Poland’s
PiS hopes its underdog presidential candidate defeats the odds
The two lead
candidates are sparring over who has the ear of ordinary Poles.
Karol
Nawrocki meets supporters in Lublin
January 5,
2025 4:02 am CET
By Wojciech
Kość
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.
Civic
Platform candidate and Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski is leading in polls. |
Jarek Praszkiewicz/ Poland Out/EFE via EPA
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.
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