Race for Poland’s presidency blows wide open

The race is on for Poland’s new president, with the two candidates neck-and-neck ahead of an election on June 1 that will have an impact well beyond the country’s borders.

Sunday’s first round of the election saw centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski squeeze out an unexpectedly narrow victory with 31.4 percent of the vote against Karol Nawrocki, supported by the populist right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, who secured 29.5 percent.

At stake is not just who gets to be president — a largely but not entirely ceremonial function — but whether Poland’s effort to reestablish a system governed by the rule of law can succeed.

For PiS, it determines whether the defeat it suffered in the 2023 parliamentary election was just a temporary setback and, like Donald Trump roaring back to the U.S. presidency after a four-year interregnum, the party can aim to retake power.

“It’s wide open and will be very close,” said Aleks Szczerbiak, a professor at the University of Sussex who keeps an eye on Polish politics.

Sunday’s result was much closer than expected and leaves Trzaskowski on the back foot. Despite most polls taken before the vote giving him an edge in the June 1 second round, he has a much tougher job than Nawrocki.

Bartosz Rydliński, a political scientist at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, said Trzaskowski might not have enough time to revamp his campaign. “Trzaskowski has 11 days now to decode why so many voters who previously backed his coalition stayed home or voted for other candidates.”

The Warsaw mayor will have to figure out how to rally his core centrist big-city electorate and gain the support of those who voted for minor left-wing candidates knocked out after the first round of voting.

“Trzaskowski needs to convince left-wing voters that he takes them seriously, to show them it’s worth going to the polls [on June 1]. I’m happy to help him adjust his course in a way that includes the issues that matter to the left and to left-wing voters,” Magdalena Biejat, who won 4.2 percent as the candidate of the Left, told TVN24 television on election night.

Szymon Hołownia, the speaker of parliament and head of the Poland 2050 party that is also part of Tusk’s coalition, came fifth with 5 percent. He made it clear he’s backing the Warsaw mayor.

“I want to say from my side, and I believe that such a decision will also be made by our political grouping, that we must give Rafał Trzaskowski a chance in this second round,” he said after Sunday’s vote.

But Trzaskowski also has to lure some supporters of right-wing libertarian Sławomir Mentzen, who placed a strong third at 14.8 percent.

Tied to Tusk

Trzaskowski’s problem is that he’s closely tied to Prime Minster Donald Tusk, who has seen his ratings tumble as his coalition government has fallen well short of the reform promises it made ahead of the 2023 election. The government blames incumbent PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda for blocking its agenda, but there is a sense of drift in the new government that is hurting Trzaskowski.

“Many people are very disappointed with Tusk,” said Szczerbiak, pointing to those who wanted changes like a loosening of Poland’s draconian abortion laws, legal recognition for same-sex couples, or a more vigorous effort to hold officials in the past PiS government to account for alleged misdeeds.

Nawrocki has an easier task. He simply has to marshal the majority of voters who backed candidates opposed to Tusk’s government.

Piotr Buras, senior policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, noted that right-wing and far-right candidates took 54 percent of the vote in the first round.

Nawrocki “will have a larger pool of votes to draw upon,” he noted in a post-election analysis.

Nawrocki has already started making eyes at Mentzen’s voters, telling them immediately after Sunday’s election: “This is the time to save Poland. We both want a sovereign, strong, rich and secure Poland.”

But Mentzen’s supporters, who skew young and urban, aren’t an ideal fit with PiS, which tends to attract older and poorer voters from smaller towns. Like PiS, Mentzen is socially conservative, calling for a ban on abortion even in cases of rape, but he’s also economically libertarian, favoring low taxes and entrepreneurs. That stance places him closer to Civic Platform than welfare-state-supporting voters from PiS.

“Each of our voters is an informed, rational person and will make their own decision on who to vote for, or whether to vote at all in the second round,” Mentzen said after Sunday’s vote, although adding that “I intend to help our voters make a decision in the second round.”

The ‘battered favorite’

Many voters chose candidates who were strongly against the current establishment, from Mentzen to antisemitic rabble-rouser Grzegorz Braun to far-left purist Adrian Zandberg. They may well stay home on June 1 rather than cast a vote for either Civic Platform or PiS, parties that have dominated Polish politics for two decades.

“Voters aren’t potato sacks you can toss around,” Zandberg said, refusing to back Trzaskowski outright.

“It’s not that Mentzen and Braun’s electorate will fully vote for Nawrocki. Certainly, however, the democratic forces have no strong advantage or safety cushion to sleep soundly,” Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who was president from 1995 to 2005, told Polish public television.

The next two weeks are also likely to see foreign policy play a role.

Poland under Tusk has become a key player in European politics after years of isolation under PiS, while Nawrocki is likely to continue his calls for the EU to be turned into a looser confederation of nation states.

While both candidates strongly back Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia, Mentzen is much more skeptical, and those views could color the next weeks of the campaign.

“If I have my way, you will never join NATO, you will not have our soldiers with you, and you will stop getting any kind of welfare in Poland,” Mentzen told Ukrainians earlier this month.

Despite the headwinds Trzaskowski is facing, Szczerbiak called him the “battered favorite.”

“It’s too easy to write him off and a hell of a lot can happen in two weeks.”

Wojciech Kość reported from Warsaw.