Trump’s Victory Couldn’t Come Soon Enough for the Polish Right

In Ashes and Diamonds, Jerzy Andrzejewski’s 1948 novel of postwar power-jockeying in Poland, the aristocratic, anti-communist Col. Staniewicz asserts, “In today’s set-up we Poles are divided into two categories: those who have betrayed the freedom of Poland and those who do not wish to do so. The first…want Communism, we do not.” 

Eight decades later, these sentiments are uncannily relevant, and they found expression in this month’s rendition of the annual Independence March in Warsaw. Earlier this year in this publication, I advised readers to keep an eye on the march, a potential litmus test of Polish sentiments toward the government less than a week after the U.S. presidential election. 

The American outcome was a decided boon for the Polish right. Conservative parliamentarians conducted a standing ovation and cheered “Donald Trump, Donald Trump” in the Sejm (Parliament) the day after America’s vote. The liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk dutifully congratulated the president-elect, prompting opponents to highlight the prime minister’s past comments alleging Trump to be in the service of Russia. Some speculated that events in Washington would sideline Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, husband of the neoconservative luminary Anne Applebaum, who had previously called Trump a “proto-fascist” and invited pro-Trump American populists to “[expletive] off.” The Polish right’s most optimistic voices anticipated the collapse of the unwieldy Tusk government, which is united only by disdain for the ousted conservative Law & Justice (PiS) party.

The new Trump administration will indeed be a hindrance to Warsaw, but speculation over a government collapse is premature. After employing blatant gangster tactics—under the approving eyes of Washington and Brussels—upon taking power late last year, the Tusk government has settled into a routine of legislative and judicial activism to which American conservatives have grown accustomed. 

Earlier this year, the government raided the premises of the Independence March organization and bullied a conservative private higher-education institution into suspending activities. It passed a resolution to nullify the Constitutional Tribunal and disregarded the office of inconvenient judges. Last week, it announced a plan that would effectively deprive Tribunal judges of their salaries under a new budget mechanism.

Abortion dominates the Polish political sphere, and this government has elevated it to a near-obsession. During the campaign, Tusk insisted only pro-abortion candidates would earn spots on the party electoral list. Ideologically diverse parts of the winning coalition bickered over the issue during government-formation talks last December. In July, an abortion vote narrowly failed in the Sejm after a couple dozen government-affiliated lawmakers joined the pro-life side. The ruling coalition recently introduced a new measure only superficially different from the first. While President Andrzej Duda holds office, such a bill will be vetoed if passed; but this recourse might vanish in just six months, and the government appears committed to an incessant campaign.

To the surprise of many in the Anglosphere, immigration has also become a key topic in rapidly developing Poland (my recent analysis of this issue here). A photo of a Senegalese man defecating in a reservoir (he was later deported) became one of the country’s defining images of 2024. Tusk has talked tough on European migration policy—a necessity for a deeply anti-immigration electorate—while quietly opening 49 new migrant settlement centers across the country. Pockets of Warsaw and the industrial Upper Silesian conurbation are showing signs that Western Europe’s cities and deindustrialized regions exhibited half a century ago. Poles of all political stripes oppose these developments, but both the old government and the new have facilitated them.

At the beginning of this month, a young man brutally beat Fr. Lech Lachowicz, a Catholic priest known as a charismatic voice; the priest died of his wounds a week later. It was the latest in a string of atrocities that have rattled the Church in Pope St. John Paul II’s homeland.

The Independence March proceeded in this tense political environment. The liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski attempted to ban the march, then tried employing bureaucratic subterfuge to allow other demonstrations to occupy the route. He ultimately relented, but warned marchers that city authorities would be “ready for every eventuality.” 

The march ended without any significant incidents, thereby initiating the uniquely Polish pastime of contesting the size of political demonstrations. The mayor’s office tallied a modest 90,000 participants, while march organizers reported 250,000. Others asserted drone footage proved over 300,000 took to the streets of Warsaw. In English-language media, outlets like Reuters and Deutsche Welle derided the march as a “far-right” event.

For Polish conservatives, channeling this energy will hardly be a straightforward exercise. By last year’s parliamentary elections, voters had grown exhausted with eight years of PiS rule, and that party’s return to power would require support from some previously antagonistic parties, likely including fragments of the current ruling coalition. More pressing is May’s presidential election, over which the abortion issue looms ominously. The Tusk-endorsed candidate will be Trzaskowski, and polls show him with comfortable leads over a generic PiS-affiliated candidate (recently confirmed as the historian Karol Nawrocki). Polish conservatives are energized and organized, but power appears stubbornly out of reach.

Poland felt on edge for the independence festivities, somehow more so than the election-weary United States I had departed. Again, one recalls the Poland of Andrzejewski’s Ashes. Idealists on two sides are contesting the structure of a new world, this time one to replace the dying neoliberal order. “Rule of law” enjoys vanishing practical meaning, and society inches closer to an abyss.

“They want to destroy us, we must destroy them,” continues the fictional Col. Staniewicz. “A battle is going on between us, a battle that has only just started.” Poland, which suffered unfathomably during the last century, deserves that these sentiments not come to fruition.