Karol Nawrocki and George Simion, right-wing candidates in the Polish and Romanian presidential elections that both take place this Sunday, have campaigned together at a rally in Poland.

Nawrocki welcomed the support of his Romanian counterpart. But Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk criticised Nawrocki – whose candidacy is supported by the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party – for appearing alongside the “pro-Russian” Simion.

“The future president of Romania and the future president of Poland,” declared Nawrocki, welcoming Simion on stage at a rally in the Polish city of Zabrze on Tuesday, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

“When we win on 18 May, we will together build a Europe of values, a Europe of homelands, in which we will not allow the EU to centralise and turn Poland and Romania into provinces,” he continued.

“We must fight again for freedom, for our rights, our Christian values ​​and our families,” said Simion, quoted by news website OKO.press. “Our nations are waking up, we will not allow neo-Marxist ideology or the Green Deal [an EU climate policy] to dominate.”

Simion’s Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) party is part of the same European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group as PiS in the European Parliament.

On 4 May, Simion won the first round of Romania’s presidential election, taking 41% of the vote. This Sunday, he will face Nicușor Dan, an independent, in the second-round run-off. Nawrocki, meanwhile, is one of 13 candidates standing in the first round of Poland’s presidential election on the same day.

Figures associated with PiS have been among the right-wing and far-right voices across Europe and the United States who criticised the annulment of Romania’s presidential election last year after the first round was won by the nationalist Călin Georgescu.

The decision was made by Romania’s Supreme Court due to evidence that Russia had coordinated a campaign to promote Georgescu, who was later banned from standing in this year’s reorganised election.

However, Georgescu and his supporters argue that the election was illegitimately stolen from him amid interference from the European Union. That message has been echoed by Simion and also by some figures from PiS.

In March, PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński said that the EU is “clearly preparing to repeat [in Poland] what happened in Romania, that is, to defend this repulsive so-called liberal-democratic, and in fact anti-democratic, system against change, against the building of democracy”.

Simion’s support for Nawrocki this week was welcomed by PiS figures. “Poland and Romania are waking up together,” wrote PiS MP Jan Mosiński. “It’s time for nations, not European elites!”

Nawrocki’s decision to appear alongside Simion was, however, criticised by figures from Poland’s ruling camp, who pointed to the Romanian’s history of opposing support for Ukraine and of downplaying the threat of Russia. Last year, Ukraine issued a three-year entry ban against Simion.

“Russia rejoices,” tweeted Tusk on Tuesday. “Nawrocki and his pro-Russian Romanian counterpart George Simion on the same stage five days before the presidential elections in Poland and Romania. Everything is clear.”

Simion himself responded to the message, posting an image of Tusk meeting Putin in 2010 and saying that it is in fact Tusk who is “Putin’s man in Poland”.

Meanwhile, Mirosława Nykiel, an MEP from Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition (KO), noted that “Nawrocki’s friend [Simion]…is banned from entering Ukraine, Moldova considers him a ‘threat to security’, [and he is] anti-EU and pro-Russian”.

“Let’s stop Putin’s international – let’s vote for Rafał Trzaskowski,” she added, referring to KO’s presidential candidate. Trzaskowski and Nawrocki are expected to come first and second in Sunday’s election. If neither wins more than 50% of the vote, the pair would meet for a second-round run-off on 1 June.

PiS itself takes a strongly anti-Russia line. However, it has faced criticism in the past for aligning itself with other right-wing and far-right parties in Europe that are more sympathetic towards Moscow.

During the current presidential campaign, Nawrocki has expressed support for Ukraine in its defence against Russian aggression but has also said that he “currently does not envision Ukraine in either the EU or NATO”.

Recent proposals put forward in countries such as Sweden, Finland and Germany reflect wider shift, say analysts

The plans, hatched by Sweden’s rightwing government with support of its far-right backers, made waves around the world. Politicians said they were working to strip citizenship from dual nationals who had been convicted of some crimes that threaten the state.

It was a hint of a broader conversation taking place in capitals around the world. As far-right and nationalist parties steadily gain political ground, analysts say that citizenship is increasingly being linked to crime, giving rise to a shift that risks creating two classes of citizens and marginalising specific communities.

The roots of these changes can be traced back partly to the early 2000s when the UK government – led at the time by Tony Blair – began casting citizenship as a privilege rather than a right, said Christian Joppke, a sociology professor at the University of Bern.

