In February 2022, I witnessed something remarkable. As Ukraine fell into war, and millions of refugees fled the fighting, Poland banded together to come to their aid. Warsaw’s Central Station became a refugee shelter overnight, with throngs of aid workers and volunteers catering to the needs of women and children sleeping on mattresses. Grocery stores gave discounts to Ukrainians, while the country’s yellow-and-blue flag became as ubiquitous as Poland’s own. My own uncle took in a refugee family from Zaporizhzhia, as did hundreds of thousands of Poles in every corner of the country.
Yet amid this spontaneous outpouring of fraternal affection, there was something else. You saw it on the graffiti, spattered on the walls of small Polish towns. “Banderites go home!” they read, a reference to the infamous Second World War-era Ukrainian militia leader Stepan Bandera, who Poles associate with a dark period of ethnic violence. You heard it, too, in whispered disapproval as sportscars with Ukrainian numberplates glided by. Last year, Polish farmers blockaded the border, unhappy at how imported grain hurt their fragile bottom line. These motivations were hardly just economic, with allusions to expelling Ukrainians from Poland a regular refrain.
What started as a trickle has now become a flood. Surveys now find that a slim majority of Poles oppose sending additional weapons to Ukraine. There’s something else too: Poland’s ultranationalist Right, formerly on the country’s margins, has barrelled to the mainstream. According to two separate polls, Sławomir Mentzen of the Confederation Party has overtaken the Law and Justice Party (PiS) candidate to take second place in Poland’s presidential race. Even polls that show Mentzen behind PiS’s man show his support growing, and the difference between the two is now less than the statistical margin of error. If the numbers hold, May’s election could be the first without a PiS candidate in the top two spots for 20 years.
This result is far from guaranteed. As the longtime party of choice for Poland’s Catholic traditionalists, PiS commands a robust political network that won’t be upended easily. Yet having lost to a coalition of centre-left parties in 2023, and with looming financial troubles biting at their heels, PiS is increasingly looking like the sick man of Polish politics, ripe for a challenge from the Right. More than that, and as the ominous references to Banderites imply, history is also ripe for a revival of anti-Ukrainian nationalism — even as the past hints at other futures for Poland and its people too.
“There can be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine.” So goes a quote from Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the founding father of modern Poland, who ruled the country during the interwar period. The line has frequently been repeated by Polish leaders explaining why defending Kyiv is in Warsaw’s national interest. But this adage also speaks to something deeper within Piłsudski’s philosophy. Called Prometheism, the project aimed at weakening Russia by encouraging ethnic minorities in its empire to establish independent states of their own — much like Prometheus had uplifted humanity with the gift of fire. As for Poland itself, Piłsudski was a believer in pluralism and envisioned a multi-ethnic state that, supported by newly erected buffer states like Ukraine, would form a powerful bulwark against Moscow.
Of course, not everyone saw things that way. Roman Dmowski, Piłsudski’s chief political rival, advocated for a much less internationalist and diverse national identity. Rather, he envisaged an ethnostate for Poles, and only Poles, created by Polonising or expelling minorities like Jews, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians. Though Dmowski held little real political power in interwar Poland, his National Democracy movement was a force to be reckoned with. Piłsudski pursued them relentlessly in his later years, arresting many of its members and leading the movement to effectively vanish by 1945.
Not that the Second World War brought understanding between Warsaw and Kyiv. Those references to Stepan Bandera remain so evocative because of what his Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists did as they tried to carve out an independent, ethnically Ukrainian state free of Polish interlopers. Allying themselves with the invading Germans in 1941, with the Nazis offering Bandera a measure of autonomy in their new world order, his followers massacred as many as 100,000 Poles living across what are modern Ukraine’s western fringes. Their actions, along with Russian population transfers at the end of the war, ultimately resulted in the wholesale expulsion of Poles from the area around Lwów, a city which had been part of Poland during the interwar years. By 1947, Polish Lwów had been redubbed Ukrainian Lviv — and at least 100,000 Poles had been driven from their homes.
The long decades of Soviet tyranny were unsurprisingly fallow for the Polish far-Right, while the early post-communist years were focused on building a new capitalist economy. Yet in the 2010s, a new far-Right party emerged in Poland. Called the National Movement, it branded itself the spiritual successor to Dmowski’s National Democracy. Among its founders was Krzysztof Bosak, who having been elected to the Polish Parliament at the age of 23, was then the second youngest MP in the body’s history. In 2019, Bosak’s National Movement entered into a coalition with another Right-wing party, and the Confederation Party as we know it today was born.
In those early days, Confederation was considered too extreme to pose a serious challenge to Poland’s political duopoly, with the PiS battling the centrist Civic Platform. Its ranks were filled with sexists, Russophiles, and anti-Semites. Perhaps the most notorious example here was Grzegorz Braun, who in 2023 used a fire extinguisher to put out the candles of a menorah in the Polish Parliament. Since then, and much like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, Confederation has tried to “detoxify” its image, expelling the likes of Braun and focusing instead on liberal economic policy, libertarianism, and a Poland First strategy on the international stage.
