. That is the veil-of-ignorance test I keep coming back to. If Tusk’s coalition reforms judicial appointments, would it accept PiS using exactly the same procedure after winning another election? If not, the reform probably has not removed political discretion sufficiently. Institutions become neutral when the rules remain tolerable after power changes hands, not when the people currently administering them happen to share your political preferences.
Poland matters internationally because it has become one of Europe’s most strategically important states since Russia invaded Ukraine. It shares borders with Ukraine, Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad region, has become a crucial logistics hub for Western support to Kyiv and is spending well above NATO’s 2% benchmark on defence, with both leading presidential candidates advocating extremely high defence expenditure. Security concerns are so politically central that both Trzaskowski and Nawrocki have publicly participated in military training during the campaign, while Poland is planning a much larger armed force. This is an extraordinary transformation for a European country that joined NATO only in 1999. Geography has turned Poland from what was once considered part of Europe’s eastern periphery into one of the states closest to the centre of continental security.
Interestingly, the election does not present a simple choice between supporting and abandoning Ukraine. Both candidates support Ukrainian sovereignty and substantial Polish defence spending. The difference concerns the architecture surrounding that support. Trzaskowski sees a stronger European Union operating alongside NATO as essential to Polish security and supports Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership. Nawrocki places much greater emphasis on the US relationship and has said he would not ratify Ukrainian NATO membership because of the risk of drawing the alliance directly into war with Russia. Poland is therefore debating two versions of Atlanticism rather than straightforward Atlanticism versus Russia.
This is particularly interesting after Trump’s return because the traditional Polish nationalist right is simultaneously Eurosceptic and strongly Atlanticist. That combination made more intuitive sense when Washington was the unquestioned champion of NATO and European integration. Trump complicates it. His administration wants Europe to spend more on its own defence and has challenged assumptions about indefinite American support for Ukraine. Trzaskowski’s argument is consequently that Polish security needs both America and stronger European capacity. Nawrocki’s political camp remains more suspicious that deeper EU integration itself reduces Polish sovereignty.
This is the sovereignty paradox once again. Poland can preserve greater formal national autonomy by limiting EU authority, but a Poland acting alone possesses far less power relative to Russia, China or even the United States than a Poland operating through a coordinated European bloc. Pooling sovereignty can increase effective sovereignty when collective institutions expand the outcomes a state can achieve. The trade-off is that Poland then needs to accept decisions it would not always choose independently. The EU therefore gives Poland more external power while reducing some internal discretion. Neither side of that equation is imaginary.
The first-round results show that another political change may be developing beneath the familiar Tusk-PiS rivalry. Candidates further to the anti-establishment right performed strongly, particularly Sławomir Mentzen, whose campaign combined libertarian economics, nationalism, opposition to aspects of EU integration and more sceptical views on the scale of Polish commitments to Ukraine. Reuters reported that the first round suggested the long-standing domination of Polish politics by the Civic Coalition and PiS camps may be beginning to fracture. That matters because both runoff candidates now need voters who supported politicians more radical than either of them.
Second rounds therefore create an interesting preference-aggregation problem. Trzaskowski and Nawrocki are not simply competing for their own first-round supporters. They need to assemble temporary coalitions from people whose preferred candidates have already lost. Nawrocki needs much of Mentzen’s electorate without adopting every far-right position. Trzaskowski needs centrist and left-wing voters while avoiding an image of representing only metropolitan liberal Poland. The winner therefore may receive more than 50% of the vote without more than 50% of voters endorsing their entire programme. Presidential mandates should always be interpreted with this bundling problem in mind.
The geographic and educational divides resemble patterns elsewhere in Europe. Trzaskowski is strongly associated with Warsaw, university-educated voters and Poland’s internationally integrated urban economy, while the conservative right performs better across many smaller towns and rural areas. This can easily be reduced to a cultural stereotype of modern cities against backward provinces. That would be analytically useless. The divide reflects different economic structures and exposures. A Warsaw professional working for an international company experiences European integration through investment, mobility and high-productivity employment. A resident of a smaller town may experience integration through emigration, agricultural regulation or the disappearance of younger workers. The same national economic system produces different local experiences.
Poland has been one of Europe’s great economic success stories since the end of communism. Real incomes have risen enormously, unemployment has fallen dramatically over the long run and integration into European manufacturing networks transformed the economy. Yet rapid development creates its own expectation effect. Citizens compare themselves increasingly with Germany or the Netherlands rather than with Poland in 1995. Improvements therefore can coexist with dissatisfaction because the reference point rises faster than living standards.
This is why telling populist voters that Poland has objectively benefited from the EU is necessary but insufficient. It answers a historical question: is Poland richer than it would probably have been outside European integration? It does not answer the household’s immediate questions about housing, healthcare, taxes, migration or whether their town possesses attractive opportunities for their children. Macroeconomic success does not eliminate microeconomic insecurity.
Migration has become especially complicated because Poland simultaneously fears immigration and suffers demographic decline. The country has one of Europe’s ageing populations and needs workers, while millions of Ukrainians entered Poland after Russia’s invasion. Polish society initially demonstrated extraordinary solidarity towards Ukrainian refugees. Over time, however, questions about benefits, labour-market competition and the distribution of public resources became more politically salient. Nawrocki has campaigned on prioritising Polish citizens in social and economic policy, including relative to Ukrainian refugees.
