Forgetting what democracy is for and all about

On June 2, I got a sense of history coming full circle in the Polish town of Sopot, on the Baltic Sea just a few kilometres from the Gdańsk Shipyard.

- Antara Haldar

Sharing a stage at the Plenary Session of the European Financial Congress with Lech Wałęsa, the legendary trade unionist who led the 1980 Solidarity strike at the Lenin Shipyard and later became Poland's first post-communist president, I felt I was witnessing the end of an era.

To be sure, Mr Wałęsa is sprightly at age 81. He speaks animatedly, his signature moustache bristling. But his spirit seemed subdued, and the Polish bankers, financiers, and business elites who filled the room seemed downright stunned. Just hours before, the country had learned that the far-right populist Karol Nawrocki — a historian, former boxer, and political outsider — had won Poland's presidential election, narrowly defeating Warsaw's cosmopolitan, progressive mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski of Civic Platform.

Mr Wałęsa had posted a stark message on social media that morning: "Goodbye Poland." But since then, the outcome has been contested, with Poland's controversial Supreme Court reviewing a flood of complaints about uncounted votes, mostly for Mr Trzaskowski. Although it was my first trip to Poland, the situation felt eerily familiar. Like post-Brexit Britain and the United States over the past decade of Donald Trump's political dominance, here was a country split down the middle. Mr Nawrocki had scraped through with a razor-thin margin — 50.89% to 49.11% — in an election decided along painfully recognisable lines: education, geography, gender, and an ever-widening cultural gulf.