The campaign to choose Poland’s next president is heating up, even though the election isn’t slated until next May.

On paper the office isn’t that powerful. The president does, however, have the ability to block a lot of what the government wants to do. And incumbent President Andrzej Duda has been doing just that to the eight-month-old administration of Prime Minister Donald Tusk — preventing it from carrying out much of its electoral program and even refusing to sign off on government candidates for ambassadors.

With Duda ending his second five-year term, making him ineligible to run again, the election has become a must-win race.

“The stakes are very high,” said Wojciech Szacki, head of political analysis at Polityka Insight, a Polish think tank.

“The ruling coalition is held in check by President Duda and winning the election means the ability to carry out their campaign promises,” agreed Jacek Kucharczyk, head of the Warsaw-based Institute of Public Affairs think tank.

“It turns out that the president is formally not very powerful but he has a post that is hugely important to the country and to Polish democracy,” he added.

A change of president has implications for the government’s program, as well as for the survival of the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, which lost power in last year’s parliamentary election. It also affects Poland’s international position.

Although the European Commission has released most of the funds that had been blocked over worries the previous government was backsliding on the bloc’s democratic rules, Tusk has been unable to undertake deep institutional reforms of the justice system thanks in part to Duda’s resistance. That has made Poland’s much-anticipated return to the EU mainstream as a liberal democracy more provisional than expected.

The likely date of the first round is May. If no one wins an outright majority, a second round with the top two candidates takes place two weeks later.

On Friday, Tusk will hold a rally with Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, the likely candidate from his centrist Civic Platform, helping kick off the campaign season — although the party is only likely to formally name its candidate at the end of the year.

Tusk says he’s sitting out the race.

” I don’t intend to run for office,” he said last week. “The coming years are really a very serious grind. I feel competent and comfortable where I am.”

Political calculations

Although becoming president would cement Tusk’s position as the most consequential Polish politician of this century, he’s savvy enough to know that Trzaskowski will have an easier time winning than he might.

Tusk, 67, has a large negative electorate and his entrance into the race would energize PiS, which reviles him.

Trzaskowski, 52, is also deeply disliked by conservatives for his strong record on LGBTQ+ issues and his secular tendencies — such as his removal of crosses from Warsaw city offices. But Trzaskowski already has a very high national profile, having run for president in 2020 when he was very narrowly defeated by Duda.

That leaves little opening for other potential candidates such as Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski.

“Rafał Trzaskowski seems most acceptable in all the polls. And this is the most likely scenario,” Tusk said.

Donald Tusk, 67, has a large negative electorate. | Sergei Gapon/Getty Images
Other parties are also mulling candidates and preparing their campaigns.

The big unknown is who PiS will pick: It certainly won’t be party leader Jarosław Kaczyński, 75, who prefers to steer PiS and the country from behind the scenes.

Well-known names such as former PM Mateusz Morawiecki and ex-Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak have been bandied about, but they all have flaws. Morawiecki is a bit of an outsider to core PiS members and presided over last year’s election defeat, while Błaszczak is a terrible campaigner.

Asked if Morawiecki will be the PiS candidate, Kaczyński said in June that the party will choose someone “who has a real chance of winning.”

The election is also massively important to PiS, as Duda’s office is one of the party’s few remaining anchors on political power. A loss of the presidency, combined with Kaczyński’s age, could see the party fragment over the next five years.

“I suspect PiS will want to repeat the strategy of 2015 and choose a young and relatively little-known candidate like the party did with Duda,” said Kucharczyk, referring to Kaczyński’s surprise maneuver of plucking obscure back-bencher Duda from the European Parliament, who then won the election.

Not so fast

Since 2005 the top two candidates for president have come from PiS and Civic Platform, and that’s unlikely to change next year. But that dynamic conceals some complex political maneuvering.

Early opinion polls show that Trzaskowski leads potential rivals from other parties, but it’s still not clear who he’ll be facing.

Tusk and his allies are pressuring the other members of the ruling coalition not to put forward their own candidates.

“Rafał Trzaskowski could even win in the first round, provided that other candidates … drop out,” Dariusz Joński, a member of the European Parliament, told the Polish Press Agency. “Sometimes in politics you have to hide your ambitions.”

But it’s not clear that the junior members of the coalition — the center-right Polish People’s Party and Poland 2050 as well as the Left — will comply. Running in the presidential election is a good way to raise the profile of a party, even if their candidate is a no-hoper.

Trzaskowski’s backers would like to see the ruling camp close ranks behind him in the second round.

Donald Tusk and his allies are pressuring the other members of the ruling coalition not to put forward their own candidates. | Omar Marques/Getty Images
Whoever runs for PiS, meanwhile, will aim to consolidate votes from the far-right Confederation party in the second round.

If that happens, the race will be close.

POLITICO’s poll of polls shows that the parties making up the current ruling coalition together have the support of 54 percent of voters, while PiS and Confederation jointly have 44 percent.

“Trzaskowski is definitely the favorite,” Szacki said, before recalling he had also been convinced that Civic Platform-backed Bronisław Komorowski would romp to an easy reelection win in 2015, but was unexpectedly defeated by Duda.

“I’ve cured myself of certainty,” he concluded.

Politico

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