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Nawrocki is a political rival of prime minister Donald Tusk’s ruling pro-corporate coalition, whose candidate he defeated in June’s presidential election.

In the case of Tusk’s government, at least for now, things have ended only with announcements. This was also the case, for example, with the grand project of deregulating the Polish economy. Tusk’s government did not deliver on its social promises (housing, culture, education) and instead focused on deregulation and tax cuts for business (for instance, through the Deregulation Committee with the participation of magnate Rafał Brzoska). This was coupled with an openly anti-migrant discourse, such as by tightening border controls and failing to respond to the paramilitary activities of the Border Defense Movement along the Polish-German frontier.

Nawrocki takes this a step further, building upon the discourse already prepared by the liberals. He essentially continues the same approach to “deregulating” the state and clearly intends to deflect potential class anger over upcoming reforms (since now both Nawrocki and Tusk are competing over deregulation reforms, concerning above all tax cuts), based on a model of extensive privatization. Ukrainians serve as the perfect target for this resentment: they are outsiders, in a weaker material position, and often themselves entangled in the ethno-nationalist discourse of their own country’s politics.

This politics of exclusion resonates because it matches popular resentments. This country is home to 2.5 million Ukrainians, today about 7 percent of Poland’s own population. Following the Russian invasion in 2022, they were greeted with extraordinary solidarity: food, housing, and humanitarian aid. By 2025, that solidarity had curdled into hostility. BBC reports of refugees being told to “go back to Ukraine” capture the shift. The historical wound of Ukrainian-nationalist massacres of Poles in Volhynia, a 1940s trauma manipulated by the Right for decades, has returned as a justification for new hierarchies: Poles as hosts, Ukrainians as tolerated guests. Nawrocki’s reforms, like the theatrical removal of a Ukrainian flag from a city hall by far-right provocateur and member of the European Parliament Grzegorz Braun, are rituals meant to draw that line in public.

Class Resentments

Here, the Polish case mirrors trends elsewhere in the region. In Romania, as political scientist Andrei Țăranu recently told Jacobin, the collapse of social democracy and the dominance of neoliberal discourse left the field open to ultranationalists. Parties like that country’s Social Democrats drifted to the center-right, while the genuine left never moved beyond 1 percent support. Nationalist leaders like George Simion or Călin Georgescu mobilized anger not with coherent programs but with symbolic gestures: territorial claims, appeals to vigilante “justice,” and denunciations of Brussels. Their voters were not responding to policy details but to the experience of being excluded by neoliberal modernization.

Poland’s far right has learned the same lesson.

The contradictions are stark. Employers demand predictability and stability in residency law. But popular anger, stoked by decades of inequality and precariousness, finds its outlet in anti-Ukrainian rhetoric. Here the welfare state itself is implicated. Built after 1989 without genuine input from workers or mass organizations, it has remained top-down, bureaucratic, and fragile. Instead of collective bargaining or redistribution, governments offer selective benefits that can be withdrawn at will — and what better group to punish than foreigners? Thus, the theater of austerity.

Take the case of removing 800+ benefits from Ukrainian families (a child benefit introduced as part of previous right-wing Law and Justice governments’ social policy, it offers families 800 zlotys per month for each child until age eighteen). Denying Ukrainians this cash may save little money, but it projects a sense of control in an unequal society where most people feel they have none. It may also serve to maintain the Ukrainian workforce as cheap and dependent; this is also why many Polish employers may be reluctant for Ukrainians to become full EU citizens rather than tolerated guest workers lacking in rights and protections.

Data from CBOS underlines the class contours of this resentment. Optimism about the labor market is concentrated among public sector workers, managers, specialists, and the better-paid in large cities. By contrast, pessimism dominates among small farmers, unskilled workers, and those with vocational education. The sharpest complaints come from women, the young, and the residents of villages and small towns — groups who see the labor market not as expanding opportunity but as constant scarcity. It is precisely among these groups that the nationalist right gains strength, redirecting anger at Ukrainians who, paradoxically, are also workers under precarious conditions.

Liberal forces have tried to adapt by mimicking right-wing gestures. Rafał Trzaskowski, formally the most pro-Ukrainian candidate in the 2025 election, still promised to restrict benefits for nonworking refugees. His caution reflects the political reality: any open defense of migrants risks electoral suicide. But by accepting the logic of exclusion, liberals only reinforce the symbolic framework of the far right, where “protecting Poles” means disciplining Ukrainians.

This is why nationalists like Sławomir Mentzen of the hardline Konfederacja party can play such a central role. A millionaire entrepreneur, Mentzen speaks the language of ordinary anger. He organizes not only precarious youth but also those with considerable economic capital but little cultural or social capital — and this is also the electorate that Nawrocki and his Law and Justice (PiS) party, a right-wing force in power from 2015 to 2023 (though Nawrocki is formally an independent), wants to win. These groups, caught between relative wealth and relative lack of recognition, are particularly receptive to narratives of dignity and national sovereignty. It was their votes, alongside those of disaffected rural workers, that secured Nawrocki’s presidency.

What emerges is not a policy of fiscal prudence but a politics of symbolic revenge: punishing Ukrainians in order to reassure Poles that someone is being punished at all. In a society where inequality has only deepened despite rapid GDP growth, this symbolic politics fills the void left by the absence of redistribution. In that void, the far right thrives.

The anti-Ukrainian turn is not simply about foreign policy or migration management but serves as a displacement of class anger. The same workers and smallholders who have seen their bargaining power collapse under decades of neoliberal restructuring now find themselves encouraged to direct their resentment downward, against refugees, rather than upward, against capital. What was once expressed in the idiom of trade union demands or social movements has been recoded as a cultural battle over who “truly” belongs to the nation.

Polish Interest?

It was precisely this coalition — small proprietors, disaffected rural labor, and segments of the urban petty bourgeoisie — that carried Nawrocki into the presidency at the end of spring. Their political language is not only the technocratic discourse of neoliberal reform but a visceral demand for recognition, dignity, and order. It is these constituencies, rather than the salaried professional class, that Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party now courts most aggressively. By promising to defend “the Polish host” against both foreign migrants and the liberal elite, the Right offers not material redistribution but symbolic revenge — and in a society marked by deepening inequality, that promise proves dangerously effective.

This is also evident in the recent policy of the liberal government, which on this issue aligns itself with the far right. At every opportunity, Ukrainian migrants are punished in a deliberately theatrical manner, as Tusk’s camp seeks to demonstrate how firmly it “defends the Polish interest.”

On this point, Nawrocki and Tusk speak with one voice: through their policies, which represent not most Polish citizens but big capital, the first victims are to be Ukrainians — at present, the families who had been receiving state support. After all, few will stand up for Ukrainian children in Poland. But as austerity bites, soon enough it will be the turn of the “ethnically Polish” citizens of this country.