Again, this should not automatically be interpreted as Poland becoming anti-Ukrainian. Public opinion can support Ukraine’s survival against Russia while simultaneously wanting limits on the domestic benefits offered to Ukrainian citizens. Foreign-policy solidarity and welfare-state entitlement are different questions. Governments create unnecessary polarisation when they treat them as one moral package. A voter can believe Ukraine should receive weapons while believing Polish taxpayers should receive priority in particular benefits. Whether that policy is economically or ethically optimal can be debated without assuming the voter secretly supports Russia.
This distinction matters because welfare states depend on perceived reciprocity. Citizens pay taxes partly because they believe the system will support them under predictable rules. Large migration shocks can weaken support if people believe newcomers receive benefits without equivalent contribution, even when the factual perception is exaggerated. The sustainable response is transparent eligibility, labour-market integration and evidence about fiscal contributions rather than moral condemnation of the concern itself.
Poland’s defence expansion creates an even larger distributional question. Both candidates support spending around 5% of GDP on defence, an extraordinary level for a European democracy. Every additional percentage point represents resources unavailable immediately for some combination of tax cuts, healthcare, education, infrastructure or household consumption. The strategic justification may be compelling given Russia’s invasion next door. The opportunity cost still exists.
This is why governments need to connect military spending with industrial policy. If Poland simply imports most defence equipment, spending improves security while sending much of the industrial benefit abroad. If part of the expenditure develops Polish ammunition, drone, vehicle and electronics production, defence budgets can also expand technological and manufacturing capacity. Security expenditure then produces a partial domestic multiplier.
Poland has an opportunity here because European rearmament will create enormous demand over the next decade. Germany has just loosened its fiscal rules for defence and infrastructure. Other European states are increasing military budgets. Ukraine requires continued supplies. A Polish defence industry capable of producing at scale could therefore turn geographic vulnerability into industrial advantage.
This is security Keynesianism with supply-side characteristics: government demand creates factories whose productive capacity can serve domestic and export markets. The risk is inefficient procurement protected permanently from competition. Defence industrial policy therefore needs measurable output rather than national prestige.
The presidential election will influence how easily Tusk can pursue these broader reforms. A Trzaskowski victory would align the presidency with the parliamentary government, reducing veto conflict. That could increase policy speed. A Nawrocki victory would preserve divided government and potentially block legislation involving abortion, judicial reform and other controversial issues. Neither arrangement is automatically better institutionally. Unified government increases decisiveness. Divided government increases constraint.
This is the governability-versus-checks trade-off.
Tusk supporters understandably want the president to stop obstructing a government that won the 2023 election. PiS supporters understandably see a conservative president as protection against a government they distrust. The presidency’s veto therefore appears either dysfunctional or essential depending on who controls parliament.
That is exactly why constitutional institutions should be evaluated without reference to the current party holding them.
Would Tusk supporters want a weak presidential veto if PiS returned with a parliamentary majority?
Would PiS supporters want a strong veto if Trzaskowski were president under a future conservative government?
Institutional preferences become much clearer when we imagine losing the next election.
This is particularly important because Polish politics has become deeply polarised around competing accounts of democratic legitimacy. Tusk’s coalition says it is repairing institutions weakened under PiS. PiS argues that Tusk is using the state and legal system against political opponents while subordinating Poland to Brussels. Each camp increasingly views the other not simply as wrong but as threatening the constitutional order.
That resembles the mutual delegitimation visible in the United States.
Once both sides believe only their victory preserves democracy, compromise begins to look immoral.
Institutional restraint becomes harder.
Every appointment becomes existential.
Every election becomes a referendum on the survival of the state.
This is dangerous even when one side’s claims about particular abuses are better supported than the other’s. Democracy requires the possibility that political opponents can govern legitimately within constitutional boundaries.
Poland therefore needs something larger than one camp finally defeating the other completely.
It needs institutions both camps expect to survive under.
The presidential election next Sunday cannot produce that by itself.
It can determine which side receives more power to shape the process.
If Trzaskowski wins, Tusk’s government will gain an extraordinary opportunity. With fewer presidential obstacles, it will no longer be able to attribute slow reform primarily to Duda’s veto. Institutional alignment transfers responsibility. Greater power means fewer excuses.
If Nawrocki wins, he will need to decide whether the presidency becomes a constitutional check or a permanent partisan veto against nearly everything Tusk attempts. Those are not the same role. A president can scrutinise legislation without treating obstruction as the purpose of office.
That distinction will determine whether divided government produces compromise or paralysis.
The election therefore is not simply Europe versus nationalism, liberalism versus conservatism or Tusk versus PiS.
It is a test of whether Poland can complete its extraordinary economic and geopolitical transformation without allowing political polarisation to turn every institution into partisan territory.
Poland is richer than it has ever been.
Militarily more important than it has been in decades.
Central to European security.
Deeply integrated into the West.
Yet its domestic political system remains divided almost exactly in half.
That is not necessarily democratic failure.
Close competition can be healthy.
The danger begins when each half concludes that the other half’s victory is illegitimate by definition.
Next Sunday’s winner will probably receive only a narrow majority.
The more important test will begin afterwards:
can they treat that narrow electoral victory as temporary authority over an office rather than proof that their half of Poland owns the state?
