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Poland’s presidential elections will pit Warsaw’s liberal mayor as the candidate of Donald Tusk’s ruling party against a historian chosen on Sunday by the right-wing opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party.
The outcome of next May’s vote could unlock Prime Minister Tusk’s reform agenda, which has been stalled by outgoing rightwing President Andrzej Duda since PiS was ousted from office last December. Duda, a PiS nominee, has used his second and final term to block some of Tusk’s bills and stop his pro-EU coalition government from replacing PiS-nominated judges and ambassadors.
Jarosław Kaczyński, the longstanding leader of PiS, bypassed some experienced politicians to select 41-year-old Karol Nawrocki, who leads Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance and previously managed a war museum in his city of Gdańsk.
Nawrocki is little-known to voters but can potentially cast himself as part of a new generation who was outside government during the two previous PiS terms. The choice is also seen as an attempt to repeat Duda’s winning path from outsider to the presidential palace in 2015.
Still, the frontrunner next May is set to be Rafał Trzaskowski, the Warsaw mayor who was nominated on Saturday after comfortably beating foreign minister Radosław Sikorski in primaries held by Tusk’s ruling Civic Coalition.
It will be Trzaskowski’s second attempt to become president after he narrowly lost to Duda in 2020. Trzaskowski, 52, is a supporter of LGBTQ rights and in May he introduced a ban on religious symbols within Warsaw’s city hall. He is also credited with building up support for Tusk’s party among younger voters, which proved crucial in last year’s parliamentary elections when turnout hit a record 74 per cent.
He promised on Saturday to “wake up Poland” before next May’s elections, saying: “I have a lot of energy to win against PiS.”
Nawrocki on Sunday underlined his academic rather than political background, as well as his Catholic values, by also taking a swipe at Trzaskowski for banning crosses. “We cannot be ashamed of these values and take down crosses in the offices of the Polish capital,” he said. Nawrocki added that he wanted “to be able to say with full responsibility that I am ready to represent all Poles”.
Opinion polls carried out before either of the two main parties had selected their candidates suggested that the Civic Coalition candidate would beat the PiS nominee in the second round of presidential voting.
But the outcome is likely to hinge on who can attract most of the votes won by other candidates in the first round.
Among other nominees so far, the Poland 2050 party — one of Tusk’s coalition partners — is fielding its leader Szymon Hołownia, while the far-right Confederation party selected its co-chair Sławomir Mentzen.
PiS did not hold primaries to select its candidate. Instead it essentially left the choice in the hands of Kaczyński, who had recently joked that he would “roll the dice” before deciding.
While Trzaskowski’s second bid for the presidency was anticipated, Sikorski emerged as a late rival after Tusk’s party decided to hold primaries earlier this month.
Sikorski campaigned as a hardline defender of national security who also pushed for tougher controls on migration and backed Polish claims against Germany and Ukraine relating to atrocities committed during the second world war.
Earlier this week Tusk unexpectedly waded into the contest by releasing a self-commissioned opinion poll that put Trzaskowski ahead of Sikorski and whose result he called “clear”.
Trzaskowski won almost 75 per cent of the votes cast by 22,000 Civic Coalition members.
After announcing Trzaskowski’s victory, Tusk said: “We all know that this is the first step, that nobody will give our candidate anything for free . . . We will have to fight for every vote, convince every Polish woman, every Polish man until the last day of the [presidential] elections.”