After Poland’s tempestuous presidential election ended in a triumph for the populist right and a devastating blow to the centrist prime minister, the less obvious winner is a publican with a soft spot for Winston Churchill and Nigel Farage.
The stage has been set for two years of open political warfare between Donald Tusk, the premier, and Karol Nawrocki, the pugnacious newly elected head of state.
Yet the emerging kingmaker is Slawomir Mentzen, 38, a figurehead of the hard right who was knocked out in the first round of voting but succeeded in strongarming Nawrocki into adopting large parts of his agenda, including a pledge to block Ukraine from joining Nato.
Karol Nawrocki, right, backed eight “pledges” proposed by Mentzen, left
His Confederation Liberty and Independence party, driven by a blend of libertarianism, ultra-Thatcherite free-marketerism and stiff social conservatism, is already on manoeuvres to string together a new government from the chaos.
“Poland needs generational renewal,” Mentzen told The Times in a rare interview with foreign press, noting that Tusk is 68 and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the most powerful politician in the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) opposition party, is 75. “It’s high time the generation in their thirties, forties or even fifties took responsibility for power.”
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Mentzen characterised the election as a revolt of “small business owners, workers, farmers” and those who believe in national sovereignty against the financial and intellectual elite embodied by Tusk and Rafal Trzaskowski, the polished and cosmopolitan mayor of Warsaw who lost to Nawrocki.
“My anti-elitism is entirely genuine,” said Mentzen, a serial founder of small businesses who runs a pub as well as a microbrewery and a legal and tax consultancy in Torun, his hometown.
“I didn’t grow up in a well-off family. Both my parents are teachers: my mother worked in a school, my father at the university. Their own parents came from the countryside, so our social advancement is relatively recent.
“I felt the difference. When I went to Warsaw, it was clear there was a divide between those raised in affluent families in the capital — for whom life was simply easier — and those from the provinces.”
Like Nawrocki, Mentzen is a relative newcomer to frontline politics, having only been elected to parliament in 2023. He remains haunted by an infamous list of five priorities he set out in 2019: “We don’t want Jews, gays, abortion, tax or the EU.”
Mentzen said it was time for a “generational renewal” in Poland
DOMINIKA ZARZYCKA/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET/GETTY IMAGES
Since then he has been through a “degree of de-demonisation — a kind of normalisation of my image”, as he put it, insisting that he was no antisemite.
Yet Mentzen has lost none of his taste for tactical provocations, saying he would like Poland to acquire its own nuclear arsenal and that he was losing faith in Nato’s ability to defend his country against a Russian attack.
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“I simply don’t believe Nato could send troops to Poland quickly,” he said. “Western Europe effectively has no army. The United States would need months to deploy serious forces here. As in Ukraine, Poland would have to hold out alone for quite some time.”
He added: “I firmly believe they would do everything they could to show support — but the problem is that western Europe is disarmed. For years, they’ve been free-riding under the American security umbrella, cutting defence budgets. Militarily, they barely exist. So the issue is not whether they would want to help, but whether they could.”
Tusk is fighting for his political survival and Nawrocki is expected to use his presidential powers to cripple the government’s reform agenda and block its nominees to the military and the judiciary. President Trump congratulated Poland for having picked a “Trump ally” and a “winner”.
Donald Tusk will face a confidence vote
PAWEL SUPERNAK/EPA
Nawrocki’s allies in the PiS party are already urging Tusk to recognise that the game is up and he must make way for an interim government staffed by technocrats until a snap election can be held. Yet Tusk is battling on: his first gambit will be a confidence vote that is intended to hold his fracturing coalition together.
What role Mentzen and his Confederation party will play in this ferment of confusion remains to be seen. On the one hand, he has offered to enter discussions about toppling Tusk and forming a minority government with PiS. On the other, he hinted that he could equally be persuaded to toss Tusk a lifeline — for the right price.
“I have a vivid imagination — almost anything can fit in it — but I don’t count my chickens before they hatch,” he said.
Mentzen predicted that Tusk would contrive to muddle through the remaining two years of his term but would emerge with his authority damaged beyond repair. “I don’t believe we’ll see an early election,” he said. “That said … I suspect the next two years will see everyone quarrelling and competing with everyone else. What will come of it no one knows.”