"Social climber, serious author, identity politician in the name of heroic victims: Why the campaign against Karol Nawrocki failed to take hold.
The result of the second round of the presidential election of the Republic of Poland was incredibly close. Karol Nawrocki, born in Gdansk in 1983, prevailed by less than 1.8 percent against Rafal Trzaskowski, who was ten years his senior. A key reason for Nawrocki's victory was that Warsaw Mayor Trzaskowski's election campaign was perceived as a smear campaign against the incumbent president of the Institute of National Remembrance. The focus was on Nawrocki's proximity to violent football fans, a previously unknown scandal involving the dishonest acquisition of real estate, and contacts with the Baltic metropolis's underworld. Instead of exposing Karol Nawrocki as a boor, the frontal attack strengthened solidarity with the opposition candidate.
Nawrocki grew up in a working-class family in a prefabricated apartment building. His mother was a bookbinder, his father worked as a lathe operator and was active in the Solidarity trade union. Due to the economic crisis of the 1980s, his father, like millions of other Poles, was forced to work abroad for three years. An important part of Karol Nawrocki's biography, which earned him 2,025 votes, is his assumption of responsibility for his family, for example, when his father became seriously ill and died early. Another is his sporting career. After several years as an amateur soccer player, he boxed for the Gdansk Shipyard Workers' Sports Club from 2000 onwards, for which he won a heavyweight tournament in 2004. He became captain of the Ex Siedlce Gdansk soccer club and founded a dedicated martial arts section.
The contrast between Nawrocki from Gdansk and his Warsaw opponent Rafal Trzaskowski could not be greater. The latter is the scion of an old intelligentsia family. His grandfather founded the first Polish high school for girls. Trzaskowski's mother grew up in Kraków in a family of antique shop owners. His father was a well-known jazz composer in Poland. Rafal Trzaskowski graduated from a US high school in 1991. 34 years later, during his election campaign, he posted beaming photos of a ski vacation with his wife.
One structural reason for the electoral defeat of Donald Tusk's Civic Platform is unspoken classism. The attempt to expose Nawrocki as a boy from the gutter achieved the opposite effect, especially in the crucial two weeks between the two elections. Nawrocki was not only perceived as a boy next door by supporters of the PiS camp. The more comprehensive the attacks and the more blatant the revelations, the clearer the statement: "He is one of us."
This defiant reaction is remarkable, because Nawrocki is one of the few politicians in Poland who did not pursue a doctorate as a political embellishment. His oeuvre as a historian, published primarily in Polish, reads like a serious academic examination of the world of his childhood in communist Poland. After having published several books on the history of the Solidarity trade union in the Elblag district, his dissertation on forms of social resistance from 1976 to 1989 was published in 2014. In it, Nawrocki critically examines the myth of the trade union as a bulwark for society as a whole and shows that it was a melting pot for actors with very different interests. The chronological outline uses a specific voivodeship to illustrate the complexity of the path from the euphoric founding of Solidarity to the fall of communism in Poland. The book did not trigger any academic debate. However, its style and content were far removed from the historical-political polemics that appeared after the Law and Justice party's election victory in late 2015.
As a research associate at the Institute of National Remembrance, Nawrocki published a cartography of communist terror in the Gdansk Voivodeship. In addition to this during his career, the historian wrote commercial books about his passions, such as football in the Baltic region. A history of the legendary match between Lechia Gdansk and Juventus Turin in 1983, in which the Gdansk club led 2-1 at one point, served as the starting point for a long-standing academic study of organized crime. The sponsor of the Gdansk football club at the time was mafia boss Nikodem Skotarczak, who controlled an important smuggling route for stolen cars from West Germany to the People's Republic and is known as Nikos.
Nawrocki published an academic anthology entitled "Shadow Economy" on organized crime in the 1980s, which has since also been published in English. At the same time, he was working on a sensational work in which, under the pseudonym Tadeusz Batyr, he testified about the criminal activities of his godfather Nikos, who was murdered in 1998. During the election campaign, it became known that Nawrocki appeared masked on a television show in 2018 to promote the book "Confessions from the Grave." Regardless of what revelations about the connections between the election winner and the Gdansk underworld may yet emerge, Nawrocki is extremely knowledgeable about the subject, partly because he has researched it extensively.
The element that makes this expertise consistent with the ideology of the Law and Justice Party which has the belief that organized crime and state security worked hand in hand in communist Poland. Jaroslaw Kaczynski's project is based on the conspiracy theory that his political opponents are still controlled by this invisible system.
The history of the president from the prefabricated housing estate includes his early service for the Law and Justice Party. In 2017, he came to Kaczynski's aid when the Ministry of Culture used a legal ploy to oust the founding directors of the Museum of the Second World War. During his four years as director, Nawrocki sharpened his profile as a radical advocate of a national history in which the statuses of victim and hero are always considered together. He was an early participant in the state's construction of a new myth of the "Outcast Soldiers," who, in the spring of 1945, violated the Polish government-in-exile's order to lay down their arms and continued fighting.
By developing the new historical-political program, Nawrocki recommended himself in 2021 as the new president of the Institute of National Remembrance, which has ample resources to continue on its chosen path and shift public discourse even further to the right.
During the election campaign, Nawrocki canvassed for votes to the right of PiS: He demanded that Ukraine's EU membership be made conditional on allowing exhumations of villages once inhabited by Poles and destroyed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during World War II.
Karol Nawrocki's political career demonstrates how the Polish right is systematically importing the practices of the MAGA movement from the United States. Nawrocki is not the Polish Trump, but a Gdansk version of US Vice President J.D. Vance. He underscored this when he quoted a psalm from the Old Testament on election night.
What unites the two is social advancement,
radicalization driven in the name of Jesus Christ,
and political success.
As in the United States, attempts by political opponents to shame have reinforced the narrative of recent Polish history as a struggle between good and evil, even though the new political style no longer has anything in common with the conservative Roman Catholic piety of the 1980s.
Felix Ackermann teaches public history at the Fernuniversität Hagen.” [1]
1. Der polnische J. D. Vance. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Frankfurt. 10 June 2025: 11. Von Felix Ackermann
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