Who's Poland's new president?

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 June 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Poland’s president-elect, Karol Nawrocki, is a right-wing historian, an amateur boxer and a fan of Donald Trump. What will his presidency mean for the region? Kateryna Khinkulova, editor of the newly launched BBC News Polska, explains. Plus, India’s ‘tailor on wheels’ with Anil Kumar reporting for BBC Telugu and the science of smiling with Alassane Dia from BBC Afrique.

This episode of The Documentary comes to you from The Fifth Floor, the show at the heart of global storytelling, with BBC journalists from all around the world.

Presented by Faranak Amidi. Produced by Alice Gioia, Caroline Ferguson and Hannah Dean. This is an EcoAudio certified production.

(Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich.)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:07.7	This is the fifth floor.
0:11.5	The fifth floor, you knowsson.
0:15.6	This is the fifth floor at Farnak Amidi Sobath. This is the fifth floor at the heart of global storytelling with BBC journalists from all around the world.
0:29.0	I'm your host, Farak Amidi.
0:36.5	Earlier this month, Poland elected a new president.
0:45.4	Karol Navrotsky is a right-wing historian who only recently rose to prominence in Poland's political scene.
0:56.3	Who is he? And what does his election tell us about the role Poland will play in the region? Katerina Kinkolova is the editor of the
1:03.3	newly launched BBC News Polska. And she's here in the studio with me, Katerina. Welcome to the
1:08.3	fifth floor. It's great to have you. Thank you for having me.
1:11.4	So can you tell me more about this new president of Poland? Who is he? And what does he believe in?
1:17.4	I think the best way to describe him or probably the way he would describe himself is that he believes in Poland.
1:22.7	So he is a historian. He led until recently the Polish National Institute of Memory. For Poland, history is a very big thing. So if we look at recent events, even starting from 1989, the fall of the Berlin War and the collapse of the communist bloc in Europe and how Poland went from being a country within the Soviet and Russian orbit into being
1:46.9	a country joining the EU, joining NATO and becoming a very different sort of politically oriented
1:52.8	country of power and regional power. But it also goes further than that because Poland was a country
1:59.3	in its own right and powerful country starting
2:01.5	from 1919 and then before that for 120 years it was divided between several regional powers
2:07.7	and there is this kind of narrative in Poland where many people want to see Poland as a great
2:16.3	power and not be dependent on countries around it or even
2:19.9	countries further away, but sort of believe in Poland in its own kind of right. And Karol Novroski
2:24.4	is definitely one of those people who believes in that strength and ability for Poland to have
2:30.3	greater sovereignty, greater sovereignty within the EU, to have a more equal relationship with the United States and so forth.
	...

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