In some ways, Poland’s presidential election on Sunday seems a simple continuation of the country’s long-standing status quo. Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s ‘populist’ new president, is expected to extend the existing gridlock between the president’s office and the cabinet, controlled respectively by Law and Justice (PiS) and Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO).
The close result in the run-off, moreover, appears to be in line with the deep polarisation of Polish public opinion between two camps that increasingly see each other as enemies, not just as political opponents.
Poland’s right is radicalising and blurring its traditionally sharp foreign policy thinking
Yet, this short-term continuity should not blind us to signs of looming change. Poland’s right is radicalising and blurring its traditionally sharp foreign policy thinking. The reasons are twofold.
First, as one observer of Polish politics correctly observed in the wake of the of first round of the election, held on May 18, the real news of the election is not the vitality of ‘populism’ but rather the fact that the decades-long duopoly of PO and PiS is cracking.
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