To the surprise of commentators both in Poland and abroad, prime minister Donald Tusk’s candidate, the highly educated, internationally respected liberal Rafał Trzaskowski, did not become Poland’s next president.

A former member of the European Parliament (MEP), cabinet minister, mayor of Warsaw, and deputy leader of the Civic Platform (PO), Trzaskowski embodied everything Western elites have celebrated in the region since 1989. He represents technocratic competence, transatlantic credentials, and an unshakeable faith in liberal democracy.

His opponent, Karol Nawrocki, was largely treated as a meme throughout the campaign. Head of the state-run Institute of National Remembrance, Nawrocki has spent years pushing an obsessive anti-communist agenda, often celebrating far-right resistance groups from Poland’s interwar and postwar history. But this wasn’t just about historical revisionism: Nawrocki also carried a deeply checkered personal past — alleged 1990s ties to the Gdańsk mafia, links to football hooligan groups, and involvement in illegal retaking of apartments. . .

Anyway: chain-taking snus through televised debates, Nawrocki looked like the antithesis of the clean liberal professional class Trzaskowski represented. And yet, he won the election — barely, but decisively. This wasn’t just a defeat of one campaign; it trashed the idea of post-1989 Central Europe’s long march toward liberal progress.

Despite Trzaskowski’s wider campaign machine and backing from public media, the liberal camp was unable to convince the electorate. Jarosław Kaczyński’s national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) put forward a catastrophically bad candidate — and still triumphed. That fact alone shows how far liberalism has collapsed in the region.

It’s hard to see how this will be reversed. Even hopeful signs for centrists like the victory of the pro-EU conservative Nicușor Dan in Romania can’t hide the broader regional trend: Hungary, Slovakia, and Serbia are sliding further into authoritarianism, and Russia’s shadow looms ever larger. Over 20 percent of Polish voters in the first round backed candidates with clear or coded pro-Putinist positions.

So, who is Karol Nawrocki? He is a local historian-turned-political fixer, a former director of Gdańsk’s World War II museum, and the president of Institute of National Remembrance since 2021. He stands for everything liberal elites despise: vulgarity, cronyism, and reactionary nostalgia. He doesn’t even try to mask it. His slogan? “Poland first. Poles first.” His persona? A self-made man, of “flesh and blood,” promising to speak for the people. In a final debate, fearing a narrow loss to Trzaskowski, he quoted the Books of Chronicles.

He still won. And he won largely because Trzaskowski lost the campaign all by himself.

The failures of the liberal coalition were manifold. Tusk’s team had campaigned on restoring democracy and rule of law, and yet, within months of taking power in October 2023, their administration was mired in scandals — the kind not so discussed in the English-speaking press but known about in Poland. Investigative journalists like Szymon Jadczak (of Wirtualna Polska, one of the country’s leading news portals) reported that the public prosecutor’s office was concealing files related to key figures like pro-Tusk politician (and ex-fascist political activist) Roman Giertych. State-owned (or state-related, like Akcja Demokracja) foundations dodged questions about how they distributed public money. Reports on election interference were withheld under legal technicalities. Even the new public broadcaster, built to replace the previous PiS government’s propaganda machine, pushed partisan fake news instead of independent journalism.

For a coalition that won on promises of legality and transparency, this was devastating. In private, government-aligned academics justified these lapses with philosophical acrobatics, citing Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the “state of exception.” The message?

Law can be suspended in order to save democracy.

But no reform — neither Tusk’s neoliberal promise of “absolute deregulation” nor deeper economic shifts — materialized. The “shock therapy 2.0” that some business-friendly liberals envisioned simply never happened. In the end, voters who had expected radical change got little more than rhetoric.

Unsurprisingly, within a year of Tusk’s premiership, his disapproval ratings rivaled those of PiS’s Mateusz Morawiecki at the height of the COVID-19 crisis.

In that context, even a candidate like Nawrocki could win. And with his victory, the post-1989 liberal dream of Central Europe may finally have run its course.

In trying to understand the unexpected victory of Nawrocki in Poland’s 2025 presidential election, it is essential to begin — as always — with class. The shock expressed across liberal and international media obscures what is, from a historical materialist perspective, entirely predictable: that a liberal regime unable to deliver material gains to the popular classes will, sooner or later, collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. And in this vacuum, the far right — promising order, identity, and a false sense of national community — thrives.