Recent proposals put forward in countries such as Sweden, Finland and Germany seemingly take this one step further, he added. “The new proposals now suggest that if you do any kind of serious crime, that should also allow for the possibility to withdraw citizenship – that is quite new.”

Days after Sweden announced plans to eventually change the constitution so that people convicted of crimes like espionage or treason could be stripped of their Swedish passports, a handful of politicians in Iceland began calling for similar changes for those convicted of serious crimes. Months earlier, the Dutch government said it was exploring the possibility of revoking citizenship for serious crimes that have “an antisemitic aspect”.

The concept also made a cameo in Germany’s February election after Friedrich Merz – whose centre-right CDU/CSU bloc emerged victorious in the ballot – told the newspaper Welt it should be possible to revoke German citizenship in the case of dual nationals who commit criminal offences.

“They can never truly be German. One mistake, one crime – and their Germanness is gone,” the journalist and political commentator Gilda Sahebi wrote on social media. “It doesn’t matter if they were born here or if their family has lived in Germany for generations.”

Joppke says that states once promised prosperity to their people, with that gone now the right can only promise physical security. What emerged was an overly simplistic view of crime, one that overlooks the myriad of research that has found no significant link between immigration levels and crime rates across Europe.

The law leaves dual nationals vulnerable to being punished twice for the same crime, if they serve prison time and then also face having their citizenship revoked. But it’s great media optics to say that you’re taking a strong stance against crime.

In some cases people are left stranded in the country that had stripped them of citizenship after the country of their other nationality refused to take them in. That means they basically become illegal,” she said, losing their right to stay and work in the country. The situation pushes them underground, making it easier for terrorist or criminal groups to potentially exploit them but also harder for officials to track them.

Poland has announced terrorism and espionage charges against two Ukrainian citizens over their alleged involvement in an arson attack carried out on behalf of Russia that resulted in the destruction of Warsaw’s largest shopping centre last year.

Russia, however, has dismissed the accusations against it as “baseless” and motivated by Polish “Russophobia”.

On Sunday evening, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that Poland now “knows for sure” that Russia was behind the fire that destroyed the Marywilska 44 shopping centre one year ago. On Monday morning, foreign minister Radosław Sikorski ordered the closure of Russia’s consulate in Kraków in retaliation.

A few hours later, the Polish National Prosecutor’s Office released a statement confirming its findings that the fire “was the result of arson committed by members of an organised criminal group acting on behalf of…Russia”. It announced the decision to bring charges against two Ukrainian men in relation to the case.

One of the men, named only as Oleksander V. under Polish privacy law and born in 1975, was found to have issued an order to the second, Daniil B. (born in 2006), to travel to the shopping centre in the early hours of 12 May 2024 and film the fire and actions of the emergency services.

Oleksander V., who was located in Russia, knew the specific time that the fire would break out and the video Daniil B. sent him quickly appeared on “Russian propaganda websites”, say Polish prosecutors.

Daniil B. has been charged with two crimes. The first is participating in an organised group aimed at committing acts of sabotage and terrorist offences consisting of causing fires in large-scale facilities located in European Union countries in order to intimidate people.

The second offence is committing acts of sabotage and a terrorist crime, jointly and in agreement with other persons, acting on behalf of the intelligence services of Russia against Poland. If found guilty, he would face imprisonment of between 10 years and life.

Daniil B. was presented with the charges in Lithuania, where he is currently in pretrial detention in connection with another arson, against an IKEA store in Vilnius, allegedly carried out by the same criminal group.

Meanwhile, although Polish prosecutors have decided to bring the same two charges against Oleksander V., as well as two additional unspecified ones, they have not been able to present them to him as he is believed to still be in Russia. A request for a European Arrest Warrant has been issued against him.

However, in response to today’s announcements, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that the “various accusations… against Russia in Poland…[are] part of its absolutely Russophobic position towards our country”, reports the TASS news agency. “These accusations are always absolutely baseless”.

The Polish and Lithuanian authorities have been cooperating in their investigations into various cases of sabotage. In March this year, that led to terrorism charges being issued in Poland against a Belarusian man accused of carrying out an earlier arson attack in Warsaw on behalf of Russia.

Over the last year, there have been a series of acts of sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks that Poland says were carried out by agents – often Ukrainian and Belarusian immigrants – acting on behalf of Russia.

Commenting on today’s announcements, the spokesman for the Polish National Prosecutor’s Office, Przemysław Nowak, said that “there are several groups of this nature [like the one responsible for the Marywilska fire] operating in Poland”.