How will a Karol Nawrocki presidency affect Poland’s transatlantic relations?

Keep our news free from ads and paywalls by making a donation to support our work!

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

By Aleks Szczerbiak

Embracing an active model of the presidency, including in the foreign policy sphere, puts pressure on Poland’s new right-wing head of state to fulfil his election promise of strengthening the country’s relations with the Trump administration.

But he has secured a significant political success following the US president’s pledge to maintain, and even expand, America’s military presence in Poland.

An active president

In December 2023, a coalition government headed up by Donald Tusk, leader of the liberal-centrist Civic Platform (PO), took office following eight years of rule by the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, currently Poland’s main opposition grouping.

In August, historian-turned-politician Karol Nawrocki, formally an independent but openly supported by PiS, was sworn in as Polish president for a five-year term. The Tusk government will now have to “cohabit” with a hostile president for the remainder of its term of office, scheduled to run until the next parliamentary elections in autumn 2027.

Under Poland’s constitution, the president is not involved in day-to-day governance and the country’s domestic and foreign policy are largely under the control of the government, so Nawrocki’s impact here is limited and largely symbolic.

However, symbolism matters in politics, and the president does have some foreign policy competencies that can affect the government’s room for manoeuvre on the international stage. Ambassadorial appointments, for example, must be approved by the president.

Moreover, the fact that Nawrocki has the authority that stems from a huge mandate, in an election that saw the highest ever turnout in a Polish presidential poll, gives him the opportunity to wield considerable influence over political debate. This is particularly true of foreign policy and international security debates, as the president is also commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Nawrocki has interpreted his electoral mandate as a vote of no confidence in the Tusk government and made it clear that he intends to carve out a role as an independent political actor and be much more active and assertive than his predecessor.

He has surrounded himself with a strong political support base who he is hoping can help him to develop and carry forward major independent initiatives in both the domestic and foreign policy spheres.

In his first few weeks in office, Nawrocki has, for example, vetoed a raft of government-sponsored legislation (which the Tusk administration lacks the required three-fifths parliamentary majority to overturn) as well as proposing a series of his own draft laws.

Strengthening Poland’s transatlantic ties

During the presidential election campaign, Nawrocki promised to prioritise maintaining and strengthening Poland’s strategic relationship with the US as one of his key campaign themes. However critical they may be of the actions of particular American presidents, there is a broad cross-partisan political consensus in Poland that the US is currently Warsaw’s only credible military security guarantor.

In fact, while all the major political actors declare a willingness to cooperate on questions of overarching national interest, even such a critical area as security policy is strongly influenced by national politics and there is fierce political competition on who is best placed to keep Washington on Poland’s side.

One of Nawrocki’s key election campaign promises was precisely that he was better placed than the Tusk government to develop and strengthen Poland’s transatlantic relations, and thereby build up the country’s position as a central and eastern European regional power.

During Trump’s first term, which overlapped with PiS’s rule in Warsaw, the two forged a very close working relationship. PiS politicians backed Trump in his re-election bid and enthusiastically celebrated his return to the White House.

At the same time, the Trump administration openly supported Nawrocki in the Polish presidential election, including a headline-grabbing Oval Office meeting with the US president himself. They clearly saw each other as strong ideological and strategic allies.

On the other hand, there is very little diplomatic chemistry between the Tusk government and the Trump administration. Not only do the current governing parties lack ideological kinship with Trump, in the past PO leaders have been extremely critical of the US president. For example, Tusk once accused him of having ties with the Russian security services, while foreign minister Radosław Sikorski described Trump as a “proto-fascist”.

Controversy over Ukraine peace negotiations

This issue came to a head last month, initially over the controversy on who should have represented Poland at various leaders’ meetings surrounding Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Alaska summit to discuss negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.

Originally, Tusk, who had represented Poland in similar meetings, was supposed to have attended a pre-summit preparatory teleconference organised by Trump with several European leaders. However, at the last minute the US side informed Warsaw that it would prefer it if Nawrocki participated in the talks instead.

However, neither Nawrocki nor Tusk attended the post-Alaska summit high level White House talks during which Trump met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accompanied by a delegation of top European leaders.

In the event, both sides tried to deflect responsibility for the lack of Polish representation at a meeting discussing matters so critical to Poland’s national security interests.

The government argued that they had agreed a division of competencies whereby Nawrocki was responsible for consultations with Trump, in line with the Polish constitutional practice that the president represents Poland in international forums operating within the transatlantic security framework.

They also said that the post-summit meeting was held in the same format as the previous online talks between European leaders and Trump where Nawrocki had represented Poland. So, they argued, it was the incompetence of presidential staff in failing to take advantage of Nawrocki’s alleged privileged relations with the Trump administration, which meant that Warsaw was not represented.

