WARSAW — Poland’s one-time rulers from the Law and Justice (PiS) party want to do it again.
The right-wing party, which controlled Polish politics between 2015 and 2023 with a majority in the parliament, a loyal president, and public media on standby, is once again fielding an underdog candidate to take on a strong favorite in next year’s presidential election.
Historian Karol Nawrocki — nominated to be PiS’s candidate even though he’s not a member of the party — is trailing in all polls behind Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, the candidate of Civic Platform, the party of Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
It’s a familiar spot for PiS.
In 2015, the party’s candidate Andrzej Duda rose from being a virtual nobody on the backbenches of the European Parliament to defeat President Bronisław Komorowski — taking advantage of the incumbent’s fatal combination of running a smug and inept campaign.
Duda’s shock victory helped PiS sweep the parliamentary election later that year.
The stakes are just as high now.
May’s presidential vote will be a make-or-break moment for Tusk’s government. Duda has effectively obstructed much of its legislative agenda thanks to his veto power. PiS’s continued control of the presidential palace would block the remainder of Tusk’s term ending in 2027, and could help a broader revival of the nationalist party’s electoral fortunes.
Nawrocki was picked by PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński over any of the household-name party insiders like former Prime Ministers Mateusz Morawiecki or Beata Szydło. He ran Poland’s World War II museum and also the Institute of National Remembrance, a body that catalogues wartime crimes against the Polish nation — all key touchstones for nationalist voters.
Nawrocki’s campaign is seeking to close fast with Trzaskowski. The PiS-backed candidate is already touring Poland extensively, aiming to cement the image of being an ordinary Pole.
Complacency kills
In his early appearances, Nawrocki, 41, has jogged, taken part boxing training and done push-ups. That was mocked by some political insiders, but the memories of Komorowski’s catastrophic defeat should not be forgotten, said Ben Stanley, an associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Poland’s SWPS University.
The feeling that “it’s all in the bag” is what Trzaskowski and his camp must not give in to, he said.
“Ten years ago, there was this assumption that there was nobody Komorowski could lose to. By the time he realized it’s a fight, the momentum was with Duda. Trzaskowski better not let the same complacency set in or he will be making the same mistake,” Stanley said.
PiS is trying to contrast Nawrocki’s supposed outsider status with 52-year-old Trzaskowski — a former Cabinet minister, member of the European Parliament, two-time mayor of Poland’s largest city and senior member of the country’s ruling party.
“Nawrocki isn’t a member of any party and he’s running against a government party candidate, the deputy head of Civic Platform,” Paweł Szefernaker, the chief of Nawrocki’s campaign, told POLITICO.
The strategist claimed Nawrocki’s strength lies with his working-class background, which makes him feel at ease while meeting “normal people,” be they rural women, local firemen, or “anyone, really, who grew up in a block of flats,” a typical reference to unprivileged life in Poland.
“Trzaskowski is the candidate of the elites, he just doesn’t understand where people like Nawrocki are coming from,” Szefernaker said.
The theme of the elites versus the people is one that PiS is likely to keep hammering in Nawrocki’s campaign, which has so far focused heavily on small-town and rural Poland. The party is aiming to paint Trzaskowski as an out-of-touch liberal, denouncing him for taking crosses out of Warsaw government offices and strongly backing LGBTQ+ rights.
However, Trzaskowski does bring a lot of experience to the race. He came pretty close to winning the presidency in 2020, losing to Duda by some 400,000 votes, or just over 2 percentage points, after a campaign that his backers said was unfair because of PiS’s control over public media, which heavily favored Duda.
Trzaskowski also isn’t shying away from hitting the road and facing ordinary people. On one morning he was filmed in a campaign event helping a farmer load his truck with crates of vegetables.
Polls of Poles
Early polling shows Trzaskowski with a commanding lead. One survey has Trzaskowski with 38.6 percent support, while Nawrocki has 23.3 percent, while another poll, concerning a hypothetical run-off vote between the two, has Trzaskowski at 46 percent and Nawrocki at 34 percent.
But that’s little comfort for the Warsaw mayor.
Komorowski held a seemingly insurmountable 15-percentage point lead over Duda less than two weeks before the election in 2015. Duda went on to win both the first round and the run-off vote, which takes place between the top two candidates two weeks after the first round if no one wins an outright majority.
The 2025 election is also likely to need a run-off — and both candidates are already hunting for additional votes.
Trzaskowski can fish for support among the backers of the other parties in the ruling coalition, whose own presidential candidates will have been knocked out in the first round.
A question remains over who the far-right Confederation party — whose candidate got 14 percent in a recent poll — will back in a second round.
Nawrocki has fewer places to seek more votes, but will be looking for voters disenchanted with Tusk’s first year in power, said Jakub Jaraczewski, a researcher at Reporting Democracy, a think-tank.
“If Trzaskowski overcomes the image of being too middle-class Warsaw to understand, say, a farmer from somewhere far away from the capital, he’s still running the risk of being attacked or the government’s failures, especially economic ones,” Jaraczewski said.
Szefernaker said the government’s ineptitude will be a strong campaign point.
“We’re going to fight for every voter who feels they were deceived by the government, which failed to deliver on so many issues they had promised,” Szefernaker said.
The government is awake to that danger. It rushed to increase the supply of butter on the market, releasing 1,000 tons from of the country’s strategic reserves in December, after skyrocketing prices in the run-up to Christmas made the cost of living a campaign topic.
“Shops are being flooded with pre-Christmas price hikes, and what is the government doing? I urge the government to restore the zero percent VAT rate on food. Immediately. This can be done before Christmas. You get to work!” Nawrocki said in a video posted on X on Dec. 18.
On the same day, Trzaskowski aired his first video of the campaign — also focusing on bread-and-butter domestic issues.
“Enough of naively understood globalization. We need to focus on ensuring that the Polish economy regains competitiveness and is as strong as possible,” Trzaskowski said.
The post Poland’s PiS hopes its underdog presidential candidate defeats the odds appeared first on Politico.
