I am not so sure Poland is under threat. They are perhaps a provocateur in this scenario.
As we approach the August presidential inauguration of the recently elected Karol Nawrocki in Poland, Professor Jim Bjork delves into generational dynamics of the 2025 election, exploring how and why a growing number of young voters are turning to right-wing candidates. Bjork draws comparisons with broader global trends.
On the night of the June 1st presidential run-off election in Poland, Rafał Trzaszkowski must have experienced an especially bitter sense of déjà vu. The mayor of Warsaw and candidate of the centrist Civic Platform party had narrowly lost to Karol Nawrocki, the candidate of the right-wing Law and Justice party, 49% to 51%. Five years earlier, Trzaszkowski had lost by almost exactly the same margin to the sitting president and previous Law and Justice candidate, Andrzej Duda. This was not the outcome that most observers had anticipated. Through the winter and spring, polling on such a second-round match-up had shown the Civic Platform candidate with a consistent lead. A Trzaszkowski victory, it was expected, would reinforce the narrow majority won by Civic Platform and its coalition allies in legislative elections in the autumn of 2023, allowing the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk to push through its programme more boldly, without fear of presidential vetoes. Instead, Poland seems to be stuck in a protracted stand-off, with slight fluctuations in turnout and pendular movements among a narrow stratum of swing voters determining final results. This polarized landscape looks eerily similar to other democracies around the world, especially the Trump-era United States.
For centrists, the seemingly persistent demographic profiles of the rival voting blocs—a nationalist movement drawing on older, male, rural, and less educated voters vs. a centre-left coalition of younger, more female, more urban, and more highly educated voters—offered reason for long-term hope, even if immediate outcomes were often dispiriting. The latter constituencies, after all, had to represent the future. As long as they were effectively mobilized, the challenge of the new right would eventually fade. But the voting patterns of 2025, while confirming or even amplifying most familiar recent demographic divides (gender; size of community; levels of education), turned on its head perhaps the most fundamental of all electoral assumptions, not only in Poland but across most other democracies: that support for the right and the far right increases with age. In 2020, exit polls showed Trzaszkowski winning 64% of voters under 30 and only 38% of voters over 60. Five years later, these surveys indicated that his support among voters under 30 had plummeted to 47%, lower than his share of the vote of those over 60, which had risen to 49%. Early signs of this seismic shift among young voters were already evident in the parliamentary elections in 2023, when, according to exit polls, the far-right Confederation for an Independent Poland won 18% of the youngest cohort of voters. In the first round of voting in the presidential election, two candidates associated with the Confederation—Sławomir Mentzen and Grzegorz Braun—cumulatively won 40% of voters under 30, eclipsing support for the candidates of the two leading parties.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/what-polands-election-tells-us-about-a-new-generation-of-right-wing-voters
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