The Poles are the latest Europeans to send the message that they want their storied nation to be sovereign and socially conservative. Political newcomer and former boxer Karol Nawrocki was officially declared president-elect on Monday.
Voter turnout was the largest since the election following the collapse of communism in 1989, at nearly 72 percent. Nawrocki defeated Warsaw’s leftist mayor Rafal Trzaskowski by a margin of less than two percent, with 50.9 percent of the votes.
Nawrocki’s victory is a blow to Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s liberal, pro-European Union government. While the Polish president doesn’t have the power to create policy, he can veto legislation. And since Tusk’s government doesn’t hold a three-fifths parliamentary majority, Nawrocki, like his predecessor, will likely make use of that power.
Nawrocki’s victory is being attributed, at least in part, to the most visible politician in the world. The Wall Street Journal reports:
He got what was perhaps his biggest boost from more than 4,000 miles away, when President Trump gave him a nod of approval.… Trump’s backing might not have been the deciding factor in catapulting Nawrocki to Poland’s presidential palace, but it gave him an edge in a tight race. At a time when Trump-styled conservatism has faltered in other recent elections such as in Canada, Australia and Romania, it found fertile ground in Poland and helped Nawrocki as he was looking to establish a political identity.
Milan Nic, a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, told the Journal that a May 1 meeting between Nawrocki and Trump generated a photo of the two together that boosted his political value. “Among everything that came out of Washington, the photo with Trump was the most important for Nawrocki — to make him look credible,” according to Nic.
Nawrocki also received an endorsement from U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who told attendees at Poland’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on May 27, 2025 that he needed to be the next president.
The Law and Justice Party tapped Nawrocki as its candidate six months ago. He is a Polish historian and an expert on communism and wrote his doctoral thesis on Poland’s anti-communist resistance. He reorganized the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, where he was born. Nawrocki is president of the Institute of National Remembrance, which conducts research on modern Polish history and investigates crimes committed during the Nazi and Communist occupations. He is a former amateur boxer and soccer player.
His campaign promises included economic and social policies that benefited Poles over other nationalities. Like those who make up other European populist movements, his supporters want stricter immigration laws contrary to the ones imposed by the European Union.
Nawrocki will likely to block the current government’s pro-abortion and LGBTQ agenda. Tusk wants to introduce civil partnerships for same-sex couples and dial back Poland’s near complete abortion ban. Poland’s Catholic demographic, which includes Nawrocki, comprises an overwhelming majority of the nation’s population.
While Nawrocki‘s former opponent supported the prime minister’s vision of a Poland perfectly aligned with mainstream Europe, Nawrocki believes Poland has given enough of its autonomy to the Eurocrats in Brussels. In addition to opposing the suicidal migration policies EU globalists have leveled across the continent, he also opposes their climate change policies.
When it comes to Ukraine, which Poland shares more than 300 miles of border with, he supports sending weapons. But he doesn’t support sending Poles. He signed off on party platform objectives that included not sending Polish troops to Ukraine and keeping Kyiv out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for fear that it would draw Poland into a war with Russia.
Poland, which already has the largest military in the EU, will spend about five percent of its GDP on defense, the most of any NATO nation. Tusk has said that by year’s end, he’d like for every Polish man to have military training. Nawrocki, by all indications, supports a strong Poland.
Globalists aren’t happy about Nawrocki’s victory. Armida van Rij of Chatham House told The Washington Post, “Voters are presented with a really stark choice: either rules-based liberal democracies or MAGA-esque ethno-nationalist types of leaders.” Borys Budka, a member of the European Parliament, told Reuters that he believed the PiS aimed to “overthrow the legal government,” adding, “This may be a big challenge for the government, which will be blocked when it comes to good initiatives,”
Nawrocki’s victory is the latest in what has become a crystal-clear pattern of anti-EU, nationalistic populism boiling over in Europe. Despite the blatant skullduggery that has emerged and tried to keep this rising political tide at bay, Europeans are undeniably rejecting globalism and the engineered liberal values that have been imposed on them.
The watershed moment when the dam began breaking was, of course, in 2016. Not only did Donald Trump pull off a shocking victory in the U.S. elections, but the people of U.K. voted to leave the EU because they sought to regain control over their nation’s policies. Ever since, populism has become more pronounced in nation after nation in Europe.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s brand of nationalism was such a threat that they torpedoed via an obvious act of lawfare removed from any semblance of legitimacy her entire candidacy. In Germany, the rising popularity of the nationalist Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) endangers the globalists’ grip on one of the most important EU nations. The statists there are getting so desperate that they’re on the precipice of banning the entire party.
In the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom, led by nationalist Geert Wilders, earned a surprising first-place finish in the 2023 parliamentary election, illustrating Dutch appeal for nationalist policies. Today, Wilders pulled his party out of the nation’s governing coalition because of frustrations over the government’s refusal to address the nation’s destructive migration policies, effectively collapsing the government.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s victory was more successful in indicating the people’s nationalist sentiment than what she has done with her position as prime minister. Also, Portugal’s populist Chega party has managed to go from inception to having 22 percent of the vote in just six years.
Then there’s little Hungary, standing tall and defiant against the big, bad EU, behaving as if it’s still the great power of yesteryear. And in Romania, like in France, the globalists had to resort to blatant chicanery and ban anti-EU, pro-peace candidate Calin Georgescu. Then they likely meddled once again to ensure someone similar, George Simion, didn’t win in the May 18 elections.
The message is clear: Europeans want their countries to remain French, British, Dutch, German, Italian, Romanian — and Polish. Nevertheless, challenges will remain. The current globalist agenda has been a century in the making. In that time, globalists have erected supranational organizations such as the EU and have siphoned ever more power from member nations. They’ve used the carrot of free travel and “free trade” to beat citizens with the sticks of unfettered migration and alarmist climate policies unburdened by actual science. The road back to a world where nations do what’s best for them is anything but a given.