Timothy Garton Ash on the newly elected President of Poland
Nawrocki is a 42-year-old nationalist historian and historical propagandist with virtually no international experience and an extremely dubious past as a young man (violent football hooliganism, strong connections with gangsters on the Baltic coast, an unsavoury story about more or less tricking an old man into handing over his council flat, alleged involvement in pimping prostitutes to guests at the hotel he was working at as a bouncer). He lacks, to put it mildly, the professional qualifications and personal qualities one would hope to see in the head of state of an important European country at a crucial turning point in European history.
Poland has a directly elected president whose role is largely ceremonial -- mostly, signing Parliament's bills into law. But he's elected, so if he decides not to sign the bills into law, the government in parliament is pretty much blocked from doing much of anything.
The government he can now block is progressive, pro-European, pro-Ukraine, and committed to civil rights and free speech. Nawrocki is associated with the authoritarian-nationalist rival party that has been active in threatening to jail any historians who might publicize unflattering aspects of Polish history and in cleansing museums and textbooks of thoughtful and challenging aspects of the national history.