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This week, the Dutch government collapsed after the far right lawmaker here At Wilders pulled his party out of the country's ruling coalition over migration policies. It's the latest development in a tumultuous few weeks in Europe, where right wing political parties have done well in recent elections. Over the weekend, a conservative nationalist backed by President Trump won Poland's presidential election.
Pro Trump nationalist Carol Nowvrotsky over in Poland has won that country's presidential election in a campaign that has laid bare the political polarization within the country.
Karl Nevrotsky is an historian who's also a former boxer, and he defeated Warsaw's liberal mayor by a razor thin margin. The outcome of the election was a blow to Poland's centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk and also to pro Ruropean Union leaders across Europe. On Monday, Tuk said he'd call a confidence vote with the hope he'll be able to shore up support for his coalition government and his political agenda.
Poland matters a lot more than people sometimes realize.
Rodney Jefferson helps oversee Bloomberg's coverage of Europe, and he's been tracking the rise of nationalist and far right parties there. This year alone, Germany, Romania, and Portugal have all seen right wing parties game ground, and the outcome in Poland's presidential election continues the trend.
Over the years. It's absorbed the huge amount of European Union money and it's at the moment it's the NATO's biggest spender on defense relative society, the economy, so Poland really matters. It's where you could argue that the European Union expansion project and all the things we talk about Europe, it's where it sort of lives and dies.
I'm David Gura, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today on the show, tracking the rise of the far right in Europe and what recent elections there tell us about the future of the European Union. The election between Karle Nevrotsky and Rafel Treskowsky was so close that at first Treskowsky thought he'd won, and he declared victory a few hours later. Nevrotzky had secured fifty point
nine percent of the vote and Trevskovsky conceded. In Poland, the president has veto power over the prime minister's legislative agenda, and Bloomberg's Rodney Jefferson says life is going to remain difficult for the current Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, who's had a hard time advancing his agenda. Introduce us to the man who won this election, karen Nevrotsky. Who is he and what does he stand for?
He is a political outsider. In fact, he has no practical experience on the front line at least. He's a quite colorful guy. Is a former boxing champion. He's from Gadanski is where Tusk's from. He's got PhD in history and he's written many books, ranging from the history of the solid Ouity movement that helped bring down Communism. He's also written a book involving the sort of criminal underworld and also about football. He's a passionate footballer as well.
But he was handpicked as the Law and Justice the opposition party's manned for this election by the person that we've often referred to as the puppet master of Poland during the Law and Justice government, which is the alswav Kacinski, who's the leader of the party, the president of the party.
Compare him, if you would, to his chief rival, that's Ralph Aul Troskowsky. How different are these two political figures.
That's basically how Poland is split. So you have Rafau Schafskowski, who is the Warsaw mayor, who you might argue would be the classics sort of pro European, more liberal leader. It's not dissimilar to what you might see in London, for example, during Brexit, or indeed New York versus the rest of the US. He's more progressive on certain things such as gender issues and Poland's relationship with the European Union. Navrotsky represents law and justice. During the campaign he was
bigging up his conservative Catholic values and background. And what is interesting with this election is Poland is divided. It's split down the middle. When Tusk came to power, the Prime Minister came to power in twenty twenty three, it was a huge mobilization of women and young people as well, particularly who had come out and said no, we've had
enough of this. The standoff with the European Union, issues over abortion and women's rights, and some of the slurs against immigrants, and all these things, and they came out. It was like a mobilization and Tusk promised a lot. He struggled to deliver for reasons also within the coalition, not just because he's being blocked by a president who's not on his side. So this election really encapsulated that divide, and that's why you can see the country, how it's
so cleaved down the middle. And it's this culture war. We call it. It's a bit of a lazy term, I know, but I'm going to use it. It's like this culture war that has emerged in Poland that we have now witnessed across Europe. In the States, we also seem to be sitting in the middle of one.
Ronnie, you are based in Scotland, but you were in Poland in the run up to this election. Where did you go and what did you hear from voters there?