As I’ve noted before (including in Jacobin), Polish public opinion research does not track class in a consistent or structural way. There are no standard variables to directly capture class position — particularly when class must be defined in terms of education and identity (more: style of life in general) and not just relation to the means of production. But we can still infer patterns from occupational categories and education data — and the latest Ipsos exit poll for TVN24 provides an unusually clear picture.

The data show a stark class gradient. Among voters with only a primary education, Nawrocki won a staggering 73.4 percent. Even in the vocational-educated group, he held a commanding 68.3 percent. Support for Trzaskowski only begins to climb among those with post-secondary education — he reached near parity in that cohort — and it is only among the university-educated that he truly led, with 62.6 percent. The pattern is familiar: the higher the level of formal education, the more likely one is to support the liberal candidate. The lower the level of schooling, the more decisive the turn toward the authoritarian right.

The occupational breakdown tells a similar story. Nawrocki triumphed among farmers (84.6 percent) and manual laborers (68.4 percent). He led even among the unemployed (64.7 percent) and pensioners (50.5 percent). In contrast, Trzaskowski fared better among the urban middle classes: professionals, managers, and students. Interestingly, even among small business owners, a group liberals often hope to woo, Nawrocki won with 57.1 percent. This signals the real base of his support — not the “working class” in any simple sense, but the fragmented lower middle classes, those whose relative status is under threat and who feel excluded from the liberal order.

Some Polish left intellectuals, nostalgic for a “people’s politics,” have cheered Nawrocki’s win as a democratic correction. This stems from the fact that Kaczyński’s party uses populist, anti-elitist language (in a similar vein, parts of the reactionary left in Eastern Europe feel a certain nostalgia. . . for Donald Trump). This is a strong argument for avoiding the kind of liberals — especially those who remember the transition period of the 1990s, which they helped to shape — who often openly disdain the “common people.”

But this is an illusion. What we are seeing is not an upsurge of popular power but the political expression of petty bourgeois resentment. The votes that gave Nawrocki the presidency came not from organized labor or collective working-class agency, but from atomized individuals in the countryside, from threatened property owners, and from those whose mobility has stalled in the neoliberal order.

This is a classic pattern in authoritarian breakthroughs. When the small bourgeoisie sees no viable path for upward mobility within the liberal capitalist structure — and when it is denied real economic participation by an entrenched elite — it turns to the Right. In this sense, Nawrocki’s victory mirrors dynamics we’ve seen elsewhere — like in the case of Muslim Brotherhood’s Egypt, as Gilbert Achcar described. It is not so much a revolt of the masses as a panic of the provincial class fractions — those “left behind” not by socialism, but by a liberalism that never delivered.

Ultimately, this was not a campaign about issues or visions. Nawrocki ran as a symbol — a man of the people, a brawler, a nationalist who scorned “elites.” His slogan, “Poland first, Poles first,” struck a chord with many of those feeling dispossessed. Trzaskowski, for all his technocratic credentials, seemed to represent only continuity — and for many, continuity meant stagnation. His campaign was marred by scandals, hypocrisy, and a cynical use of legal technicalities to block public scrutiny. Voters who had been promised a restoration of “the rule of law” after the PiS years instead witnessed the same opacity, the same evasion — only with new faces.

By the time of the second round, the Tusk government had already lost much of its legitimacy. Its reforms had stalled; its promises had withered. The liberal dream of European constitutionalism, of governance by civility and consensus, had been tested — and failed. The result: a backlash, driven not by fascist masses, but by classes whose loyalty to liberal democracy was always contingent.

In a striking illustration of Poland’s shift toward international far-right currents, Nawrocki’s victory was cheered well beyond the country itself. Trump celebrated the outcome with a tweet proclaiming, “Congratulations Poland, you picked a WINNER!”

Tellingly of his ideal reference points, the night the results were announced, Nawrocki invoked a Biblical passage from 2 Chronicles 7:14.

As it goes in the King James Version: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

For many devout Christians, this declaration bordered on blasphemy, yet it struck a chord among far-right leaders across the region, who have warmly congratulated him.

This outcome not only reflects internal disagreements within Polish politics but also signals a broader regional phenomenon. With parliamentary elections scheduled in the Czech Republic this fall, leading indications suggest that a far-right, petty-bourgeois movement under Andrej Babiš is poised to triumph there as well, according to both polls and prevailing social attitudes. Such developments underscore a deeper crisis within the post-1989 liberal order, which — unable to deliver substantive economic and social benefits to the disenfranchised — finds itself increasingly undermined by radical alternatives.