Why are today’s strongmen so obsessed with muscle?

LIBERALS have wasted no time in pointing to Karol Nawrocki’s lack of qualifications for his new job as president of Poland. He has never previously held political office. He won by the narrowest of margins with 50.9 per cent of the vote. But Nawrocki possesses the one qualification that many national populists value above all other: a taste for physical strength laced with violence.

Nawrocki is a former boxer who still likes to go a few rounds. He is also such an enthusiastic football supporter that he reportedly got the logos of his two favourite teams – Chelsea and Lechia Gdansk – tattooed on his chest. During the campaign, he admitted to taking part in 2009 in a 70-a-side-punch-up with fans of rival clubs, alongside scores of convicted criminals armed with clubs and brass-knuckles. He denied other violence-related accusations, such as that he moonlighted as a pimp during a stint working as a security guard at a hotel and that he has extensive contacts with the Polish underworld. His come-from-behind campaign featured videos of the candidate in the boxing ring and shooting range and a pledge to “make Poland great again”.

This emphasis on physical prowess laced with violence is commonplace on the nationalist right. The master of the genre is, of course, Vladimir Putin. Russia’s president likes to pose doing macho things, such as hunting, shooting, fishing and ice-pool diving, often stripping down to his waist to reveal his rippling biceps and bare chest. He claims that he once stunned a Siberian tiger that was supposedly menacing a female journalist. In January 2007, Putin brought his black labrador into a meeting with then German chancellor Angela Merkel, a well-known canophobe, saying “I’m sure it will behave”.