Poles apart: hard right wins by a sliver

0:28The Economist drinking. In years past, he might have expected booze-fueled punch-ups to break out. Not anymore, and that lack of violence is reflected across Britain. And when private mercenaries tried to overthrow the regime of Equatorial Guinea in 2004, the so-called Wongaku brought the world of military contractors into the public eye. Its leader was longtime mercenary Simon Mann. Our obituaries editor remembers him.

1:02But first...

1:09These days, elections often seem almost existential. In the case of Poland's presidential race, a knife-edge vote was a choice between two quite distinct futures. Exit polls appeared to point to a liberal one, showing that the mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzakowski, was in the lead. Though the polls showed the race was extremely close, Trzakowski claimed victory.

1:36We won, he told supporters last night. But actually, he didn't. Just a few hours ago, the final results came in, with a victory instead for the hard-right nationalist Karol Nawrowski. Though the margin was tiny, the shift in outlook for Poland could be far greater. In the early hours of this morning, It emerged that Karol Nawrowski, who is backed by the Conservative opposition in Poland, had won by 50.9 % of the vote. That's a margin of about 370 ,000 votes over Rafał Trzaskowski, his liberal opponent who won 49.1 % of the vote. Maria Wilczek is a news editor at The Economist. The victory of Nawrowski, who is a political newcomer, means that he will bring more of a nationalist outlook to Polish politics.

2:25And he will present new difficulties for Poland's government under Donald Tusk, which is already struggling to introduce liberal reforms that it had promised when it came to office in 2023. Maria, what does Nawrowski stand for and what does this mean for Poland? Nawrowski's victory throws the governing coalition into deep crisis. Back in 2023, Prime Minister Donald Tusk was elected on the promise of returning the rule of law to the country and to purging state institutions of the cronies installed by the previous Law and Justice Party, aka the Peace Party. But all of those efforts have been frustrated by the peace-backed president, Andrzej Duda.

3:12Now, he will be replaced by someone who is potentially even more of an obstacle. Karol Navrotsky, who is also backed by the Peace Party, could scuttle Mr. Tusk's agenda with his presidential veto. The governing coalition doesn't have the two-thirds majority in parliament that is needed to override that presidential veto. And he's expected to target any reforms that would try to depoliticize the courts in terms of abortion laws and green energy. He is also expected to frustrate the government's efforts in introducing any policies in those areas. And the next parliamentary election is coming up in 2027.

3:53Until then, the Tusk government therefore risks being a lame duck, and that is an existential threat for his camp, which has already become a lot less popular because of its inability to introduce its promised reforms. And until then, And it's only going to further bleed support. If, as you say, Donald Tusk's government is now essentially a lame duck government, what does that mean is going to happen in the next couple of years? Well, the opposition might actually start pushing for an early election, which would be bad news for Mr Tusk's government. The state pollster Tebos showed this week that only a third of polls supported the government.

4:29These numbers have been steadily falling over past months. At this point, 44 % of respondents opposed it. And with Karol Nawrotzki as president, Tusk's chances of turning his support around look all that much slimmer. Nawrotzki could also be quite damaging for Poland in terms of its foreign policy. Poland is the sixth largest economy in Europe. It's emerged as a key NATO ally on its eastern front. Now, Mr. Nawrotzki has said that he stands for a sovereign, ambitious Poland that does not listen to voices from Brussels, Berlin and Paris. He also wants to stop Poland from becoming a province of a federalised European Union.

5:08All of that signals that he would try to reverse the course that Poland has been on in terms of forging closer alliances within the European Union and with many of its NATO allies. And Maria, these results show that Polish society is deeply divided. How is that likely to play out now? Yes, they do indeed. And it's been a very exhausting, negative campaign. Both have presented their rivals as puppets of either the opposition or the governing camp. But in the past weeks, there's been an onslaught of press reports, which have been somewhat surreal. Journalists have reported that in the early 2000s, Nawrotzki, the next president, had arranged sex workers for guests at a hotel where he worked as a security guard.

