Warsaw, Poland – The streets of Warsaw were awash with red-and-white flags last Sunday as two presidential hopefuls and their supporters marched through the capital for one last time before Poland takes to polls on Sunday, June 1, in the second round of voting for the country’s next president.
Rafał Trzaskowski from the centre-right Civic Platform of the governing Civic Coalition and Karol Nawrocki, an independent candidate supported by the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which ran Poland between 2015 and 2023, are the two remaining contenders in the election. In the first round of polls on May 18, Trzaskowski won 31.1 percent of the votes while Nawrocki came second with 29.5 percent.
So far, polling groups say the vote is split fairly evenly between the two for the final round. A poll by IBRiS for Polish news outlet Onet, has found that 47.7 percent of respondents intend to vote for Trzaskowski, with 46 percent indicating they will vote for Nawrocki. The rest are unsure.
One of the two will succeed Andrzej Duda, the outgoing nationalist conservative president who was also backed by PiS and has been blamed for holding up justice reforms by using his veto against the government.
This is a hotly contested race. Trzaskowski and Nawrocki have clashed over the European Union, national security and social values. At the same time, both candidates take a similarly hardline approach to immigration, and have used anti-Ukrainian rhetoric, building on growing resentment among Poles who see themselves as competing for strained social services with 1.55 million Ukrainian migrants and war refugees.
While Trzaskowski has proposed that only working Ukrainians should have access to the country’s child benefit, Nawrocki has gone further, saying he would also be against Ukraine joining NATO or even the EU.
‘Every vote is needed’
Speaking at his “Patriots’ March”, which gathered about 140,000 supporters last weekend, Trzaskowski took aim at his opponent while calling for unity.
“It’s high time for honesty to win. It’s high time for integrity to win. It’s high time for justice to win. It’s high time for truth to win. That’s what these elections are about,” he declared to a cheering crowd.
“Full determination is needed. Every vote is needed. So that the future wins. So that all of Poland wins.”
Trzaskowski has served as Warsaw’s mayor since 2018. His comments about “honesty” are seen as a reference to a recent news story about Nawrocki’s alleged purchase of a flat in Gdansk belonging to an elderly man in exchange for a promise to provide him with care. According to the man’s family, the promise was not fulfilled, and he was placed in a state nursing home.
In response, Nawrocki has said he will donate the flat to charity and pointed out that under Trzaskowski’s mayorship, families had been evicted from state accommodation in Warsaw.
Trzaskowski is viewed as a more liberal candidate than his opponent and has, unlike Nawrocki, supported calls for LGBTQ rights, as well as the liberalisation of the country’s strict abortion law in the past. He has remained largely silent about these issues during the current campaign, however. If elected, he would be more likely to help the governing coalition pass various bills, primarily reforms to the rule of law and the justice system, which have so far been blocked by Duda.
“Rafał Trzaskowski would be a pro-European politician,” said Bartosz Rydlinski, political scientist from Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw. “Brussels, Paris and Berlin would be the first capitals he would visit. He would try to maintain close relations with the US, but focus on strengthening the European component, both in the European Union and in NATO.”
US endorsement for Nawrocki
Nawrocki’s weekend “March for Poland” through central Warsaw gathered close to 50,000 supporters, and emphasised his nationalist conservative, pro-Catholic and free-market views. He argues that Poland should be prioritising its relationship with the US over the EU.
But his real triumph came this week when he received an official endorsement from Kristi Noem, President Donald Trump’s secretary of homeland security.
Nawrocki laid out his plan for Poland’s future on Tuesday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual event hosted by the American Conservative Union (US) for US conservative activists and officials. The event is usually held in the US, but took place in Hungary in 2022. This year, it was held in the Polish town of Jasionka, southeastern Poland, close to the air and shipment hub which supplies weapons and aid to Ukraine.
“For us, for Poles, relations with the United States are based on a deep foundation of values. These values are freedom, democracy, and sovereignty,” he told the audience, which included US Secretary of Homeland Security Noem, Vice President JD Vance, the billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, the former White House political strategist in 2017 during Trump’s first term as president.
“My opponent, Rafał Trzaskowski, is playing dishonestly,” said Nawrocki, who claims Trzaskowski would follow EU orders blindly, including on relaxing immigration rules. “Not only does he lie during public debates and get caught in these lies, but he also doesn’t want to say what his real idea for Poland after June 1st, 2025, is. And this idea is obvious. Speed up the migration pact, speed up the climate pact and pursue a policy that is important for Brussels, not for our security.”
