There’s presidencies, and there’s presidencies. Irish parties mulling over their choices to succeed Michael D Higgins will be taking some comfort from the fact that their successful pick will not be assuming a Trump-like, seemingly omnipotent presidency, shaping their agenda, nor indeed, the half-way house that is Poland’s top office.
Karol Nawrocki, conservative historian, amateur boxer, and supporter of Donald Trump, who was sworn in on Wednesday, is neither a symbolic figurehead nor an agenda setter. However, his powers of veto and policy prerogatives ensure that he will be a major thorn in the side of Poland’ s centrist Europhile government.
Backed by nationalist opposition party Law and Justice (PiS), Nawrocki ‘s shock, wafer-thin, majority in June’s election dealt a particular blow to prime minister Donald Tusk’s hopes to undo the PiS’s legacy of attacks on judicial independence and to improve the country’s relationship with fellow EU member states and Ukraine, whose Nato membership the new president can block. Poland is now bracing for a continuation of the deadlock seen under nationalist outgoing president, Andrzej Duda.
At his inauguration on Wednesday Nawrocki warned that he is ready to block appointments of judges he does not see as fit to perform their roles, and will create a council dedicated to repairing Poland’s constitutional order. He concluded, shouting the Maga-like “May God bless Poland, long live Poland.”
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Like Trump, Nawrocki brings a rich vein of controversy to his new post. He is the subjects of ongoing criminal probes, and like Trump, will be protected during his presidential term from prosecution. Controversies he has been involved in range from his admitted part in a brawl between football hooligans in 2009, allegations of involvement with gangsters and claims he cheated an old man out of his apartment.
He is a political newcomer little known to the public before PiS threw its weight behind him. A bumpy road ahead is likely.
