Poland’s conservative nationalist president is due to meet Donald Trump at the White House in a visit that has prompted fresh tensions with the nation’s pro-European government led by Donald Tusk.
Backed by the populist rightwing opposition Law and Justice party, which ruled Poland between 2015 and 2023, Karol Nawrocki unexpectedly won Poland’s presidential election after running a campaign under a Trumpesque slogan of “Poland first, Poles first”.
The historian turned politician had met the US president before the election, securing his highly prized endorsement and presenting himself as someone who could safeguard Poland’s interests with the conservative US administration. When he won, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Such a great win in Poland by Karol Nawrocki. He will be a great president!”
Nawrocki’s visit to the White House on Wednesday will be his first overseas trip since taking office last month, and the first serious test of his foreign policy credentials.
He hosted a summit in Warsaw last week involving the leaders of Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine, and spoke with other EU leaders by phone to prepare for the meeting, as he wants Poland to play a broader role in representing the region’s interests.
His chief foreign policy adviser, Marcin Przydacz, told reporters on Tuesday that talks would “primarily concern security issues”, as he stressed that Poland – Nato’s top spender, for which it gets regular praise from Trump – wanted to “maintain the best possible relations with the Americans”.
Nawrocki will also present Trump with the Polish view on the Ukraine war and his talks with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska, “pointing to the causes of this aggression and identifying the aggressor, the Russian Federation”, Przydacz said.
But the visit has exacerbated tensions with Tusk, the centrist prime minister who was formerly president of the European Council.
Nawrocki, a fierce critic of Tusk who has pledged to continue supporting Kyiv but opposes Ukraine’s membership in Nato and pushed for tightening the benefits paid out to Ukrainian refugees in Poland, signalled his intention to pursue a foreign policy independently of the government.
Shortly before the Alaska summit between Trump and Putin, he joined a leaders’ phone call with the US president sidelining Tusk, who had previously represented Poland in similar discussions. Presidential aides said Nawrocki had got involved at Trump’s personal invitation.
The move locked Tusk out of a prestigious call, reducing his role to participating in preparatory and debriefing calls with other European leaders instead.
Poland subsequently skipped the high-level Zelenskyy-Trump meeting altogether, sending no representative to join the Ukrainian president and a group of European leaders at the White House, with both camps trading blame for the absence.
The Polish president is also expected to stress to Trump the importance of keeping US forces in the region, with approximately 10,000 troops stationed in Poland and reports that the number may be under review.
The meeting comes amid growing frustration on both sides of the Atlantic with what is seen as Russian attempts to obstruct efforts to end the war, with Trump repeating on Tuesday night he was “very disappointed” in Putin.
Just hours before Trump and Nawrocki were to meet, Poland was forced to scramble its own and allied aircraft to monitor its airspace during another major night attack on Ukraine, with more than 500 strikes across the country. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who will take part in a meeting with Nordic and Baltic countries in Denmark on Wednesday, said Putin was “demonstrating his impunity”.
The turf war between the Polish president and prime minister was brought back to the spotlight before the White House visit, after ministers repeatedly asked Nawrocki to toe the government’s line in his talks with Trump.
The president’s aides responded by insisting the visit could instead be an opportunity for “a new opening” in relations, which they argued had been damaged by Tusk and his ministers’ past critical comments on Trump.
As the row deepened, a one-page memo outlining the government’s advice for the president was leaked to the media. Presidential aides publicly ridiculed the document, describing it as “resembling a college essay”, and rejected the ministerial insistence on following their instructions as “impertinent”.
Nawrocki also did not invite any government officials to join his delegation, breaking with a tradition that a junior minister would sit in the president’s meetings overseas. Przydacz said he would instead send a memo to inform the government of any developments.
Despite Nawrocki’s meeting with Trump on Wednesday, Tusk said he would be representing Poland during a hybrid meeting of the “coalition of the willing” on Thursday.
The internal divisions could weaken the country’s influential role in shaping Europe’s response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, after it welcomed more than a million Ukrainian refugees and turned into a major logistics hub for military and humanitarian aid deliveries for the war-torn neighbour.
