What kind of a Polish President Karol Nawrocki will make is not immediately clear. Described in the media as a ‘conservative historian’, he is certainly no crusty academic; a keen boxer and footballer, he has been known to take part in organised punch-ups between several hundred fans of rival teams. And although he took an MA in History at the University of Gdańsk and was awarded a doctorate for a thesis on ‘Social Resistance to Communist Power in the city of Elbląg 1976-89’, the list of his subsequent publications suggests a greater interest in football than history.

It may be that it was his love for the beautiful game that brought him into contact with its more exuberant variety of fans and the confraternity of neo-Nazi bikers with whom he has been alleged to consort, or it may just be an interest in people. He has fended off questions about contacts with members of the criminal underworld by stressing his concern for social issues, explaining that he met many as a prison visitor. The repeated allegations that, when working as a security guard at the Grand Hotel in Sopot, he used to supply its clients with prostitutes may well have a similarly innocent explanation. That he is fascinated by low-life, there can be no doubt. In 2018 he published, under the pseudonym Tadeusz Batyr, the biography of a notorious gangster who had been murdered in a turf war. In a curious twist, posing as Batyr and heavily disguised, he agreed to give an interview, in which he lavished praise on the great historian Karol Nawrocki.

It is no doubt his versatility that recommended him to the leader of the Law and Justice party (PiS), Jarosław Kaczyński, who, in a resounding speech at Sosnowiec in 2013, declared that history must be subjected to the political priority of making Poles feel good about themselves. This declaration was provoked by the planned theme of the Museum of the Second World War under construction in Gdańsk, the brainchild of the then Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The principal authors of the exhibition, Paweł Machcewicz and Piotr Majewski, were determined it should not be a monument to Poland’s martyrdom or a glorification of Polish arms, but a politically neutral overview of the tragedy of the conflict from a universal point of view.

According to Kaczyński, this was all wrong. The Museum should be ‘an instrument for the fundamental defence of Polish national interests’, he thundered. The exhibition should reflect the Polish point of view (as he saw it) and uphold Poland’s ‘dignity’. This placed centre-stage what its present director, Professor Rafał Wnuk, calls ‘the argument between the supporters of affirmative history, aiming to arouse feelings of national pride, and those who believe that the essence of history is critical reflection on the past’.

Nawrocki had been working since 2009 at the Institute of National Memory (IPN), founded in 1999 to preserve the secret police files that the outgoing nomenklatura had not purloined or destroyed, and archival materials relating to the country’s spell under communist rule from 1944 to 1989 and the struggle against the totalitarian regime. It has subsequently grown into a centre for the study and commemoration of Polish history during the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 2017, shortly after the opening of the Museum of the Second World War, Kaczyński, who had come to power two years earlier, appointed Nawrocki as its director. Faithfully carrying out his orders, Nawrocki put Polish martyrdom and national heroics back at the heart of it. When he had finished, he was brought back to the IPN, as vice-president, then president. He had over the years also been placed by Kaczyński on the advisory boards or governing bodies of various museums, to ensure history and culture were properly presented.

This trajectory allowed him to be put forward as a presidential candidate, not by a party but by a group of historians and supposedly independent figures, even though he was from the start Kaczyński’s choice. It also allowed him to pose as the defender of Poland’s honour, the guardian of its historical, cultural and moral claim to respect on the world stage, and to tap into a deep wellspring of repressed feeling.

Since the overthrow of communist rule in 1989, forward-looking liberal elites in Poland have failed to fully appreciate the extent to which a majority of Poles, both in the country and particularly in colonies of émigrés around the world, nurture profound feelings of hurt and resentment at the way in which their nation’s sacrifices and achievements, particularly during the Second World War and the Soviet domination, have been overlooked, if not actually denigrated. Such feelings have been exploited by the Church to rally the faithful, on social media and, no doubt, foreign internet agencies out to undermine democracy, tipping them into hysterical fears of apocalyptic threats to the motherland. They are particularly strong among the old and socially or economically disadvantaged, which has led many to assume they would die away with time and the growing prosperity following Poland’s entry into the EU. But they are also held by many younger people – over 50 per cent of voters under the age of 30 in Warsaw voted for Nawrocki, rather than the city’s efficient and highly popular mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski.

Last week’s presidential election was essentially a clash between two rival views of the position Poland should adopt on the world stage: of the polite, civilised, educated Trzaskowski, who speaks six languages and the brasher, more aggressive, Trump-like Nawrocki, who tells Poles he will make Poland great again.

Which does not give many clues as to what kind of president Nawrocki will make, as he remains in many respects an unknown quantity. For one, he is not, as the outgoing president Duda was, Kaczyński’s puppet. Something of a chancer, and, it would seem, a fantasist, given his stint as Tadeusz Batyr, now that he has won power he may either raise or lower his tone. During his election campaign, he struck various populist chords, such as growing resentment of the Ukrainians and the ‘European elites’ that provoked Russia’s invasion, opposition to all immigration, lower taxation and farmers’ dislike of EU climate change regulations, but whether he acts on them remains to be seen. His first planned visit abroad is to Washington, and his declared affinity with Trump suggests that, like him, he may delve into his pool of alternative people to staff his team and adopt pugnacious attitudes towards the outside world. He will certainly wish to be seen as the nation’s champion, boxing for Poland, and history, or at least an interpretation of it, will doubtless provide the ring.