Poland’s Folk Right Is No Joke

In the first round of Poland’s presidential election in May 2025, the liberal incumbent Rafał Trzaskowski led with 31.4%. Karol Nawrocki, backed by the governing Law and Justice party (PiS), trailed narrowly at 29.5%.

But the real surprise came from two fringe candidates: Sławomir Mentzen of Konfederacja, who secured 14.8%, and Grzegorz Braun, running independently after a split with the party, who won 6.34%.

Together, they commanded over one-fifth of the vote, more than the AfD in Germany or Reconquête in France, and despite running separately, their combined force nearly knocked the PiS candidate out of the runoff.

What looked like division was, in fact, an ambush: they targeted different flanks of the same cultural battleground as an anti-modern, anti-liberal, and intensely Polish alternative.

And where PiS had once been the safe harbour of the right, it now appeared managerial and tepid, but Konfederacja, fractured but unbowed, had taken its message from the margins to the ballot box, and nearly succeeded in replacing them as the right in Poland.

The Leaders in Revolt

Sławomir Mentzen is no one’s idea of a traditional nationalist. A trained economist and tax consultant, he built his political brand through social media, first as the heir of polemicist Janusz Korwin-Mikke in the KORWiN party, and later as co-chair of Konfederacja.

He appeals to disaffected young men: digitally native, economically libertarian, and socially conservative. His TikToks and Instagram posts cloak Rothbardian economics in meme culture, attacking taxes, wokeness, and bureaucracy with the precision of a spreadsheet and the humour of a stand-up routine.

Grzegorz Braun, on the other hand, is what Mentzen is not: austere, apocalyptic, and militantly Catholic. His talking points reference Marian apparitions, his speeches evoke traditional monarchy, and his scandals include disrupting a Hanukkah ceremony with a fire extinguisher.

Where Mentzen talks about VAT and decentralisation, Braun denounces Masonic plots and urges a return to Latin liturgy.

And yet both men draw from the same emotional reservoir: a revolt against liberal modernity, against the European Union, and against the Polish centre-right’s submission to the establishment set around the remnants of the Solidarity movement from the end of the communist era.

The Strange Fusion That Made Konfedaracja

Konfederacja was born in 2018 as a coalition of two incompatible tribes: Janusz Korwin-Mikke’s paleolibertarian followers and Krzysztof Bosak’s Ruch Narodowy, the youth-driven nationalists who sought a Catholic revival.

Korwin, ever the provocateur, advocated the abolition of income tax, the restoration of monarchy, and the end of universal suffrage, as well as engaging in racist and sexist tirades that brought him attention but also infamy.

Bosak, more polished and disciplined, channelled Poland’s interwar integralism, fusing nation, Church, and masculinity into a cultural identity politics of the right.

Despite their differences, the coalition survived, united by a shared contempt for PiS centrism and European liberalism, and Bosak’s fourth-place finish in the 2020 presidential election, with 6.8 percent, proved the movement had legs.

By 2023, with Korwin fading into irrelevance, Mentzen took over the libertarian mantle, modernising the message while avoiding Korwin’s self-sabotaging flair.

But internal tensions deepened, a s Braun’s increasingly extreme behaviour and his refusal to moderate, led to his 2025 solo run, as Konfederacja officially backed Mentzen, yet their base backed both.

From Cult to Contender

The 2025 result confirmed a generational shift, and among men under 30, Mentzen dominated the field.

His aesthetics are Silicon Valley libertarianism with a Slavic twist: clean design, ironic detachment, and ferocious anti-statism. He offers a blueprint for national revival that fuses low taxes, strong borders, and civilisational pride.

Braun, by contrast, calls for national penance, and his supporters revere him not despite his extremism, but because of it. He is not a politician to them but a martyr in waiting.

Together, they pulled Poland’s Overton window so far to the right that even PiS had to play catch-up: in the lead-up to the runoff, Nawrocki adopted key points from Mentzen’s “Toruń Declaration”, pledging tax relief, decentralised governance, and a hard stance against EU interference.

Konfederacja’s influence now extends far beyond its fragmented caucus: it shapes discourse, drives turnout, and dictates what is now sayable on the Polish right.

And yet, the movement is unstable, its leaders distrust one another, its factions argue over first principles, and its base is ferociously online but institutionally weak.

Braun faces criminal proceedings and parliamentary expulsion, as Mentzen struggles to keep his movement radical enough to inspire, but clean enough to survive.

What unites them is not strategy, but myth: a shared conviction that Poland must either reject modernity or be consumed by it. And so far, this conviction is helping them gain momentum, election after election, even if internally divided.

Statement

In 2025, two anti-modern insurgents split the Polish right, and still walked away with one-fifth of the vote. Mentzen and Braun are not allies anymore, yet are bound by the same purpose: to burn down the liberal centre from opposite ends of the altar. Their original platform, Konfederacja, born from monarchists, libertarians, and nationalists, now shapes Polish politics without ever entering government. It is a rebellion rooted in social media, liturgy, and rage. Europe should take note. Where the technocrats fail, the folk right rises. And in Poland, it already has.

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