Trump’s Impact on Europe and Elections in Poland with Andrzej Bobinski [PODCAST]

What does Donald Trump understand about politics that others don’t? What is the impact of Trump’s presidency on Europe (and the Polish political scene in particular)? And what should we expect from the forthcoming Polish presidential elections? Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Andrzej Bobiński, the Managing Director of Polityka Insight.

Leszek Jazdzewski (LJ): What does President Donald Trump know about politics that most people do not understand?

Andrzej Bobinski (AB): Donald Trump is a brilliant politician in a number of ways. We underestimated him during his first term. I read a number of books that ridiculed Donald Trump and, basically, made him into a clown.  I believe that and I am not saying there was not some truth in those words, but I think that because of this, we stopped treating him seriously. And now, we have to take him seriously because his actions speak louder than his words.

During the campaign, when I was watching Donald Trump speak, every time I looked at something that was cut out of context and was on Twitter. It just sounded extremely silly and did not make any sense. I could not really understand what he was saying. Then, when I would sit down and listen to his rally, I could see the amazing energy he would generate and the way he was able to find a common understanding with the people listening to him.

Even when he was rambling, the rambling was part of the show. It resembles podcasts where you do not necessarily understand what people are saying, but you just like the sound of what is being said. Trump is an amazing politician precisely because he is a showman. And as a showman, he is someone who provides entertainment and some sort of security and understanding of what people want to hear.

This being said, he is a dismal president, and he has only been in office for five weeks. However, I would expect that over the course of the next weeks, months, and years, we will see that he does not have all the answers, and that, basically, this method of dealing with chaos just generates more chaos.

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I am very pessimistic when it comes to the state of world affairs in general, but also to where the United States is going. I am not saying that Donald Trump is a dictator or that he is going to end democracy in the United States – quite the opposite. We are overestimating the impact he will have on the state and on the country itself. But he is using forces that are changing the world and generate chaos, which somebody will have to clean up at some point.

LJ: How should Europeans perceive the United States right now? Is it still an ally? Or os it a power that is drifting apart from Europe? What challenges does the Trump administration pose not just to Poland, but to the European continent in a broader sense?

AB: It is still too early to say. Every day over the last five weeks, we have seen that Trump tends to change his mind and course quite often. He says one thing one day, and then the next day he says something completely different. The United States today is a completely unpredictable actor. However, I would not go as far as to say that the United States is not an ally anymore. It is too early to state something that strong.

It is going to be a very difficult term for Donald Trump, who is not getting any younger by the day.  There is an alternative reality in which a lot of people around Donald Trump and in his administration today will be exchanged sooner rather than later. For example, I do not see Elon Musk staying on board for longer than a year. There is also a number of safeguards, processes, and institutions which could still get the United States back on track.

Something that Donald Trump understands well are money and markets. In the United States, there are extremely strong lobbies – for example, the defense lobby will likely start playing a bigger role in the coming weeks. Because if we look at the stock market prices of defense and armament companies in the United States, they are basically falling.  Meanwhile, if we look at what is happening with the stock markets in Europe, all the defense companies are rising. Clearly, business understands how the world is changing. And Donald Trump understands business. Therefore, this is something that could still get us back on course.

However, for the time being, it is clear that Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s America are completely unpredictable actors. Because of all the chaos we can already observe, we are going to see a lot of havoc, problems, and extremely difficult and dangerous situations. Still, I am slightly optimistic because there is a system of checks and balances in place, which is completely different from the system of checks and balances that we have known for the last 80 years.

Donald Trump is overplaying his hand, and he is not as strong as he believes he is. For instance, the Congress is one of the institutions that, at some point, will wake up and will start checking his power. He has picked up a million fights (like the one with the judiciary) and he has only all the easy answers. Meanwhile, the world is getting more and more complicated. And these easy answers basically do not make sense and will create extremely complicated problems.

LJ: How do you see Donald Trump transforming the way that Poland sees its security, its position in Europe, as well as its internal political scene?

AB: These are still early days, it needs to be repeated. What the Polish government is doing at this point basically makes sense. It is a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude. They do not want to put their eggs into any one basket. Especially with a big presidential election coming up in two and a half months, there is a feeling that neither the government, nor the Polish society want to alienate the Americans, because we perceive the United States as a guarantee of our security.

Having said that, we were waiting to see where all this will go and where this is headed, Nevertheless, I do believe in the theory that Donald Trump believes that he needs to change world order, that he is moving away from the way liberal democracies try to set up the world order, and that he is heading into a reality where we are going to have a limited number of superpowers that will be deciding the fate of the world and setting up spheres of influence where they will be playing their own games.

On the one hand, these superpowers would be countering each other; on the other hand, they would sometimes work together in order to keep the new world order in place. Where does this development put Poland and how does that change Poland’s attitude to the United States if this is where things are going? We are heading towards a very different reality if the United States stays on course in this respect. Poland’s security will need to be linked much more closely to our European allies. Today, this became very obvious.

