Who is the most popular politician in Poland today? Not, as you might expect, the new prime minister, Donald Tusk, nor is it the defeated leader of the opposition, Jarosław Kaczyński. It is not the president, Andrzej Duda, an ally of Kaczyński’s arch-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which ran Poland for eight years before elections last October. No, the most popular politician in Poland is the newly elected speaker of the parliament, Szymon Hołownia.
Even keen observers of Polish politics can be excused for not having heard of Hołownia, as he is a newcomer to Poland’s legislature, the Sejm. He is famous in Poland but not, until recently, for political reasons. For more than a decade, he was the co-host of the TV show Poland’s Got Talent!.
His meteoric political rise is quite surreal for the Warsaw commentariat. It is as if Simon Cowell had successfully run for the House of Commons and become the speaker on his very first day in Westminster. Actually, it’s even more unusual, because the speaker plays a pivotal role.
In the Polish political system, the role’s official title is “Marszałek Sejmu” (Marshal of the Sejm), and its authority is stronger than that assigned to Hołownia’s British counterpart, Lindsay Hoyle. The post carries military connotations, and not without reason.
The Marshal of the Sejm has their own security force, the Marshal Guard. Its primary task is maintaining order in the house, a nod to the medieval origins of Polish parliamentary tradition. Centuries ago, debates in the Sejm sometimes escalated into actual violence, and a special elite unit was formed to protect the king and other VIPs.
In the Polish order of precedence, the Marshal of the Sejm is number two (the prime minister is merely fourth!). He can effectively kill any project by simply keeping it off the order of business – filing it instead in the so-called Marshal’s freezer. He has strong powers against filibustering; he can switch off any member’s microphone or even order his guards to remove any particularly unruly member.
The speaker’s importance means the role is traditionally reserved for seasoned politicians. Szymon Hołownia is the first parliamentary newcomer to be elected Marshal since the fall of communism.
Hołownia made the switch from entertainment to politics because, he says, he was frustrated by the lack of ideas about the future. Polish politics is indeed largely focused on the past – the main arguments often boil down to who did what to whom many years ago. He launched a party called Poland 2050, which in 2023 forged a centre-right political alliance called Third Way. It joined forces with Tusk’s pro-Europe centrist Civic Coalition ahead of last October’s election.
Initially Hołownia’s project was easy to dismiss. While it is not uncommon for a celebrity or a billionaire to enter parliament in Poland, they rarely hold significant posts and get bored quickly.
This time it is different. Yet even those who voted for Hołownia were surprised by his elevation to speaker. The PiS veterans certainly underestimated his skills. Party leaders began their parliamentary careers in 1989. Their experience of the rough and tumble of Sejm politics might have suggested they would easily outmatch Hołownia.
They were in for a shock. Hołownia did his homework, memorising every parliamentary rule, regulation and precedent. So far he has emerged not just unscathed from skirmishes with the old guard but a political celebrity.
An attempted forced entry by two former ministers (the pair had criminal convictions and as such were barred from the Sejm even after a presidential pardon) on 7 February did not go well for the PiS.
Everybody roots for this kind of hero: the rookie who comes to a fight with veterans and wins, against all the odds. It goes some way to explaining Hołownia’s popularity. He has promised to modernise and drag the Sejm into the 21st century, opening it up to more scrutiny from the press and public, and stamping out practices that took hold under PiS.
On Poland’s Got Talent!, Hołownia’s style was very different from the Simon Cowell approach; he was the “kind one”, comforting and encouraging nervous contestants.
In parliament, too, he always appears calm and polite, but has injected humour into proceedings and a streak of vitriolic sarcasm. When Kaczyński thundered that without the two banned ministers, “the Sejm does not exist any more”, Hołownia retorted: “If we don’t exist, then maybe we should stop paying you?” Commenting on the unruly behaviour of another PiS politician, Hołownia called him: “Donald Trump scaled down to his abilities”.
A side-effect is the sudden bump in viewership of televised parliamentary proceedings – or “Sejmflix”, as they are called nowadays. The official Sejm channel on YouTube currently has 741,000 subscribers, twice as many as the UK parliament. This is largely down to Hołownia’s performance.
Poland has its next presidential election in just over a year’s time. There are no official declarations yet but Hołownia is expected to run, and so far the polls suggest he would make it into the final run-off.
There is an old saying that the cardinal who enters the conclave as a pope leaves it as a cardinal. In Polish elections, doing well too early is the kiss of death. Something unpredictable always happens. But one thing can safely be predicted: we will all be hearing a lot more about Szymon Hołownia.
Wojciech Orliński is a Polish journalist, writer and academic
