As a national living abroad, returning to Poland has started to feel a bit like stepping into Narnia – a land consumed by the battle between good and evil, with each side convinced the other is the arch-villain.
Sunday’s presidential run-off laid bare the profound polarisation in Polish society, in which two radically different visions of the country compete for public support. Many Poles question how the country chose a person without political experience and a scandal-ridden past.
Dialogue between these factions – let alone anything approaching empathy – is all but impossible. Moreover, this wouldn’t have changed if liberal Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski had won. Melodramatic rhetoric has completely erased any middle ground.
Gone are the days when political rivals could agree on a few basic pillars, such as transatlanticism or support for Ukraine.
Nawrocki, now president-elect, has done away with even the most basic bipartisan assumptions. His campaign pandered to a Poland enraged by the very bogeymen his Law and Justice party (PiS) helped create: foreign politicians (especially Germans) who lecture Poles and Brussels 'technocrats'.
The EU itself is not without responsibility for the depth of the divide. Its hyperbolic portrayals of the Law and Justice party have fed the narrative of an existential clash between liberalism and authoritarianism, with no discernible grey zone in between.
Outside observers would be led to see PiS as being in the same mould as Orbán, or even akin to the most radical post-truth politics of Romania’s new president, Călin Georgescu.
But the tendency of Western Europeans to interpret Eastern Europe through the same lens is misleading. The region's right-wing movements are not monolithic.
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