5:56He has denied this, but he has admitted that he has taken part in mass brawls of football hooligans in his 20s. Navrovsky and his campaign have insisted that all of this is part of an elaborate smear campaign orchestrated by the governing camp and state media. And as the election results shows, many people have believed him and come out to support him. And you've said that Navrovsky is very keen to show his independence from the rest of the EU. How will Europe respond to Poland's new president? I'm sure many people in Europe are worried by the news. Following the elections two years ago, many had hoped that Poland had managed to push back the populists and that the presidential palace was their final foothold in the country.

6:47And many had also hoped that Poland would follow the examples of places like Germany, Romania, Canada, Australia, where the MAGA influence had failed to skew elections as much as was feared. But today's results shows that perhaps Poland has failed to live up to those expectations and Mr. Nawrowski's next moves will be very closely watched in Europe and further out. Maria, thank you so much for talking to me. Thanks, Rosie.

7:33It's Saturday night on St. Mary's Street in Cardiff. James Franchum is a data correspondent at The Economist, and his nose for a numbers story took him to the Welsh capital. During a recent visit to the city, I saw all the things that you might expect to see during a night out in one of Britain's biggest cities. Hordes of people were moving from one bar to the next. Some were singing, some were stumbling, some were semi-naked. But everyone was out to have a good time and get really quite drunk. But of all the action in Cardiff on that Saturday, one thing was missing. Violence. Injury caused by violence across England and Wales, most typically inflicted during drunken nights out, has fallen by two-thirds over the past 25 years.

8:18That's according to data collected by Cardiff University's Violence Research Group. In the early 2000s, the number of people presenting at A &E departments for the treatment of injuries caused by violence numbered 450 ,000 a year. In the most recent three years, it was just 150 ,000 each year. That's a massive decline over 25 years. And what's going on? Why is it all getting less violent? Well, in my reporting, I think there are two broad explanations for this remarkable shift in behaviour. One is better policing, more preventative policing. And the second would be shifting social norms. At Cardiff University, there's a professor there called Jonathan Shepard.

8:59When he was a young doctor in Bristol in the 1980s, he noticed the abundance of people there turning up on Friday and Saturday nights, basically with like smashed invasors. He noticed two things. One was just the number of incidents that were happening that the police weren't aware of. And then the second thing is the abundance of basically lacerations. So people getting glassed as they were out drinking. For the benefit of our non-British listeners, what is it to be glassed? Well, I've never been glassed myself, but I've seen it in films. Basically, you smash a bottle and that bottle then becomes a weapon.

9:35And what Professor Shepard's research led to, basically, was the introduction of toughened glass across bars and pubs around the country. And so that meant that actually when you attempted to glass someone, the weapon, as it were, didn't produce lacerations. The toughened glass simply just shattered effectively. As much as that helps to have glass that isn't easily turned into a weapon, you were talking about a change in policing and a change in social norms. Let's go through those. What's changed about policing? So what Cardiff did was use very detailed data from hospital records and provide that to the police and other authorities in Cardiff.

10:13in order to identify hotspots. And that gave them much better information in order to tackle violence before it happened. And Cardiff's particularly interesting because it has the highest density of license establishments of any city centre around the UK. What they did in Cardiff was to do very simple things like pedestrianise the streets, they change the patterns of policing, they have stewards, they make sure people don't get in fights in the taxi ranks, they have very good information, They share that information across establishments and so on. So it's very simple stuff, but it's proven to be really, really effective.

10:50What about the other part of the equation that you mentioned, the changing social norms? Yeah, so I don't think everything can be explained across the country by preventative policing. Not everyone is employing the Cardiff model, for example. So there must be something else that explains this nationwide reduction in violence. and from my reporting what people tend to point towards is the changing behavioural norms among younger generations so if you become violent you tend to be drunk and what we do know for sure is that young people are drinking less than people of 25 years ago of the same age and that tends to be borne out by the day too insofar as that we find that two-thirds of the reduction in violence over the past decade is due to young men getting into fewer scrapes, basically.

11:36The mechanism by which that violence reduces likely to be alcohol, we know for sure from surveys that people between the ages of 16 to 24 who say they don't drink has increased in the past decade or so. So I think there are two things that are likely going on here. One is the preventative policing, but that has also coincided with this behavioural change, the propensity of people to drink less, to be more sensible than they were perhaps 25 years ago. James, thanks very much for your time. Thanks, Jason.

