What Poland’s Surprise Election Winner Means for the World

You’ve got to hunt for news about the most consequential election in Europe this year. Israel has pushed even the war in Ukraine far down the headline scroll.

But Sunday’s surprising vote in Poland deserves attention — for what it says about domestic small-d democratic politics and for what it means geopolitically for the U.S. and Europe.

Let’s start with the first and the man of the moment: Donald T. — T is for Tusk — who both shares some qualities with his namesake and represents a rejection of Trumpist politics.

Tusk led his center-right Civic Platform and two likely coalition partners to an unexpected victory over the ruling Law and Justice Party. Over eight years, PiS, as the governing party is known, blended social Catholic conservatism, nationalism bleeding into jingoism and state patronage. Its detractors saw in it an existential threat to Poland’s thirtysomething democracy and raised doubts about the election’s fairness.

We’ve become so downbeat that the outcome came as a shock. It shouldn’t have, and it’s instructive why.

Polish politics, like our own, are loud. Extremist voices break through most easily. But even though kinda-crazy works well online or on cable, it tends to lose appeal when people make serious choices about who should run the joint. High decibel levels obscure the deep pragmatic streak of most voters in countries that are stable and relatively well off. They also obscure another reality: Poland, even run by populists on the political right, is hardly an autocracy. PiS used state media and coffers to swing voters, stretching for sure the usual advantages of incumbency. But democracy worked.

The reasons start with the prosaic. Poland has been the fastest-growing economy in Europe since the Berlin Wall fell, and PiS was a decent steward and benefitted politically. Then inflation spiked and growth slowed, not surprisingly hurting the incumbents. Corruption scandals further soiled their reputation for decent, mostly clean governance. Draconian prohibitions on abortion were out of step with younger and female voters who mobilized to vote them out, just as the overturning of Roe v. Wade did in the U.S. last year.

The lesson here is similar to another one from the 2022 midterms: In national elections, voters gravitate to normalcy and competence. The ruling party went too far from both, and left the majority of Polish voters in the center, willing to take the available alternative. The three coalition parties walked away with 54 percent of the vote.

The other lesson is perennial. Never bet against the most talented politician in a race. Donald Tusk, in that sense, has Trumpian qualities: He’s a good communicator, connects with his voters, and knows how to navigate the media of modern politics. He parried attacks on him as a German and Russian stooge and “evil incarnate,” per the ruling party’s leader. When he left for a top job in Brussels, in 2015, the Civic Platform imploded. Now he’s back, they’re back.

Many of the leaders who are, quite more clearly than in Poland, chipping away at democracy also happen to be pretty good retail pols. Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, who won mostly fair and square this year; Viktor Orban, in Hungary; India’s Narendra Modi. Take note, opposition parties: Poland reminds you it takes talent to win elections.

Now to the geopolitical implications, which are made larger by the war in Israel.

The coming change doesn’t move Poland on the war in Ukraine: For most of the past year-and-a-half, and setting aside some recent tensions over farm exports, Kyiv has had no closer ally in the world than neighboring Warsaw, where Poles see the conflict with Russia in existential terms almost as starkly as the Ukrainians do. Back during his time in Brussels, Tusk was called a “Russia hawk,” who tried to convince his friend and Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel to harden up on Moscow after Crimea was annexed in 2014. He failed then with costly consequences, not least to her legacy.

His electoral triumph matters for another reason: It could ease strains growing in Europe over Ukraine — especially at a time when American support for Kyiv and Europe’s defense grows precarious and the White House focus turns toward the Middle East.

Since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, the most important capitals in the EU when it comes to security have been Paris-Berlin-Warsaw. For all those years, this was a broken axis. Warsaw’s PiS picked fights with Berlin over history. Merkel’s indulgence of Putin — summed up, naturally, in a German phrase Russlandversteher, understanding Russia — made most Poles nervous. France’s Emmanuel Macron began the war trying to pacify Putin, not helping him with the Poles, and hasn’t found a common language with Germany’s Olaf Scholz.

Tusk’s rise to prime minister, expected later this year, will change this dynamic immediately. He’ll look to rebuild ties with Berlin, where Russlandversteher is discredited, if not dead. Meanwhile, Macron is sounding tougher notes on defense and Russia, and he and Tusk are said to have a decent relationship.

This troika is the best hope the EU has to get serious about its security. Hard decisions loom to reorient the industrial complex for a long war. If American support for NATO and Ukraine sags, it’ll be Europe that will have to make up for it.

Europe has many times in the past promised to step up, at long last, and proceeded to plant face firmly on the ground. The turn in Polish politics is a new chance. If taken, it would help insulate European security and NATO from the two forces that currently imperil their efforts to defend themselves immediately against Russia and China beyond: Changing winds in American politics, and a major conflict brewing in the Middle East.

With a sprinkle of hyperbole, Tusk says his election saved Polish democracy. His larger legacy could be to strengthen European security.