What role will the United States plays in the future? There is a number of different timeframes here, because today and tomorrow we need the United States, and this is a dire need in order to guarantee our security. In about three to five years, we could start thinking about a more autonomous defense and security system.  We would have to be moving in that direction because the moment when all this will be changing will be an extremely difficult and dangerous one.

At the same time, the society’s attitude towards the United States will be changing too, but this change will not be binary. It is going to be very complex and difficult because there is also an ideological aspect to it. What Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump are saying – which is that basically we are living in an anti-work counter-revolution – plays into the hearts and ears of quite a lot of people in Poland. We are looking at a huge change in the way we are going to be looking at the world, and it is still impossible to say how this will play out.

What I can say and what I do believe in is that this will transform our political scene, the whole political spectrum, and will also generate a generational shift. We are going to wake up in two, three years’ time, in a completely different political reality where the things we are going to be discussing and fighting over will be very different to the things that we think are important today in our political reality.

LJ: Should we expect a paradigm shift in the United States – a country which has been extremely stable politically in the last 20 years?

AB: I think we might, especially on justice. The people who were cheering Donald Trump on when he was elected might have a huge problem with their extremely pro-American and pro-Trump attitude in the coming weeks. If we are going to see a sort of second Yalta with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump meeting and deciding on the fate of the world, even the most hardcore Trump supporters in the Law and Justice party will have a problem with defending this attitude and stance.

However, there is a number of bigger questions which we do not know the answers to, but which need to be answered. If Europe starts playing up to its needs in terms of defense and security, this will mean that there will be a strong integration. I cannot imagine that Europe starts building its defense and security capacities and capabilities without integrating more strongly. If that happens, then a number of Polish politicians will come out as simply anti-European.

As a consequence, the first fault line, the dividing line, will be between the pro-Europeans and the anti-Europeans, because one of the paradigms that we grew up in and we have lived in – the one thing that everybody agreed on – is that we want to be part of the West. The European Union, the United States, and NATO – these were the institutions that made up the West from our perspective.

As such, the one thing that will change sooner rather than later (and will constitute a dividing line in our political debate) is whether you are pro- or anti-European? Are you pro- or anti-American? The pro-Europeans will most probably be anti-European, at least for the next couple of years. Meanwhile, the anti-Europeans might be pro-American. And then we get to Russia.

I cannot imagine that during our lifetime there will be a political party that will say outright, ‘We are pro-Russian.’ However, a number of these parties are already saying more loudly that they are friends of the friends of Russia – of Viktor Orban, AfD, or Marie LePen, and so on. This is an extremely interesting and bizarre dynamic.  This dynamic builds itself into a polarization between the pro-European, the anti-American, and the anti-European, pro-American who will be trying to weaken Europe and will be playing into Russia’s hands.

At the same time, another actor that will, at some point, start playing a role also in our internal politics is China. This is another dynamic which is extremely hard to imagine, but my guess would be that we are going to see a lot of movements on the South China Sea.

Having said this, Donald Trump’s real problem is not Ukraine, nor is it Russia – it is China. We can already see that today – with military exercises involving Chinese warships sailing up to Australia in the last weeks. Xi Jinping can see what is going on and understands that this is a window of opportunity for him to make a move. When this starts happening, then the question is, how does the Chinese issue play into our politics?  My guess would be that this would be another element of this fault line, of the division between the pro-European, anti-American, who will most probably be anti-Chinese.

The Polish strategic autonomy will be anti-European, pro-American, and will be looking towards China while looking for different actors who can finance our development. This group will consist of the realists who will be trying to look at these superpowers and try to say, ‘Poland first!’.

Indeed, we need to take from all these actors what they are able to give us. Therefore, if Americans want to sell us F-35s, then we are going to buy them. If Russians want to buy our apples, we are going to sell them apples. And if the Chinese want to invest in our infrastructure, then let them do it.

These realists will be a strange, difficult power to be reckoned with in Poland. However, this is not going to happen in the next three months, as the forthcoming presidential campaign may be slowing these changes down. Nevertheless, this is the direction in which we are heading.

This upcoming change is huge this change is. We seem to have had a very broad consensus in this country over the last 35 years – and not only over foreign policy. We were fighting chiefly about symbolic issues (but, needless to say, they were extremely important). Nevertheless, we had pretty much agreed on what needs to be done.

What we did not always agree on was how to achieve these goals. Sometimes we agreed on the fact that we had no idea of how to move things along in healthcare or housing. But, basically, we have had a fairly common understanding of the threats, needs, and challenges in the society. Therefore, we were fighting over the Church or abortion, but foreign policy was completely out of the conversation because we wanted to be part of the West. What is interesting is that our polarization will be organized by the world outside of Poland.

Still, at the end of the day, we are still going to agree on what needs to be done – on competitiveness, the need to transform our energy system, the climate, or any other issues. In a nutshell, we are going to agree on the challenges but then, we will be fighting over the symbolics of all this. This is something new, and it is huge in terms of understanding how our political system will change over foreign policy and everything that will be happening outside.

