WSJ: Poland’s political divisions puncture its influence on world stage

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk (left) and President Karol Nawrocki
Photo: EPA

Poland has one of the strongest economies in Europe, one of NATO’s highest rates of military spending and a nearly unmatched understanding of Russia’s threat to the continent. Yet the country punches below its weight on the world stage.

The reason? A divided political system that has paralyzed both sides for years and complicated Warsaw’s relationships with both President Trump and some of Europe’s biggest powers, The Wall Street Journal notes. Economic strength and high military spending haven’t translated into decision-making clout on Ukraine.

The divisions broke into the open late last month, when Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s centrist government ordered police to surround one of the country’s top judicial bodies in a new crisis point in a decadelong power struggle with its right-wing rivals. The police’s arrival triggered physical confrontations between top officials and protests that lasted late into the night.

Poland’s splintered politics are hardly unique in the West, where the U.S. and even traditional European powerhouses have succumbed to rifts between centrist and populist politicians amid sclerotic economic growth. But Poland’s divisions have persisted for decades.

For its allies and neighbors, these splits weaken the voice of a model North Atlantic Treaty Organization member—with the largest military on the continent—as the alliance ponders both U.S.-European relations and its own fate as the war over Poland’s eastern border grinds on.

The fierce rivalry between the centrist prime minister’s Civic Platform and right-wing President Karol Nawrocki, aligned with the opposition party Law and Justice, has led both sides to use foreign policy to play to their bases back home.

Tusk, who held a top European Union post a decade ago, and Sikorski have tangled with the Trump administration and its allies, including Elon Musk, who once told the Polish minister in a continuing online feud to “be quiet, small man.”

Meanwhile, Nawrocki has escalated a rift with Ukraine over the killing of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists in World War II while recently accusing Germany, the continent’s biggest economic power, of not needing Hitler to unleash anti-Polish sentiment.

“To have room for maneuvering on the national stage on Ukraine and Russia, you at least need to have open access to Kyiv and to the White House,” said Slawomir Debski, former government adviser and now a professor of international relations at the College of Europe in Natolin, Poland. “Now Tusk is unable to reach the White House. Nawrocki is unable to reach Kyiv.”

Many Poles have grown frustrated with their country’s corrosive politics. In a country steeped in its sometimes tragic history, some draw parallels to the internal divisions of the late 18th century that allowed larger European powers to partition the country.

“Now I understand how it happened,” said Maciej Kuziemski, CEO of Philanthropy for Impact. “Poland for centuries now has a history of infighting that is detrimental to its success.”

Current and former officials acknowledge that the internal fighting has damaged Poland’s influence.

“We do not seem to be able to undertake a more ambitious, and nuanced foreign policy right now,” said Tomasz Szatkowski, who was fired as Poland’s ambassador to NATO shortly after Tusk won power.

Political tensions came to a head on Oct. 30 with the mobilization of police around the Constitutional Tribunal, which rules on how laws should be applied, including how EU rules should be implemented in Poland. Nawrocki, who was flying to Africa, turned his plane around. Landing in Warsaw, he crossed through police lines into the courthouse to physically confront judges and promise to defend the tribunal leaders his party had appointed when in power.

Even a shooting in Krakow on Saturday, which killed six people, quickly descended into partisan rancor, with the interior minister saying the shooter was a far-right extremist, drawing criticism from nationalist parties.

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