The result of the Polish presidential elections from an institutional point of view leaves things as they were, with a sovereignist head of state – first Duda, now Nawrocki – committed to obstructing the action of the pro-European government coalition led by Tusk. From a political point of view, however, it marks a clear setback for the political forces and the prime minister who in 2023 had brought Poland, after eight years of PIS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość – Law and Justice) rule, back to the centre of European governance processes, taking the strongest and most representative country away from the Visegrad coalition. The Polish vote replicated some characteristics now common to almost all European countries, with a very strong generational polarisation (young and old supporting the sovereignists, the adult population of the pro-Europeans), socio-cultural (pro-EU people with medium and high school education, the others mostly anti-EU) and territorial (anti-European rural areas and pro-European urban and industrialised areas). In the anti-Brussels vote, in Poland as everywhere else, very different and contradictory demands are summed up, from the recrimination of Brussels’ excessive interference in the internal affairs of member states, to the scarcity of European aid to remedy the difficulties of national electorates. Moreover, the sovereignist agenda orders priorities that reflect insecurities or perceived emergencies, which often have little or nothing to do with reality, but a great deal to do with the ideological lenses that sovereignist strategic narratives (twinned with Russian ones) represent in the eyes of an unconscious and fearful electorate.

The convergence of propaganda and economic benefits

In the success of Nawrocki, who swept the votes of Mentzen, who came third in the first round (the pro-Russian candidate with this programme ‘I dream of a country without Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes and the EU’), and Braun, who came fourth (with an even more racist platform), the costs of the war in Ukraine have found great space, starting with the more than two million refugees now housed in Poland, and anti-immigration policies, even though Poland with the Baltic countries is evidently the EU’s most exposed border to the Russian threat and is one of the European countries with fewer immigrants in relation to the resident population, 2.6% of the total. The Poland that elected Nawrocki and dreams itself ‘without Europe’ is the country that received EUR 14.1 billion from the EU budget in 2014, with a net balance of EUR 7.1 billion, and a contribution to national public spending of around 3.4%. Given the composition of EU spending – contributions to development and the Common Agricultural Policy – it is easy to deduce that these resources went primarily to the territorial areas that handed victory to Nawrocki. On the other hand, if Poland is among the EU countries that have grown the most in the last decade, this is largely due to its integration into the European single market. Without the EU, Poland would be poorer and poor Poles even poorer.

Moral hazard and the urgency of a new Europeanist formula

A naive and benevolent reading of these electoral dynamics could lead to the conclusion that, given the characteristics of the sovereignist electorate, it was above all unconsciousness that guided its choices. A more realistic reading would lead one to conclude that this vote was a textbook example of moral hazard, which, moreover, we know very well in Italy because it has always been the pattern of our relationship with the EU, particularly on issues of public finance, but also on the corporate regulation of economic activities. The masterpiece of the anti-European media hype, i.e. the veritable hybrid war on the European democracies, has been not only to make people think that the EU is the enemy that dispossesses states and citizens of all power, but that it is possible to exploit the EU’s weaknesses by living off its political paralysis. Polish anti-European voters in their hearts believe that it is possible to stay politically outside the EU and continue to derive the usual benefits from it, and that the negative consequences of anti-European nihilism are not destined to fall on the nihilists, but can be socialised and distributed with a constantly positive balance.

It is the same reflex of the Italians who for years believed that Italy was too big to fail and that therefore Italian financial indiscipline could not be sanctioned in the long run, because for Europe this would be murder-suicide. The majority, albeit a small majority, of Poles thought something similar, having become acutely aware of the intrinsic flaws of a ‘peacetime’ European construction and the wide margins of blackmail ensured by the member states’ powers of veto. This has been demonstrated for years by Orban, who threatens to smash everything and then collects the price of extortion for not smashing anything. We will hear in the coming days heartfelt appeals to take seriously the ‘malaise’ expressed by the vote in Poland.

Instead, one should consider Nawrocki’s election as yet another demonstration that today the main challenge of pro-Europeans and pro-Europeanism is to find the political and institutional formula to prevent the anti-EU from living at the expense of the EU.