The itch to write a blog post about this has been growing over the past couple of months but I thought it sensible to wait until the final results were in before expressing a view.
Romania had presidential elections in May, and Poland had them on June 1. My commentary will look critically at some of the media narratives, rather than doing any reporting on the politics, because there is enough of that already published.
I have been covering Eastern Europe for 15-16 years now, mostly business and finance but also plenty of elections, and I have had my work published in Polish and Romanian on more than one occasion.
I have worked well with sources and journalists from all political camps, and I have a lot of appreciation and affection for these two countries, which I consider to be pleasant, dynamic, seriously governed, and, importantly, posing an increasingly stark contrast to Western Europe through their love of entrepreneurship, individual responsibility and patriotism.
The media has focused on sweeping cross-border trends, or supposed trends, of either a return to mainstream EU progressive values, or US-style MAGA anti-establishment behaviour. It is a binary that obviously works well for passionate readers, who are increasingly the drivers of editorial policy in online journalism.
The trouble to me is that there are big enough nuances in play to render such analysis useless.
Firstly, the alleged pro-EU progressive candidate in Romania, Nicusor Dan, is not that progressive. He has indeed been supported by the mainstream EU establishment, including Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, whose preferred candidate lost the Polish election. But Dan has also expressed strong conservative views over the years, including a preference for private rather than state-backed economic activity, low tax, strong law enforcement and a scepticism of widespread welfare provisions. Such views have overwhelmingly broad support in Romania and the wider region and are not in the least controversial.
He also famously backed a (failed) proposal to define marriage in the Romanian constitution as only possible between a man and a woman. This episode suggests he is more conservative than the majority of Romanians, which is saying something, given how conservative Romanians and Eastern Europeans tend to be in comparison to their Western friends. Such views, were it not for his personal alliance with Tusk and other key figures in the Brussels mainstream, would have got Dan labeled far-right by Western media outlets, many of which have since called him a progressive.
Secondly, the fact that Dan’s opponent had been ambivalent at best about Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, and at worst (through his allies and associates) showed support for Russia, inspired some media to extrapolate the same dynamic onto the Polish election. This was an error that the Tusk team did not hurry to correct.
Notably, the man whose shenanigans threw Romania’s previous attempt at presidential elections into dissaray (December 2024), Calin Georgescu, became a close ally of George Simion in the May contest, while also having an entourage of people closely connected to Moscow. For my money, the Kremlin was a minority shareholder in the Georgescu-Simion project, with Romanian Putinists providing the bulk of the philosophy and infrastructure behind this movement to remove Romania from the Occidental alliance. For his part, Simion himself campaigned hard in Warsaw to get Karol Nawrocki elected.
But in Poland, Nawrocki, the rightwing conservative who won the election, cannot rightly be described as pro-Russian, or anti-EU. More accurately, it can be said he is a nationalist who opposes the progressive tendency in EU policymaking, and on a personal level is a harsh critic of both Tusk and Ursula von der Leyen, with media simplistically calling him far-right and sometimes, pro-Russian. It is certainly useful to the EU leadership finding itself criticised by Nawrocki to have media conflate such criticism with support for Russia.
The definition of far right these days varies depending on the strategic objectives of whoever does the defining, but the point is there is no pro-Russian option in national politics in Poland, even when the candidate is endorsed by Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who is probably Europe’s only pro-Russian leader alongside Robert Fico of Slovakia. Nawrocki, apart from openly supporting Ukraine and criticizing Russia his whole life, is wanted for arrest in Russia for dismantling Soviet monuments in Poland from his previous position as the head of a public institution. Moreover, the PiS, the populist party that supported his campaign and is closest to him, have been in power in Poland between 2015-2023, coinciding with the Russian invasion of Ukraine during which Poland provided enormous armed and financial support to Ukraine.
Thirdly, Solidarity, the legendary anticommunist and anti-Soviet trade union, which brought on the end of Russian domination of Poland, endorsed Nawrocki. Anyone with the slightest passing knowledge of Poland should know who Solidarity are, and if they don’t, they should not be writing about Poland in newspapers or online.
A sidenote: the media also went big on Nawrocki’s association with football hooligans in his youth. What was missing was a nice bit of context. Tusk, the progressive, was also a friend of the hooligans when he was young, something that was portrayed favourably by media: “young Donald was headstrong, first running with the local football hooligans […]” etc. It’s also worth noting that Tusk is the first EU leader to bar asylum applications in-country, due to the pressure illegal migrants are putting on the country’s border with Belarus, one of the measures he took that would put him to the right of Western politicians such as Nigel Farage. In other words, like Dan, Tusk is also much more conservative than the EU establishment which backs him and often shows him off as a wet liberal.
We might conclude from this that the “Brussels bubble,” as it’s called in the media, is being pushed Rightward by both its detractors and its allies.
Indeed, a couple of hours after the publication of this post, Dan told media: “Regardless of who won in Poland, they feel the same danger from Russia and are obliged to collaborate. Unlike Romania, where two weeks ago we had a competition between a pro-Western candidate and a candidate who very often repeats Russian narratives, in Poland we had a competition between a candidate for EU integration and a candidate for greater independence of Poland from European structures, but both firmly anti-Russian. From this perspective, our collaboration will not be difficult.”
Returning to Romania, and the overstretched “global MAGA” theory, some media have characterized Dan as the anti-MAGA candidate and his opponent, George Simion, coincidentally another ex-football hooligan, as the pro-MAGA one. This is also a flawed analysis, because Donald Trump (the creator of the phenomenon and MAGA-man-in chief) has not made a formal endorsement in the Romanian election (he endorsed Nawrocki in Poland). Dan also had nothing but warm and positive words for Trump when they had a call, shortly after Dan won, during which Trump congratulated him. Simion went to great lengths and expenditure to appear to be the MAGA candidate, but this simply didn’t work, because of a lack of interest from the MAGA movement apart from some paid PR operatives and Steve Bannon. We can only speculate on the reasons for this.
I like the media, I like working in media, and I like criticizing it. So, for the benefit of anyone reading this, my insider’s opinion is that whenever you read about an election you should actively seek the opposing view and always separate concrete facts from inferences, because in such a high-stakes game even the most ethical players tend to cut corners when the opportunity arises.
And the big media houses are sometimes themselves more of a player than a dispassionate observer, for a variety of reasons, including a propensity for sensationalism which drives reader engagement online, or reporters and editors struggling to contain their personal preferences.