Yeah, I was in Gadansk, which is where Solidarity Union was born. You could say it was the birthplace of Poland's modern Polish democracy. And I was down in Warsaw working with my colleagues, and then I actually left from Posnan. And the thing that always astonishes me about Poland still is the transformation of the country is unbelievable, the railway system, the roads, the way that cities look, the money that's
gone in there. I mean when we were writing about this a few years ago in the context of why is Poland suddenly having this big argument along with Hungary and long Slovakia with the European Union, is that on a per capita basis, nowhere in the EU absorbed more money. So the economy is doing really well, wages are up as well, but there's a certain level of division and anger. And one of the people I will just name drop
if you like, is my colleague Natalia. He had a nice long chat with Alexander Kasniewski, who's a former president. He was the president from ninety five to two thousand and five, during which time Poland joined the EU join NATA, and he was saying that one of the issues here right now in Poland is that you have this huge mobilization of people that brought Donald Tusk back to power a sort of more liberal, pro European Poland, and yet
he hasn't delivered in the way that they expected. Change hasn't come quickly enough for one cohorter of people, or it's not coming quickly enough on certain things like climate change and gender issues, and with those same issues things are going way too quickly for the other half of the bole.
Ronnie put this election result in context. What does it mean for Central Europe and for Europe more broadly.
It's a hammer blow because I mean we've tend to forget the sort of recent period of these parties and the successes of conservative nationalism, Law and Justice, the party that supports Nevrotsky, and it's the bigger Poland who are trying to come back to power in Poland and the next parliamentary election in twenty twenty seven, for which this is key to that allied with Auborn in Hungary, right would Fidso and Slovakia, you could have Babbage coming back
in the Czech Republic and it's almost like they want to try and get sort of like this band back together. And so it's hugely resonant for the region from that point of view, but also for Europe because a lot of these issues, whether we talk about immigration, cost of living crisis, what would do about Ukraine aid, these are issues that are showing up across Europe, and Poland elected a sort of conservative nationalist if you like, Trumpian sort
of government. Before Trump came to power, it came in October twenty fifteen. By the end of twenty sixteen, we had Donald Trump winning the White House and Britain had voted to leave the European Union. So just to look at Poland and to look at it as some sort of bell weather is quite important.
We saw Carol Levrodsky go to Washington, he met with President Trump. What role did President Trump play in this election? What roles he playing more broadly in elevating some of these nationalists and for right candidates in Europe.
You know, we're in the middle of a tariff led to trade war. Trump is trying to rewrite to security arrangements for Europe. Everyone's having to spend more on their own defense. There's a lot going on, and I think Trump's done two things. He's changed the sort of the calculus for Europe when it comes to trade, the economy, and also defense and security. But at the same time, the return of Trump to the White House is very much reinvigorated a lot of these parties.
After the break the issues that Europe's far right political parties and what a surgeon support means for European unity. If you look at Europe today, you'd be hard pressed to find a country where right wing populism has not gained ground. Outside of Poland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland and Slovakia all have far right parties and power, and all over the continent the far right has gained traction. There are the far right parties and leaders that routinely
make headlines. There's Germany's AfD or Alternative for Germany, and Portugal's Chega Francis Marine Leapenn, Britain's Nigel Faraj, Austria's Herbert Kickel. The list goes on. I asked Bloomberg's Rodney Jefferson if what we're seeing is the rise of something new.
I'm no historian, but there's lots of comparisons you have on economics and things, people referring back to nineteen seventies, and then they refer back to thirties and the different sort of political and cultural zeitgeist of e merged. I think in this case, the firewright never went away. I remember speaking to someone in Poland in twenty seventeen when there were quite some serious issues of Poland's relationship with Europe and also with the US, and you say, look,
twenty percent of any country votes a certain way. I think what has happened more recently over the last ten years, certain issues have been turbocharged, and a lot of that is to do with the speed of change.
Rodney says, what we're seeing stems from frustration with the economy, from major events like the global financial crisis, and from more migration. Then there were leaders like Hungary's Victor Orbonn who have had an outsized influence.
Twenty fifteen was a very pivotal year. You know, Aubonn was in power, he'd come back in twenty ten. That year was the time when you had the Greek standoff as well with the Eurozone that went down to the wire, and then you had the refugee crisis and you had huge numbers of refugees pouring in from Syrian civil war, pouring into Greece and then moving up north with Serbia.
And it's these things that suddenly there's that feeling amongst a certain swathes of the population of being under threat, and it comes very easy then for these leaders to whip up a sort of identity politics. It also came at the time when the world was still sort of going through the post financial crisis, reckoning and all these
sort of things aligned. And that's why you're sitting there when you have Donald Trump as president and I'm sitting in a country that left the European Union and various other things that happened.
What role has Victor Orbon played in countries outside of Hungary advancing for right parties.