LJ: Let us turn to the topic of the forthcoming presidential election in Poland., which are to be held on May 18 (the first round) and on June 1 (the second round, if needed).  At the moment, it seems that Mayor of Warsaw Rafal Trzaskowski is going to win easily. What would need to happen for Trzaskowski not to become the president? Is it likely? What do we need to know about this presidential election?

AB: For the time being, when you look at the presidential race, Rafal Trzaskowski is extremely lucky. It looks as if the first round is going to be very easy for him for three reasons.

One is that he practically has no serious other candidates on his side of the political spectrum, so he can do pretty much anything because nobody is going to be ‘eating up’ his support. The leftist candidates (like Magdalena Biejat, Adrian Zandberg, and a couple of others) are eating up around 7% of support from the voters who are willing to vote for the Left. However, individually, they are facing the problem of getting to the 3-4% mark that would make them a serious contender. Meanwhile, Szymon Holownia, the Speaker of the Sejm, is dealing with a downward trend as his campaign does not make any sense.

In that sense, Trzaskowski has it really easy because he is the only candidate who is playing to half of the voters in Poland. On the right side of the political spectrum, there is a million candidates, and they are all fighting over the same issues. This is good from Trzaskowski’s perspective because, for one, it makes them look weaker because they have to cut up the vote.

The other thing is that because of the fact they are fighting over these issues, they get bogged down with details and have a problem with playing with the big narratives and moving towards the center of the political debate – what most probably is crucial to win in the second round. As such, they are fighting over the small issues, which makes them look extreme and righteous instead of common and centrist. Meanwhile, you do need to come across as a fairly low-key centrist candidate at some point in order to get the middle ground.

The third factor is that the Law and Justice party is in a very weak state because they have a very weak candidate. They have missed out on how the world is changing. I thought that they would continue to observe what Donald Trump is doing and try to use his playbook, but they are not doing that. Instead, their presidential candidate is Karol Nawrocki, who is a boxer. However, what they have not realized is that young people do not watch box these days. They would rather watch all these weird fights, like the UFC or MMA. Interestingly, this is what Donald Trump was using in his campaign as in the countryside, it was relatable to the people.

Meanwhile, Karol Nawrocki is not trying to use that sentiment. Clearly, his problem is that young people do not believe in him. Nothing about him is attractive to young people.  If you compare Slawomir Mentzen (the far-right New Hope party) to Nawrocki, there is a huge generational shift. However, it is not really about Nawrocki, nor is it about Pawel Szefernaker, the head of his electoral campaign. It is basically about Jaroslaw Kaczynski. They need to run a campaign that makes sense to Jaroslaw Kaczynski because he is in charge. I am not saying he is making the choices, but they are playing to the owner – and the owner is Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

However, the electorate is looking for something else. If it is Andrzej Nowak, a professor of history who delivered the first speech and set the tone of the whole party convention as he quoted Pope John Paul II, then it – from Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s standpoint – makes total sense to go in that direction. When you look at what is happening in the polls and how the world is changing, this is not necessarily what voters under 50 are looking for.

For those three reasons, it really seems that Rafal Trzaskowski will have it easy in the first round. The question is about the second round and what happens then. How many percent is he able to get in the first round? And how many of these voters will go and vote for Trzaskowski in the second round?

Moreover, if any of the right-wing candidates do not get 30% of votes in the first round, this will show that we are going to have an extremely fragmented electorate that will have been fighting between each other. And you do not just tell people ‘Now go and vote for the candidate who we have been fighting against for the last three months’. They are all competing, and because of that, they do not necessarily love each other. This is why it is going to be extremely difficult.

One big risk factor – apart from any black swans – is the popularity of the government. However, having said that, the recent CBOS report observed that the rise in the popularity of the government is at the level of plus five points in terms of sympathy and minus four in terms of antipathy. This means that January was the worst month and that their popularity is starting to pick up – it will likely not soar, but rather plateau.

Needless to say, in a very polarized society, 40-60% of the society is going to have some sympathy for the government. Even when you could see that the government’s ratings were falling, Trzaskowski’s position was fairly stable. As such, the support for the government does not seem to hurt him in terms of his following and popularity. Trzaskowski is running a very sensible and disciplined campaign. You may like or dislike it, but he is doing the things he should be doing in order to win the presidential race in the end.

The one thing that could happen is that the government could mobilize the other side. And this is the thing. I do not think Trzaskowski’s support will fall. It is going to be rather a question of the turnout and whether the anti-government, the anti-Trzaskowski supporters will be super mobilized and come out and vote. Will this be helped by Elon Musk and his algorithms? I do not really see this happening, as the probability of that is fairly low, but we have to keep this scenario in mind.

I do not like prediction markets, but I sometimes look at them to better understand the trend. And if you do like prediction markets, then Trzaskowski is expected to get 68-72% of votes in the presidential election, which is a fairly good lead. And this is a pretty good readout of the probability of him winning in the second round.