Instead of fielding dreary ideologues like Bosak, who gained a mere 7% of the vote when running for president in 2020, the party also found a new champion in Mentzen, who holds a PhD in economics and enjoys the largest following of any Polish politician on TikTok. With his no-holds-barred, unfiltered diatribes against rival politicians, Mentzen knows how to whip his online crowd into a frenzy, and even Poles who don’t support him often find his viral content popping up on their feed. If the latest polls are to be believed, Mentzen has more than tripled the party’s support since Bosak’s campaign.
Mentzen is certainly not without baggage. In 2019, for instance, he infamously stated that Confederation wanted a Poland without “Jews, homosexuals, abortions, taxation and the European Union”. He later claimed he was joking — at least about the Jews. His 2025 campaign website outlines an assertive agenda that includes cracking down on illegal migration; lowering taxes; combating “Leftist ideology”; continuing to build up Poland’s armed forces; opposing any Polish troops in post-war Ukraine; and standing up to the EU, among other provocative ideas.
Yet despite not being mentioned in his platform, a core part of Mentzen’s appeal has been his uncompromising language on Ukrainians. “They treat us like suckers,” he said in a TV interview this month. “We are sending weapons, money, social benefits to Ukraine, we are treating Ukrainians in Poland for free. In return we get slander, they insult us and show absolutely no gratitude.” Mentzen certainly is not calling for the forced assimilation or expulsion of Ukrainians. Yet in an echo of Dmowski nearly a century ago, his central message is that the Polish state must prioritise the wellbeing of ethnic Poles above all else. Mentzen personally alluded to the dark history between Poland and Ukraine last month when he visited Lviv, where he condemned the city’s numerous statues of Bandera. In response, Kyiv branded him an “enemy of Ukraine” and accused him of “inciting ethnic hatred”.
The distinction Mentzen therefore makes is not one of citizenship or residency — but of blood, culture and spirit. And, in the eyes of Confederation, this is where PiS got things wrong. Though the party took a hard line on illegal migration while in power, it not only welcomed millions of Ukrainians, but also encouraged the arrival of thousands of legal immigrants as cheap foreign labour. In fact, Poland under PiS has led the EU in granting first residency permits to foreign workers from outside the bloc since 2017. The party was also implicated in a visas-for-cash scandal shortly before the 2023 elections, ultimately costing the party its grip on power.
Karol Nawrocki, PiS’s candidate in this election cycle, has scrambled to align himself more closely with Confederation’s position on immigration. But Polish populists apparently aren’t buying it — at least not enough to keep Mentzen at bay. Yet if Rafał Trzaskowski, the Civic Platform’s candidate, will almost certainly win the election, his party’s government has also shifted its policies. That’s clearest around its approach to a post-war Ukraine. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has repeatedly refused to commit Polish soldiers to any future peacekeeping force, the subtext being that Poland may find it needs its troops at home instead.
As the best-armed state in the region, Poland will likely be forced to deploy its soldiers to Ukraine sooner or later. But the fact Tusk feels compelled to temper his party’s platform speaks to Confederation’s rising soft power. This is likely to only continue. Poland remains much less diverse than the multi-ethnic nation inhabited by Piłsudski and Dmowski, to say nothing of Western European states like France or Britain. All the same, this is a country whose national makeup is indeed changing, especially in urban areas, inevitably fuelling Confederation’s ultranationalist vision.
Though it won’t replace PiS anytime soon, then, it’s only a matter of time before Mentzen becomes the primary force on Poland’s Right. Yet here, again, history may make itself felt. Forget Dmowski or the Banderites — the country’s past encompasses an even broader paradox. Despite Piłsudski’s efforts, after all, modern Poland is unaccustomed to being a regional hegemon, let alone an empire, and has resisted several opportunities to become one. Even at the height of its power, in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the largest states in Europe, the country’s potential was squandered by a self-interested nobility.
Today, Poland once again finds itself wobbling between narrow isolationism and a leading role in Europe, one that would require it to become a guarantor of security far beyond its own borders. This, it goes without saying, would encompass many more people than simply ethnic Poles. Confederation’s rise is at least in part a response to this geopolitical moment and aims to force Poland’s leaders to make a choice between two futures that’ll dictate the country’s future for decades to come.
Aside from certain details, this choice is the same one that Piłsudski and Dmowski offered Poles a century ago. Though Piłsudski eventually emerged victorious, his plans were cut short by his own death, by the annihilation of Poland in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and by the country’s long domination by the Soviet Union. Now, though, Poland may finally have a chance to revisit the matter and settle it once and for all. Because while history doesn’t repeat itself, it certainly rhymes — in Poland more than elsewhere.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/