2025 Presidential Elections in Poland: sharp polarization and rise of the far right
While the first exit polls suggest a victory of the ruling Civic Coalition candidate, his lead over the sovereignist opponent is slimmer than in any of the earlier opinion polls. In the second round, planned for 1 June, everything is possible.
Three key conclusions are to be drawn from this vote. First, the ‘eternal’ rivalry between pro-European Civic Coalition and sovereignist Law and Justice has definitely transformed into a tripartite fight with an even more extreme right-wing force. Second, that taking over extreme right slogans is not an efficient strategy to contain the extreme right. The third one is perhaps the saddest: that a well-written political program, genuinely addressing the needs of the population with carefully selected, moderate solutions is far too little to get their authors to the top. In the era of online politics, other factors count.
No bonus for Tusk’s man
Rafał Trzaskowski, mayor of Warsaw and candidate of the ruling Civic Coalition, cannot be satisfied with his 30.8% (results according to the first exit poll). This is not much more than in the first round of the 2020 presidential election, when Trzaskowski unsuccesfully challenged Andrzej Duda. Karol Nawrocki, supported by Law and Justice, obtained 29.1%.
The sovereignist voters, albeit surprised by the selection of the candidate – the head of Institute of National Remembrance, not a top Law and Justice politician – mobilized to support ‘their representative’ despite all the scandals that surrounded his campaigns and numerous journalist investigations portraying him as a dishonest man with strange friends related to the criminal world. The most recent and the most devastating publications suggested that Nawrocki became an owner of a small apartment in Gdańsk in return for caring for a disabled elderly man, who was then found living in a retirement home. However, for sovereignist voters a vote for Nawrocki is, first of all, a vote against Tusk – for some, a vote against mass layoffs, pro-business economic policies, for others, a vote against close ties to Europe and Germany in particular, for ‘traditional values’.
Rafał Trzaskowski has not gained any bonus points for representing the incumbent government or for being one of the icons of the coalition that removed PiS from power in 2019. On the contrary, his voter base seems to have remained unchanged in recent years. He is still the favorite candidate of educated, pro-European voters from larger cities and the western part of the country, mostly aged 40 and above. If Polish liberals hoped that for Law and Justice, the loss of power would lead to the party’s disintegration, they now know that they were wrong. Nawrocki will fight for the presidency until the last day.
Far right rise
This campaign has once again confirmed that the far right cannot be stopped by adopting its slogans and language. Sławomir Mentzen and Grzegorz Braun came third and fourth in the polls with 15.4% and 6.2% of the vote, respectively. Each of them envisions a Poland with almost no taxes, zero state involvement in the economy, but with paid education (Mentzen) and a leading role for the Catholic Church (Braun). Mentzen also suggested during the campaign that he would force raped women to give birth to their children, while Braun proudly proclaims the “fight against the Jewish communists” as one of his key aims. Both presented themselves as candidates from outside the system, turning the existing Polish order upside down, for the benefit of those unsatisfied. Meanwhile, their programs are a Polish political socialism-to-capitalism transition program taken to the extreme: absolute freedom for business, a primitive version of conservatism, and zero respect for women’s rights.
Both Trzaskowski and Nawrocki tried to win over voters fascinated by the far right by adopting its demands: stopping migration, taking away social benefits from Ukrainian citizens living in Poland, and lowering taxes. The result is that the PiS sovereignists have lost their aura of a “national-social” party, and women who voted for Trzaskowski may be really disappointed that their expectations have once again been pushed into the background. The far right, on the other hand, is doing fantastically well. Progressive and pro-European voters face a tough test over the next two weeks: both top candidates will fight for the votes of “right-wing anti-establishment” voters, supporters of Mentzen and Braun, because this 20% of the electorate could tip the balance.
Forget dialogue, (don’t) forget the left
The socialdemocratic left cannot be happy after this election. The three left-wing candidates—Adrian Zandberg, Magdalena Biejat, and Joanna Senyszyn—together garnered just over 10 percent. While this is a better percentage than in the European elections, it looks more than modest compared to the overall performance of the sovereignist right-wing candidates.
A few years after mass protests of women which then massively voted against Law and Justice, a female candidate Magdalena Biejat won no more than 4,1% of the vote, which is a devastating assessment of her agency as a representative of the New Left – the socialdemocratic party which joined Tusk’s government. She lost even to Adrian Zandberg, her former colleague from Together (Razem) party, who, unlike her, refused any co-operation with Tusk, not to endorse his anti-social policies. Zandberg’s dynamic online campaign helped him to win 5,2%, a results that may give his party some hope to regroup and hold an independent position as ‘the most credible socialdemocratic party’.
All the left-wing and progressive candidates in Poland still face the same dilemma: how to make voters believe that trusting them could actually matter. Both social-democrats presented a well-prepared program, responding to the real challenges facing Polish society, including housing policy and healthcare. This is, as we can see, far too little even to fight for the second round of the elections. However, both Biejat’s and Zandberg’s results are better than the 2020 score of Robert Biedroń, then representing the New Left and ending up with no more than 2,21%. Should Civic Coalition focus on charming the far right voters, a new space may open for the left.
But the greates loser of these elections is Szymon Hołownia, who five years ago ambitiously fought for a place in the second round, proposing “sensible conservatism” and “dialogue” as an alternative to extreme polarization. Now, despite being the speaker of the parliament and a leader of another party belonging to the ruling coalition, he has won a meager 4.8 percent. His “let’s look for a third way” speeches are completely outdated. In 2025 Poland, no one on the political top is interested in any kind of dialogue: Donald Tusk said on Twitter after the results were announced that the real game has just begun. There is no middle grounds and no understanding for the opponent – polarization is everything.
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