Beginning in the late 1980s, Eastern Europe shifted from being a political backwater to a political bellwether. By shrugging off the Soviet yoke and exiting communism, the region pointed toward the future collapse of the Soviet Union and the cresting of a third wave of democratization. The fast-track liberalizations of Eastern Europe in the 1990s encouraged similar bouts of deregulation and marketization elsewhere in the world. The disintegration of Yugoslavia presaged centrifugal conflicts that would engulf Libya, Sudan, and Ukraine.
And if you want to understand the popularity of Donald Trump in the United States, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the global backlash against liberalism first acquired its distinctive right-wing populist flavor in Eastern Europe, beginning with hapless presidential hopeful Stanislaw Tyminski in 1990. The failure of liberal parties in the region to usher in broad prosperity—and the creation of distinct post-communist classes of haves and have-nots—led directly to the rise of right-wing populist parties and politicians. Even the egalitarian effect of European Union transfers was not enough to prevent the success of Viktor Orban in Hungary, Robert Fico in Slovakia, and the Law and Justice Party in Poland.
Today, the region is torn between broadly liberal, pro-EU politicians and their broadly illiberal, nationalist, and xenophobic rivals. What separates the two is often just a percentage or two at the polls. In Romania, a representative of that first group, pro-EU presidential candidate Nicusor Dan, won last week’s election but only after a pair of far-right opponents nearly pulled off an upset victory.
In Poland, meanwhile, the political winds blew in the other direction, as Karol Nawrocki nosed past the pro-EU candidate. It was a very close election, with Nawrocki garnering 50.89 percent of the vote and his opponent getting 49.11 percent. Nawrocki is linked to the right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS), and he has now become a major obstacle in the path of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s plan to bring Poland back into the European mainstream.
Over the last decade, the world has suffered bouts of political whiplash as right-wing populists and their opponents have battled it out at the ballot box. In the United States, Trump has come back for a second term after besting liberal Kamala Harris while the progressive standard-bearer Lula has returned to office in Brazil after the defeat of “Trump of the Tropics” Jair Bolsonaro. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, after leaving government in disgrace in 2019, won the general elections last year (only to be squeezed out of power by three other parties joining together to form a coalition government). After elections this week, South Korean progressives will return to government after losing by a tiny margin last time around.
To be sure, some autocrats—like Orban, Narendra Modi in India, and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador—have proven almost election-proof. And some progressive parties, like Morena in Mexico, have also remained in power across terms.
But the polarization of politics in Eastern Europe, which has already produced wild swings at the polls, points to a new era of instability when election results are hard to predict because the electorate is so evenly divided and the society so starkly polarized. Is governance even possible in such a see-saw world?
Let’s take a closer look at Poland to see what the future of democracy looks like.
The return of tusk
The Law and Justice Party (PiS) patterned its remaking of Poland on the example of Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Socially conservative, it promised a more aggressively Christian Poland that would be less tolerant of homosexuality and immigrants. Since taking power in 2005, it followed Orban’s model by exerting more control over the judicial sector, systematically restricting media freedoms, and pushing back against perceived interference by European institutions.
Unlike its libertarian counterparts elsewhere in the world, PiS actually favored more government involvement in the economy—to direct resources to an underfunded health sector, encourage pro-family policies, institute a minimum wage, and provide tax exemptions for young workers. These economic policies were a thank-you to Poland B, the folks who didn’t benefit from the liberalization of the 1990s and who exacted their revenge by putting PiS in office.
The other element that distinguished PiS from its regional counterparts was its intense animosity toward Russia. Part of this was general Russophobia that dates back to the tsar’s enthusiastic participation in the dismemberment of Poland in the eighteenth century, the Soviet attempt to reoccupy parts of the country in 1919, and Stalin’s later grip over the government in Warsaw. But part of the animosity is of more recent vintage. In 2010, one of the founders of PiS, Lech Kaczynski, died in a plane crash in Smolensk, in western Russia, which was the result of human error but which some Poles are convinced was a Russian plot.
So, while Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico align themselves with the illiberalism of Vladimir Putin, Kaczynski’s twin brother Jaroslaw, who continues to pull PiS strings in the background, will have nothing to do with the Kremlin.
In 2023, PiS came out on top for a third straight parliamentary election. But it didn’t win enough seats to form a government. Donald Tusk, who returned to Poland after a stint as the president of the European Council, led his Civic Platform party into a coalition government with the Left and the Christian Democratic Third Way party.