Indeed, Nawrocki’s critics claimed that his absence from this meeting was the new president’s first major political setback since his inauguration, undermining his claim to be the best guarantor of Poland’s relations with the US. While Trump might regard Nawrocki as an ideological soulmate, he did not, they argued, see him as a key negotiating partner and their relations might not be as close as the Polish president suggested during the election campaign.

Nawrocki’s aides, on the other hand, argued that the president was not ignored, just that he did not need to go to Washington because Tusk did not request Poland’s presence at this forum. The post-summit meeting comprised, they said, those members of the “coalition of the willing” states that not only supported Ukraine but were also prepared to commit troops to an international military peacekeeping force, which Warsaw has made it clear it would not participate in.

There was little specific to be gained from Nawrocki’s presence and he was better able to advance Poland’s interests at the much more important one-to-one bilateral working meeting with Trump scheduled for the start of September, the centrepiece of the new president’s first foreign trip since his inauguration. The Trump administration, they said, would have been very unlikely to hold two such high-level meetings with the same leader within such a short space of time.

Conflict over the Washington visit

For sure, there was clearly a risk for Nawrocki that the Washington meeting could have ended up as simply a courteous gesture with no specific commitments. In fact, Nawrocki secured his most important objective: a long-sought-after, and apparently firm, ongoing commitment from Trump that the US would maintain, and possibly even increase, its military presence in Poland.

There are currently an estimated 8,000 troops stationed in the country, some on a rotational basis. The US military presence on NATO’s eastern flank remains one of Poland’s central issues of concern, given that Washington’s interest in Europe appeared to have been waning and senior Trump administration officials had previously warned that the number of American troops could be reduced as European states took greater responsibility for their own security.

For its part, the government argued that Trump’s pledge was simply a response to the fact that Poland’s defence budget had risen to 4.7% of GDP, making it NATO’s top spender, with much of this invested in US defence contracts.

The run-up to Nawrocki’s Washington trip also saw an open conflict between the president’s aides and the Tusk government. It began when the foreign ministry sent a one-page memorandum to the presidential chancellery setting out the government’s position on various issues to prepare Nawrocki for his visit; the contents of which were subsequently leaked to the media (it was unclear how).

The president’s camp described the document as embarrassing and lacking specifics, and rejected the foreign ministry’s insistence that Nawrocki follow their instructions as impertinent.

The foreign ministry, in turn, accused Nawrocki of having broken with tradition by failing to invite a senior government representative to accompany his delegation meeting the US president. The Polish ambassy in Washington was also excluded from the visit.

Nawrocki’s chancellery denied that there was any such tradition and said that no one from the government had been invited because they had poor relations with the Trump administration. The president would instead send a memo informing the government of any important developments.

Moreover, Poland does not currently have a full ambassador in Washington because both Nawrocki and his PiS-backed predecessor Andrzej Duda refused to accept the Tusk government’s nominee: Bogdan Klich, a PO politician who has in the past described Trump as Putin’s puppet.

This turf war over how Nawrocki should conduct US relations and prepare for his Washington visit goes to the heart of the dispute between the two sides over what the president’s foreign policy role should be. The government argues that it determines and sets out Poland’s foreign policy and that the president should simply represent its position abroad, even if he disagrees with it.

The president’s camp insists that representing Poland has a broader meaning and that Nawrocki’s role cannot be limited to simply that of a government cipher. Nawrocki’s Washington visit was thus seen as an opportunity for a new opening in Polish-US relations, which, they argued, were damaged by the Tusk administration.

The risks of an assertive presidency

The fact that Nawrocki’s first foreign visit since taking office was to Washington is a sign of the importance that he attaches to the transatlantic relationship, but also of his strong political ties with Trump. It was undoubtedly a political success and not just a show for the cameras, allowing Nawrocki to answer critics who argued that that he could not capitalise on his apparently close relationship with Trump to advance specific Polish interests.

Nonetheless, Nawrocki still faces the risk of appearing overreliant upon, and even submissive to, Trump. Some critics have already suggested that the US president will try and use as him as his “Trojan Horse” to advance US interests among European leaders. Nawrocki could, for example, become associated with a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine negotiated by the US president which was felt to be unfavourable to Poland’s security interests.

Nawrocki’s assertive approach to the presidency and bold claim to be a better builder of transatlantic relations than the Tusk government risks putting him much more in the political firing line than earlier presidents.

One of the strengths of a constitutionally limited president is their ability to step back from the day-to-day political struggle and insert themselves back into debate at a time when it is advantageous to them. It will be much more difficult for an active president like Nawrocki, who so clearly nails his political colours to the mast, to do this.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Mikołaj Bujak/KPRP

Aleks Szczerbiak is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex. The original version of this article appeared here.