12:22As Simon Mann sat in his hired private business jet going towards Harare, he kept an eye on the instrument panel. Anne Rowe is the Economist's obituaries editor. Not the one in the cockpit, but the virtual one that he had in his brain, where various lights would tell him whether the operation he was engaged in was a good idea or not. Was it a go or should he pull out? The plan that he was engaged in was to remove President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea from his post. He was a despot who had ruled Ecuadorial Guinea for about 25 years. And the idea was to put an exiled opposition leader called Severo Moto in his place.

13:13So they would go to Harare. They would then load up a plane with weapons and mercenaries, surprise President Obiang in his palace, and he would be arrested. and they would act as the escort and they would take Severo Motto into the palace to replace him. But as he sat there looking at his virtual instrument panel, he was really wishing for a red light. He thought if there is just one more snag, I'm going to pull out of this thing. He always got like this before he did an operation. he would get sweaty and sick and wish he could pull out and get very cold feet but on the other hand he'd had a very great success in 1993 in Angola when he and his business partner Tony Buckingham had flown into Angola and had taken back the city of Soyo from the forces of UNITA which were the rebels against the internationally recognized Angolan government.

14:23At that point, he was an oil and gas executive, and he and Tony Buckingham had decided that they would go in to protect a project that they had going and earn the great gratitude of the ruler of Angola. They were very successful. They not only got a very big payment for it, which could then subsidize their future operations, but they also got a cut of oil rights. He often asked himself what he was doing in this line of work. Why was he a mercenary? Although he liked money, money wasn't his only motivation. In any case, if you looked at the regular army, men were serving in it for money. It was a job.

15:11So the idea that soldiering and money had to be kept apart was a false one. truly. He also thought that private forces had been used in war all through the centuries. There had always been a private element, either men you could call on to fight or people you could call on to help behind the lines. And after all, kings and queens had sent out privateers to capture Spanish galleons. That element of warfare was very important, and he didn't think it made much difference. If a state wouldn't put to rights a regime that was oppressing its people and doing great harm, as the regime was in Equatorial Guinea, then it was up to private folk to try to do the job for them.

15:57And the world really ought to be grateful for that. Unfortunately, that plan was not a great success. In fact, it was a terrible failure, because as soon as they all rendezvoused in Harare, they were arrested, and he himself was put in a holding cell in which he was badly beaten up, given terrible food, so his digestion was wrecked. And after then, he was given a sort of trial and sent to the most notorious prison in Harare. After three and a half years there, he was abducted to the most fearsome prison. After two years, he was let out. The president said he let him out for humanitarian reasons, but there did seem to be a quid pro quo.

16:51Some years later, Simon Mann testified in defense of the president's son in a court in Paris, and incidentally also defended the regime of President Obiang.

17:09He had carried out all these ops that were more or less unknown, but this one suddenly brought him huge ridicule and a great deal of unwanted fame. when he'd been in prison in Harare, he wrote to his wife Amanda and told her that he wouldn't be able to get out unless a large splodge of Wonga, as he put it, that is, a great bundle of cash, was paid to get him out of prison. So this most unsuccessful coup was given the name Wonga and caught the attention of the British press. And it caught it even more when it was found out that one of the people who'd been on the fringes of the Wongaku, very eager to help, although he hadn't actually come through in the end, was Mark Thatcher, the son of the former Prime Minister.

18:00When all this came out, there was an absolute explosion of the story.

18:08Simon Mann tried to compare what he was doing as a mercenary to a mountain climber. He had the same desire as a mountain climber. For adventure, he wanted to get in the way of danger. And when he saw the top of the mountain, he really wanted to get there. He had wanted to be saved by a red light from going on this trip. And he might want to be deterred from going up a mountain. But once he saw the top and the possible gains and possible glory of it, the adventure, the danger, his heart leapt up, and all he could think about was that most of the lights, even all of them, were green.

18:54Anne Rowe on Simon Mann, who's died aged 72.

19:07That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

19:15Thank you.