Tusk has subsequently steered Poland away from illiberalism and back into the good graces of Brussels. The EU has once again opened the spigot of funding for Poland. But other promised reforms have been hard to push through because the government doesn’t have a parliamentary majority sufficient to overcome a presidential veto. And the Polish president, the PiS-aligned Andrzej Duda, loved to use his veto power.
That’s why this week’s presidential election was so important. If a liberal had won the presidency, the Tusk-led government could have finally passed many of its promised reforms. Instead, to the dismay of Tusk and others, Karol Nawrocki continued the PiS winning streak, which means that the party will control the presidency from 2015 to at least 2030.
What Nawrocki represents
A conservative historian and former boxer, Nawrocki has little power outside of his ability to wield a veto. But that’s a veritable superpower. He will likely use it to block abortion access and LGBTQ rights. During his campaign, he shredded a copy of Gender Queer: A Memoir to demonstrate his commitment to “family values.”
Unlike Orban, he supports Poland’s actions on behalf of Ukraine. Like Orban, he is anti-immigrant, including the million or so Ukrainian refugees who fled to Poland after the Russian invasion in 2022.
Nawrocki represents a beachhead for the MAGA movement in Poland. Trump endorsed him. And the Conservative Political Action Conference held its first meeting in Poland in the week leading up to the election—to give Nawrocki a last-minute boost. Homeland Security head Kristi Noem appeared at the gathering to announce that Nawrocki and other European politicians in attendance “will be the leaders that will turn Europe back to conservative values.”
Nawrocki has made his outsider status an advantage. He’s a first-time politician and, at his campaign’s outset, half of Polish voters had never heard of him. Like Trump, he somehow managed to survive several scandals—including allegations of procuring prostitutes for clients—that would have killed the careers of other politicians.
Perhaps his greatest asset, however, was that he wasn’t associated with the current Tusk government. In February 2025, nearly 60 percent of Poles were dissatisfied with Tusk and his coalition partners.
The progressive disadvantage
The far right, when it attains power, doesn’t observe the niceties of the law. In Poland, PiS went straight for the judicial jugular to stack the courts in its favor. Trump issues unconstitutional executive decrees. Daniel Noboa handed out money to essentially buy the recent election in Ecuador.
Liberals, on the other hand, are generously more scrupulous about obeying the law (at least in comparison). They play by the rules, which means that they must somehow restore some semblance of democracy within the legal constraints of democracy. It’s as if one side digs a giant hole with a backhoe without bothering to file an environmental impact statement or inform the owners of the land. The other side scrambles to meet all the legal requirements of filling in the hole, and then is given only a trowel to do the job.
That’s certainly been the case in Poland. PiS attacked independent judges and tried to silence critical journalists. Tusk, meanwhile, has been bound by democratic rules (the presidential veto) and democratic procedures (the presidential election).
The far right generally doesn’t give a fig about democracy. Right-wing ideologue Curtis Yarvin once called for “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” which put him on the margins of discourse in 2008 when he published his manifesto under the pseudonym of Mencius Moldbug. Today, his proposal to cede all power to a CEO-in-chief has become a near-reality, and Yarvin has become a veritable MAGA whisperer with close links to J.D. Vance, among others.
Unfortunately, however, defending democracy isn’t necessary a winning strategy for progressives. Satisfaction with U.S. democracy actually increased after Donald Trump’s election last November. To win, progressives have to focus not just on the plutocrats or Trump’s violations of civil rights but on the intersection of the two: corruption.
Anti-corruption campaigns are populist, cut across ideological categories, and capitalize on the desire of people to “throw the bums out.” Trump and his allies around the world are corrupt, above all. Voters should be more exercised about the breaking of political rules but in practice they’re angrier about the breaking of economic rules and the outright theft of government resources.
The other takeaway from Poland is the continued popularity of an economic agenda that truly benefits the have-nots. One of Duda’s vetoes, just last month, was to shoot down a Tusk effort to reduce health care revenue. When will liberals learn? Nawrocki’s insistence during his campaign on an agenda of economic populism provided him with just enough of amargin of victory.
An anti-corruption platform married to a social democratic agenda would be a killer combo for progressive candidates. Many countries are teetering politically, capable of being nudged one way or another by a small percentage of voters. Can left and liberals find a way to work together to fashion broadly popular campaigns—as in France in 2024 and South Korea in 2025—to prevent MAGA forces from taking over the world?
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