The event was a much-needed boost for Nawrocki after a long week of bad news.
First, on May 22, Slawomir Mentzen, the far-right head of free-market party Konfederacja, who came third in the first round of the presidential election, claimed on his YouTube channel interview with Nawrocki that the PiS candidate had taken part in a fight between football hooligans in 2014 – something Nawrocki has never denied.
Then, in a TV debate the following day, he was seen placing a small sachet on his gum, thought to be filled with tobacco, but which prompted speculation that he might have been taking drugs. Nawrocki responded by providing a negative drug test result on Tuesday.
Finally, a news story was published by Onet, citing anonymous sources, claiming that as a young man, Nawrocki had participated in supplying prostitutes to guests of the Grand Hotel in the seaside city of Sopot, where he worked as a security guard in 2007. Nawrocki denied the claims and, in a post on X, stated that he would sue the outlet.
But the negative news does not seem to have affected his support.
“When it comes to the hooligan fight, he was 28 at the time, and I don’t have a problem with that because I think that men should know how to fight. When it comes to other issues – everyone can make a mistake, and it does not have to mean bad intentions,” said Marcin Mamon, a right-wing freelance journalist who claimed the alleged scandals involving Nawrocki have been exaggerated.
“For me, voting for a conservative or right-wing candidate is a declaration of values, such as the Catholic faith. Voting for the other candidate means voting against the Church and for abortion, which I’m totally against.”
Parliamentary deadlock
Having a like-minded president would be crucial for the governing Civic Platform to reverse controversial judicial reforms introduced by the former PiS government, especially regarding the independence of the judiciary.
As a result of the changes, which were deemed to contradict European law, in 2021, the European Union imposed penalties on Poland. While Civic Platform came to power in 2023 with the promise of reversing the controversial laws, it has been unable to do so as President Duda holds a right to veto and would block any attempts at changing the law.
“Nawrocki’s victory would mean a total war with the government,” said Rydlinski. “He would be a much more conservative president than Andrzej Duda, and he would probably refer many bills to the Constitutional Tribunal, which is still under the control of judges elected by the Law and Justice government.”
According to experts, a victory for Nawrocki would also put Poland on a conflict course with Europe.
“Karol Nawrocki would very strongly opt for bilateral relations between Warsaw and Washington, breaking up the EU’s unity,” Rydlinski said. “He would be a mini-Trump in Central Europe, which would mean a major conflict with Germany, cooling relations with France, and certainly a conflict with Brussels.”
Nawrocki’s conservatism and fascination with Trump have sparked concern among some Polish voters. Those who voted for left-wing or centrist candidates in the first round are likely to unite now, not in their support for Trzaskowski, but against what they see as Nawrocki’s Trump-like vision for Poland.
The left-wing and centrist candidates who lost in the first round have declared their support for Trzaskowski, and their supporters are expected to follow suit.
“Putting a cross next to Trzaskowski will not come easy for me,” said Zofia Szeremet, a 20-year-old student based in Warsaw who voted for the left-wing leader of the Razem party, Adrian Zandberg, in the first round. “But I can’t imagine not voting in such an important election. I don’t agree with Trzaskowski on many issues, but at the end of the day, he is a guarantee for Poland’s pro-European course.
“Nawrocki is anti-EU, anti-Ukrainian, inexperienced and incompetent, and I don’t imagine a president having ties with hooligan movements.”
A close call
Polls are inconclusive when it comes to the election favourite. What the first round of the vote has revealed, however, is that voters are tired of the continuous primacy of the two biggest parties.
“If we add up the results of Nawrocki and Trzaskowski, it is slightly above 60 percent, the worst result since 2005. It is clear that Poles are looking for an alternative, and not only on the right, but also to the left,” said Marcin Palade, political sociologist and expert on electoral geography in Poland. This compares with the nearly 74 percent won by the top two candidates in the 2020 presidential election – Andrzej Duda and Rafal Trzaskowski.
“Rafał Trzaskowski finished the first round [this year] below even what the polls predicted would be the minimum he could win, which is the worst possible scenario,” Palade said. “Nawrocki had the worst result a PiS candidate has had since 2005, below the ratings of the party that has stood behind him.”
Furthermore, there may be more voters in the second round: Voter turnout for the first round was 67.3 percent. Palade added: “The second round will be decided by young people, but also by those who did not vote in the first round. It is an open question whom they will support.”
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