Right-winger wins Polish presidential election
Newshour
BBC
4.4 • 984 Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Right-wing historian Karol Nawrocki has narrowly won Poland's presidential election, in what is a blow to the governing centrist coalition.
Mr Nawrocki - who is backed by the main opposition Law and Justice party - will wield a powerful veto over policy - so what does it mean for the pro-EU government led by former European Council president Donald Tusk?
Also in the programme: What exactly caused the "mass casualty" event at an aid station in Gaza?; and positive news on colon cancer recovery, as research shows survival rates are boosted by a third - just by regular exercise.
(Photo shows Polish presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki reacts to the results of the second round of the presidential election, in Warsaw, Poland, June 1, 2025. Credit: Aleksandra Szmigiel/Reuters
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour live from the BBC World Service in London. |
| 0:07.6 | I'm Rebecca Kesb. |
| 0:09.2 | And we begin the programme today in Poland, where last night, by the narrowest of margins, |
| 0:14.7 | the right-wing historian Carol Navrotsky won the presidential election, |
| 0:19.4 | beating the Liberal candidate, Mayor of Warsaw, Raul Traskowski, by just about 1.5% of the vote. |
| 0:30.9 | The scenes from last night, so what do we know of Mr Navrotsky? He's fairly new to politics. Apparently he's a Eurosceptic. He's a fan of Donald Trump and apparently an amateur boxer. For more details, I've been speaking to Polish journalist, Marcowski. |
| 0:48.5 | It's still really unknown how he will deliver his promises because he made some of them. At least eight points that he signed with Suavumir Benson, the candidate of Confederation |
| 0:58.0 | party, to get his followers, show us a very clear path that he possibly will take. |
| 1:03.7 | And quite a right-wing one. |
| 1:06.7 | Yes, you could describe this as a right-wing one or something like a mainstream of right-wing parties right now in Europe. |
| 1:15.2 | If you call it radical or not, it depends of the view, I assume. |
| 1:19.0 | But for example, those points, a couple of them that he signed. |
| 1:22.4 | He will not allow Ukraine to join the NATO. |
| 1:26.2 | That's the one. |
| 1:27.1 | The second one, he's strongly against the Green Deal in Europe. |
| 1:30.7 | The Green Deal? |
| 1:31.8 | Yes, a Green Deal. |
| 1:33.0 | Strongly against Euro currency in Poland, for example. |
| 1:36.7 | Or he's not in favor of any new regulations from the European Union. |
| 1:42.1 | And he would like to even have a stronger border with |
| 1:45.7 | Belarus and Russia. Okay, he did win by a very narrow margin, didn't he? Where did the other side, |
| 1:53.1 | the Liberal Mayor of Warsaw, Mr. Traskowski, where did he lose this election? Of course, there is not a simple answer to that kind of complex question, but there are a couple of things that help us to unlock that mystery. |
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