Washington — Poland hasn’t really had a turn in the world spotlight since the 1980s, when all eyes were on the drama of the Solidarity labor movement’s perilous but ultimately successful struggle against Communist rule.

President Donald Trump’s stop in Warsaw, where he arrived Wednesday night on his way to the Group of 20 meeting in Germany, focuses attention on a country viewed by many as having come full circle since those heady days.

Poland’s right-wing government views the visit as an enormous boost to its prestige, and has worked to ensure that Trump-friendly crowds turn out for a U.S. president known to relish shows of public adulation.

U.S. allies in Western Europe, however, worry that the president’s visit is in effect stamping a seal of approval on the Polish leadership’s aggressive moves against democratic institutions such as the courts and the news media, and that Trump could be seen as offering an implicit endorsement of the government’s populist, stridently anti-immigrant stance, which is reminiscent in some ways of his own.

Still colored in many ways by the sorrowful legacy of the 20th century, including the deaths of about one-fifth of its population in World War II, Poland has strong U.S. ties, personified by a large diaspora in the United States. While countries such as Ireland and Germany claim a far larger share of ancestral roots among Americans, Americans of Polish ancestry number nearly 10 million and have left an indelible mark on cities including Chicago and New York.

NATO ally Poland also hosts a contingent of about 900 U.S. troops, and has for many years contributed to U.S. and NATO missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it spends more of its GDP on military expenditures than most of its NATO neighbors, a subject Trump publicly lectured the alliance about during an awkward visit in May.

Trump’s Polish counterpart, President Andrzej Duda, shares some common policy ground with the U.S. president, including prospects for energy deal-making, a shared mistrust of Muslim immigrants and refugees and a degree of disdain for the European Union. But the country’s most powerful political figure is Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the nationalist-minded ruling Law and Justice party, which won 2015 parliamentary elections.

Under Kaczynski, the party has moved to rein in the judiciary, sought to muscle media outlets into taking a more pro-government line and advanced various conspiracy theories, including one surrounding the 2010 plane crash in Russia that killed dozens of Polish dignitaries including Kaczynski’s twin brother, Lech, who was then president.