Yeah, Auburn's been very much sort of a dot to overstate him, but very much a ring leader. He's obviously
supported the likes of Marine le Penn. He's been very active in Poland, in fact that at one point Kachinski, the leader of Law and Justice, referred to trying to create a Buddapeste on the Viswa River to sort of replicate what Orbard had done with the unpicking of democratic institutions, changes to the judiciary in his favor and that sort of, you know, politicization of democracy to the point where he's going after the NGOs again, foreign funding of NGOs, which
has been likened to Russia's attack on those freedoms and in Georgia and places. So he has become like this person that people look to as well. Look at Allbund has done in Hungary, and he's been very open about it. Right, he said very early on, I am building an illiberal democracy here. As far as he's concerned, he's on the right side of history.
What role has the economy been playing on all of this. On the one hand, you've got Germany and its economy has been in this tough place. But on the other hand, you've got Poland, which, as you noted a few minutes ago, has kind of been flushed with money, was it?
Carl Barks has said everything comes down to economics. It's all about what's in your pocket. I think that's clear. The cost of living crisis people actually going back to Poland, people talk about that. The voters were saying, yeah, but things are so expensive, and I think everyone has felt that with the inflation, post coronavirus, the different sort of
how things are played out in the economy. I mean, having said that, Poland is still like I think it's one of the fastest growing economies still in the European Union. But it's how that growth, it's how people feel right and they see prices, and I think that's completely played into it in the Polish election that just happened. Now we talk about the winner and avrot Ski versus Taskovski,
the liberal mayor of Warsaw. One of the key elements here was the fact that the first round the far right Confederazia candidate Mensin got almost fifteen percent of the vote, and those votes had to go somewhere. So actually the far right here is played that hidden hand. And one of the things that because he talks about taxes and cutting taxes and the cost of living as well as
all the other things. I see it here with Nigel Faraje of the Reform Party talking about are we going to cut taxes, We're going to raise a thresholder which people start paying tax, putting more money into people's pockets. It is classic populism.
Not to put too fine a point down about what you're saying, is you're seeing the far right pulling maybe more centrist or less far right leaning groups closer to the far right.
Yeah. I think you could see that clearly again in Poland this election. Actually even before the election, when you've got tuss playing a hard line on immigration. You see that with Keir Starmer. He has this huge majority in the UK and yet he feels like he's having to respond to Paraje and the Reform UK Party and try and outflank them on immigration. And it's something we've seen as part of that phenomena over the last ten years
is that politics has just been pulled. The response hasn't been to say, look, this is why immigration is good, or this is why it's good for the economy, or this is why we should tackle climate change and reinforce that message. It's been to actually move to the right to try and keep those votes.
Rodney, from where you sit, editing coverage of many countries in Europe, are there places that stand out to you that maybe you're paying close attention to where far right parties could gain ground.
What concerns me, or at least what I think we should keep an eye on, is the next electoral cycle. So, for example, there was a recent election in Portugal and I believe that the far right there place second, and that election story was framed as being the center held, but actually the election story was very much the fact there was a surgeon far right. So where does that go?
You could say the same with Greece. Mitsotakis came back to Paris Prime Minister the vote for the left series a party completely collapsed and again the center held a center right leader of a country that was changing and very much pro European Union and just the kind of guy that Brussels likes to have in power. Yeah. But at the same time, I think you had three far
right parties that got into parliament. There was a big surge in the fire right and I know people who voted for the far right, so we're sick of this. Were Greek we want to be. Is that again that identity politics? And I think that's where we have to be careful. It's what is that storing up and where does that go?
What does the outcome of this election Poland mean for the Prime Minister Donald Tusk because he looks at his agenda. What does it mean for policymakers in Brussels at European Union headquarters who are trying to figure out how this is going to affect their policies going forward.
The biggest issue, very simply is that Tusk has to have legislation rubber stamped by a president who has basically been hand picked by his opponents, Yeah, to try and obstruct him so that they get back into power in twenty twenty seven. And for Brussels, for the European Union, it's about looking at how perhaps they can rally around Tusk. And I think that what Brussels and for European Union policy, what they have to do is they have to be
very careful how they navigate this. You have to be careful what you wish for, and you're already seeing I think parts of the European Union look talk more and more about let's slow down here, Let's slow down on some of these policies, unchange on the climate that the farmer's protests and things like that. Let's just slow down a little bit here and take stock and I think you might you'll probably find that more of a theme.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Germ. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow