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.
What has driven this shift? Optimistic observers on the left and centre-left pointed to a more general rejection of the ‘duopoly’ of Civic Platform and Law and Justice. This anti-establishment impulse was manifested in significant support for a left-wing candidate, Adrian Zandberg of Razem (Together), who came in second among the youngest cohort. It was also pointed out that Mentzen and even Nawrocki had personal qualities that may have resonated with young voters. They were the youngest of the major candidates. Mentzen was TikTok-savvy. Nawrocki had a colourful past as an amateur boxer and bouncer at a luxury resort. But we must still reckon with the fact that young (especially young male) voters turned to right-wing anti-establishment candidates much more readily than left-wing anti-establishment figures. This pattern stood in contrast to recent trends in other recent European elections (the UK, France, Germany), where young people, while not immune to the appeal of the far right, nonetheless remained much more likely to support insurgent parties on the left than on the right.
One issue that distinguished Mentzen and Braun most sharply from their rivals in the ‘duopoly’ was their hostile attitude toward Ukraine and Ukrainians. Not so long ago, this stance had seemed to define their status as fringe parties and inability to appeal to the mainstream electorate. Support for Ukraine in Poland has been both broad and deep, shaped by mutual memories and fears of Russian aggression and solidarity with an immediate neighbour resisting invasion. But this apparent consensus is clearly more fragile than it had seemed. Even if anti-Ukrainian sentiments were not the main driver for the disproportionately youthful electorate of the far right, these voters had demonstrated their openness to such sentiments and ability to incorporate them into their overall worldviews. The common denominator joining different strands of hostility to Ukraine and Ukrainians was the conviction that the interests of Poles—as jobseekers competing with Ukrainian immigrants; as farmers competing for markets with their Ukrainian counterparts; as taxpayers funding putatively over-generous social support for Ukrainian refugees; as military conscripts potentially being called up to defend Ukrainian territory—were being subordinated to foreign interests.
Such a ‘Poland First’ worldview was, of course, congruent with and partially inspired by Donald Trump and far-right nationalists elsewhere in Europe. It also had deep local roots. Poland’s original ‘new right’, the National Democratic movement at the turn of the twentieth century, proudly described this attitude as ‘national egoism’. The movement’s leading spokesman, Roman Dmowski, tellingly articulated his views under the title Thoughts of a Modern Pole, emphasizing the National Democrats’ hard-headed realism and greater adaptability to a rapidly changing world. The ability of the National Democrats’ ideological heirs to package their message as a revolt by the young against a desiccated establishment should, therefore, not come as a complete surprise. This is not to suggest that there is anything either natural or inevitable about the surge of support for the far-right among young Polish voters. But the fact that it was possible at all should be a warning for other democracies, such as the UK, where backers of the right and far-right have continued to have a disproportionately geriatric profile—for now.