It appears official: Karol Nawrocki is now President-elect of the Republic of Poland. The AP reports,
Trump-backed conservative Karol Nawrocki wins Poland’s presidential race.
I say “appears,” because these things always seem tentative. You will recall the Romanian presidential election of 2024, where the nationalist candidate won the first round and advanced to the final, along with a center-right candidate.
Since the voters got it wrong, those results were tossed and the nationalist barred from running again. In the re-run, the replacement nationalist candidate again handily won round 1, but was defeated by the establishment candidate in round 2. He never had a chance.
Commentator Byron York noticed this morning on Twitter (X), quoting this passage from the New York Times on the Polish election,
The Polish runoff came just two weeks after voters in Romania rejected a nationalist candidate in a presidential election, a result that raised the hopes of Polish liberals that Europe’s right-wing populist wave was receding.
York responded,
Quietly jaw-dropping paragraph in NYT story on Polish election. Is that the whole story? Something seems missing…
Or consider France 2025, where the leading candidate for president in 2027, Marine Le Pen, was barred from running, lest she win.
There is a long history in European “democracy” of elections being rerun until voters produce the correct result.
On three occasions, Denmark in 1992 and Ireland in both 2001 and 2008, voters shot down referenda on European Union issues. In all three instances, voters were forced to revote the following year to undo the down vote.
Only Brexit in 2016, has more-or-less stuck as a rejection by voters of the European Union.
Parliamentary elections, too. In 2023 the “far-right” party won the general election in the Netherlands that year, but the party’s leader was not allowed to become Prime Minister or even serve in the cabinet. In at least three recent incidents–Germany 2025, France 2024, and Portugal 2024 and 2025–voters chose a majority right-leaning parliament, but a left-leaning government was sworn in to avoid “contamination” by the “far-right.”
To paraphrase the old saying, democracy has to be destroyed in order to save it.
