Newsletter #64: Checking in with the Continent

Poland, Romania, and Germany

Good morning,

We’ll be dedicating a full article to the budget later this week, and since there has been little else in the news in Britain we thought it was about time we gave you an update on what’s happening elsewhere on the continent.

Assuming there’s no big news in Britain this week, we’ll continue this roundup in the next newsletter as well, looking at France, Denmark, and the Netherlands. That newsletter will be published on Saturday morning, as will future newsletters from here on out as a result of successful lobbying from the PJ WAGs association to free up our Sunday evenings. Who said Pimlico Journal doesn’t respect family values?

This newsletter’s agenda: Nawrocki is becoming his own man — and Poland is heading for a right-wing government of some kind (free); Romania pursues fiscal consolidation, but big questions remain about the long-term viability of the four-party coalition (paid); Friedrich Merz’s coalition creaks as Germany heads for third year without growth and the Alternative for Germany takes first place in the polls (paid)

Nawrocki is becoming his own man — and Poland is heading for a right-wing government of some kind

Good morning from Pimlico Journal’s cryogenically frozen Poland correspondent. I have been defrosted in the office microwave to provide you with an update on what’s been going on in Europe’s fastest-growing economy.

When we last zoomed in on Poland, it was in the context of the Presidential elections — from which the PiS-backed ‘citizen’s candidate’ Karol Nawrocki emerged victorious by a slim margin. If you are not familiar, Nawrocki is a bodybuilder, a historian, a former football hooligan, and a snus addict. As of this week, he’s also Poland’s most trusted politician. On the other side of the spectrum is Adrian Zandberg — who we briefly mentioned in our election breakdown earlier this year — the leader of the far-left ‘Razem’ party, which split from the broader left-wing coalition ('Lewica’) having refused to support Donald Tusk’s centrist government. Zandberg bears an unfortunate resemblance to Sully from Monsters Inc.

It is fair to say that I seriously underestimated Nawrocki as a politician and as a President. He was widely expected to be much like his predecessor Andrzej Duda — a puppet of the docile PiS establishment who would simply keep quiet and follow the orders of the party’s felinophile eminence grise, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. So far, it seems these expectations were far off the mark. Nawrocki has built on his image as a down-to-earth patriot, and he now commands a sizeable personal following, cultivated both via official channels and with the tried-and-tested medium of TikTok edits produced by teenagers and students. Despite living outside of Poland, I see at least one edit of Nawrocki and his enormous presidential BMW on my feed every day — typically with Polish football ultra rap as a backing track.

Beyond projecting a strongman image, he has achieved tangible results by wielding his veto against some genuinely unpopular laws. Tusk’s coalition has failed to pass controversial legislation expanding the usage of wind energy and building new turbines as a result, and Nawrocki has refused to expand and extent social benefits to Ukrainian refugees. He has also vetoed various other laws attempting to create red tape around corporate governance and the energy sector.

The polls — never entirely reliable anywhere and less so, if anything, in Poland — have made for interesting reading these past few months. Poland 2050, a centrist party led by former Speaker of the Sejm Szymon Holownia, has completely collapsed after a brief period of excitement. Their partners in the ‘Third Way’ alliance, formed for the recent Presidential election, the PSL — Poland’s oldest political party, founded in the 1880s — have also virtually disappeared. This is primarily due to Holownia’s terrible performance in the Presidential election, where he won just 4% of the vote, and partly due to general public dissatisfaction with the government (in which they are coalition partners). Their position was not strengthened by widespread rumours that the PSL would enter a coalition with PiS and vote against Tusk in the motion of no confidence which was filed immediately after the election.

Many polls also indicate that, having split the already limited left-wing vote between them, neither New Left nor Razem will enter the Sejm at the next election (currently scheduled for 2027). New Left have recently scored one victory, however: the election of Wlodzimierz Czarasty, one of their MPs, to replace Holownia as Speaker of the Sejm. Czarasty is a former member of PZPR (the ruling party during Poland’s communist period). This is not unheard of for Polish politicians, but unlike many others he also held party positions: Czarasty was a leader in the communist youth organisation during the 1980s. Aside from looking like a character from the cover of the video game Worms, he has caused a splash for having banned the infamous Grzegorz Braun from appearing in the Sejm due to his regular outbursts against Jews and homosexuals (among other groups).

Braun himself has had a strong few months in the polls. His party, KPP (a far-right splinter from Konfederacja, the main grouping for the anti-PiS right) is currently at around 7% on the aggregators. They have previously seen highs of 11%, although these mostly come from ‘friendly’ pollsters which have consistently overestimated support for them and for Konfederacja. Broadly speaking, they have succeeded in stealing some of Konfederacja’s momentum, but the latter remain at about 17% in the polls and Braun is mistrusted by the vast majority of Poles. He has also been making increasingly Pro-Russian noises and attending various ‘peace marches’, as well as meeting with notorious far-right agitator Wojciech Olszański, a man who claims to be a ‘fascist, nationalist, and Stalinist’. I am almost certain that the government will move to ban Braun’s party — with tacit support from the rest of the right — if he is credibly assessed to be a Russian agent. Poland is still corrupt enough that hard evidence, whilst preferable, will be optional for such a move.

Overall, it looks highly likely that PO will take a beating at the next election. Seat projections are very hard to do properly, but most attempts now predict a very slim majority for a theoretical PiS - Konfederacja coalition. This would not be good for the latter in the long term, as being anti-PiS has become a key part of their identity and political appeal. PO will also not be able to ally with any of the remaining parties, unless New Left manage to remain in the Sejm and dramatically outperform the polls. In short, Poland is heading towards a right-wing government of some kind — but the battle for momentum among various factions will continue at least until elections are called.

—Anonymous Contributor, Pimlico Journal