In December 2023, as Poland’s parliament, the Sejm, marked the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, Grzegorz Braun strode into the main hall and blasted the candles on the menorah with a fire extinguisher.
At the time, Braun was a Polish MP, the stunt in keeping with his image of fringe provocateur: over the past decade, the eye-patch-wearing Braun has disputed the existence of Nazi gas chambers during World War Two, set light to the flag of the European Union, physically assaulted a pro-choice gynaecologist, and openly praised Vladimir Putin weeks into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
For most politicians, to repeatedly court such scandal would amount to political suicide.
For 59-year-old Braun, it has become the foundation of a political brand.
Today, the fringe framing no longer holds. In last year’s presidential election, Braun finished fourth, picking up more than 1.2 million votes. By no means on the margins, his party, the Confederation of the Polish Crown, is currently polling at nearly eight per cent ahead of the 2027 parliamentary race.
“Braun is the kind of politician who is almost impossible to discredit,” said Dominika Sitnicka, a political journalist at OKO.press. “Every weapon used against him only strengthens him among the people he is trying to reach.”
Braun did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Born into an intellectual family, Braun entered Polish public life as a filmmaker, clocking up more than 20 feature-length films. When he moved into politics, he spent years on the nationalist margins; a monarchist and critic of democracy, he does not believe in evolution, opposes abortion and IVF, supports the death penalty, and has claimed that a secret Israeli government bunker is being built beneath a water park outside the Polish capital, Warsaw.
Braun’s breakthrough came in 2019, when a collection of small far-right Polish movements united under the banner of the Confederation party, creating a political vehicle capable of carrying previously marginal figures into parliament.
“I don’t think he would have been able to build a movement like this on his own,” Sitnicka told BIRN.
“Back in 2015, most people looked at him as a curiosity. But by 2019 he was in parliament, with a completely different set of opportunities.”
Once inside the Sejm, Braun and his allies acquired something they had never enjoyed before: institutional legitimacy. Parliamentary offices allowed them to organise events, establish parliamentary groups and invite conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccine activists and fringe intellectuals into the heart of Polish politics.
An equally important turning point came after Braun split from Confederation and ran for president as an independent in 2025.
“He rebelled, took the risk and proved he could stand on his own,” Sitnicka said. His fourth place, she argued, made an independent parliamentary run in 2027 a realistic prospect.
Professor Mikołaj Cześnik, a political scientist at Warsaw’s SWPS University, sees Braun’s rise as part of a much broader European story.
It reflects a continent shaped by economic insecurity, ageing societies, migration and an information environment that overwhelms voters with constant stimuli while leaving little time for contemplation. In that context, he argues, someone who arrives with a very clear, emotionally charged message can succeed.
“It’s a similar pattern to what we saw with Nigel Farage,” Cześnik said, in reference to the prominent Brexiteer and leader of the political party Reform that is threatening to turn British politics on its head.
“Twenty years ago, he [Farage] too was completely on the political margins,” he added. “If you look at Farage’s career, or the trajectory of France’s National Rally, you can see how politicians on the extremes, given the right political circumstances, can go surprisingly far.”
In 2024, Braun was elected to the European Parliament, where he was met with bewilderment.
The Polish MEP Krzysztof Śmiszek recalls being repeatedly approached by colleagues from across the chamber, asking him the same question: “Who did you bring from Poland?” Two years later, curiosity has curdled into indifference.
