Poland’s conservative opposition have a Trump dilemma [Opinion]

Mar 7, 2025 | Politics

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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 Daniel Tilles

OPINION

Maintaining a tough anti-Russia line while showing allegiance to Donald Trump is becoming increasingly difficult for PiS.

When Donald Trump swept to a second term at last November’s elections, his victory was enthusiastically received by Poland’s national-conservative opposition party, Law and Justice (PiS), some of whose MPs celebrated by wearing MAGA caps and chanting Trump’s name in parliament.

PiS, which enjoyed close relations with Trump during his first term, when it was also in government, hoped his return would provide it with a boost and would undermine the current Polish government, led by Donald Tusk, who has been publicly critical of Trump in the past.

However, as I warned at the time, in reality Trump also poses dangers for PiS, in particular over his very different approach towards Russia.

A large part of PiS’s political identity is centred on being anti-Russia. It blames Vladimir Putin for the plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczyński, the party’s founder and identical twin brother of current leader Jarosław Kaczyński.

It accuses Tusk of being too friendly towards Russia during his previous term as prime minister from 2007 to 2014, including suggesting he may somehow have been involved in Lech Kaczyński’s death or covering it up.

PiS has also repeatedly attacked Western countries and the former Tusk-led government for being too willing to trust in and do business with Russia, arguing that this was what gave Putin the confidence and funds to invade Ukraine.

Jarosław Kaczyński even blamed Russia (alongside Germany) for helping Tusk remove PiS from power in 2023.

Yet trusting Putin and doing business with Russia is the very policy Trump is now actively pursuing. That is making it increasingly hard for PiS to show allegiance to the US president without appearing hypocritical and risking political backlash in a country whose population is overwhelmingly anti-Russian.

This week, a journalist asked PiS MP Teresa Pamuła if she trusts Trump, to which she replied yes. He then asked her how she could do so given that Trump has said that he trusts Putin and that he believes Russia has good intentions.

Pamuła’s only response was to repeatedly claim that she “hasn’t heard him [Trump] say that”.

Trying to bury their heads in the sand and hope that the clear contradictions go away is not a viable long-term strategy for PiS. Indeed, it is likely to get ever harder.

On Thursday, in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Trump’s special envoy to Russia and Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, declared that the president’s approach is “informed by the realisation that the United States needs to reset relations with Russia”.

That single word, “reset”, is particularly harmful to PiS, which has in the past condemned Tusk and Western countries for pursuing a policy of reset with Russia.

The word was even used as the title of a series shown in 2023 by state broadcaster TVP – which was at the time a propaganda mouthpiece for the PiS government – purporting to show how the former Tusk government had been too close to Russia.

After Kellogg’s remarks, Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski – who was one of those targeted for criticism in TVP’s Reset series – shared the quotes on social media and directed the attention of “PiS propagandists” to them.

A final danger for PiS is that, even if they can somehow paper over the hypocrisy of their current position, their allegiance to Trump may not be reciprocated.

During Trump’s first term, PiS was in government and its ally, Andrzej Duda, was president. That meant it had a lot to offer Trump. Now PiS is in opposition and Duda is a lame duck, seeing out his final months before leaving office in August.

Trump, a highly transactional politician who likes to deal with leaders who hold real power and influence, may no longer see PiS as particularly useful.

That impression was strengthened during Duda’s recent decision to fly to Washington for a meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the CPAC conference.

While Duda arrived on time for the meeting, Trump was around an hour later, leaving the Polish president to be seen on a live Polish TV broadcast pacing up and down the waiting room.

Once Trump did arrive, the meeting, which was supposed to last an hour, finished in a matter of minutes as the US president had a scheduled speech to deliver at CPAC.

The reason for Trump’s late arrival was never explained. It is possible there was a genuine and pressing issue he had to attend to. But it certainly did not give the impression that Duda is a valued ally.

 

A glimpse of how all this might play out politically for PiS can be seen in the current campaign for May’s elections to choose Duda’s successor.

The PiS-backed candidate, Karol Nawrocki, has long been an avowed opponent of Russia (he proudly boasts that he is on a list of those wanted for arrest by the Russian authorities) and has continued to use such rhetoric during the campaign.

But he has also taken an increasingly hard line on Ukraine, suggesting doubts about its EU and NATO membership and promising to end Kyiv’s “indecent” treatment of Poland.

Leading figures in PiS have done the same, often echoing Trump’s positions. Last month, deputy party leader Elżbieta Witek repeated the US president’s call for Ukraine to hold presidential elections despite the ongoing war.

Last week, a former PiS government minister, Przemysław Czarnek, said that Zelensky had acted like a “fool” during his recent visit to the White House and that “Ukraine is not capable of being independent” without US support.

Yet that messaging does not seem to have worked: Nawrocki’s average support in polls has been on a constant downward trend, falling from a high of 30% around early December to 23% now.

Much of that support appears to have gone to far-right candidate Sławomir Mentzen, who over the same period has risen from 7% to 17%.

He is now threatening to overtake Nawrocki and win a place in the second-round run-off against Tusk’s candidate, Rafał Trzaskowski.

Weekly rolling average of support in polls for Poland’s main presidential candidates compiled by ewybory.eu

Mentzen’s own rhetoric has been just as tough on Ukraine as Nawrocki’s, if not more so. But there are two major differences.

First, Mentzen and his Confederation (Konfederacja) party have always been hostile towards Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees (unlike PiS, which was very supportive of them after Russia’s full-scale invasion).

Second, Confederation, although not pro-Russia in the manner of many other far-right parties in Europe, has never been openly hostile towards Moscow in the manner of PiS.

That means that, whereas Nawrocki is producing messaging that can feel out of keeping with PiS’s earlier positions, Mentzen’s narrative allows him to say that he has been right all along.

Indeed, Mentzen is the most Trump-like of all Poland’s presidential contenders. As well as being a politician, he is also a businessman. His low-tax, libertarian economic policies echo some of Trump’s, as does his penchant for cryptocurrencies.

PiS now faces the possibility that not only may its support for Trump backfire, but it could also find itself outtrumped by the far right.


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: Krzysztof Sitkowski/KPRP

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