WARSAW: Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election on Sunday between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future.

The winner will succeed President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term.

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The outcome will determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies.

An exit poll by Ipsos will be released when polls close on Sunday at 9 pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected on Monday.

Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the agenda of the centrist government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, thanks to the presidential power to veto laws.

An unpredictable vote at a time of tensions

The vote comes amid heightened regional tensions driven by Russia’s war in neighbouring Ukraine, security concerns across Europe and internal debates about the rule of law.

It follows a first round on May 18, in which Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski won more than 31% of the vote and Karol Nawrocki, a conservative historian, earned nearly 30%. Eleven other candidates were eliminated.

Opinion polls show the two men running neck and neck.

Other factors add to the unpredictability. Nawrocki did much better in the first round than surveys had predicted, indicating that his strength was underestimated. On the other hand, large numbers of Poles abroad have registered to vote in the second round, which could help Trzaskowski.

The candidates

Nawrocki is a 42-year-old historian who was tapped as by the national conservative Law and Justice party despite a lack of political experience or party membership.

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But this is seen as acting in his favor, as the party, which governed for 2015-2023, seeks to refresh its image before a parliamentary election in 2027.

Nawrocki’s supporters describe him as the embodiment of traditional, patriotic Polish values. They believe U.S. President Donald Trump’s support for him will strengthen Poland’s ties with the United States and make the country safer.

Trzaskowski, 53, is Warsaw’s mayor and a close ally of Tusk.

A deputy leader of Civic Platform, a pro-European Union party, he has been prominent in national politics for years. This is his second presidential bid after narrowly losing to Duda in 2020.

Supporters credit him with modernizing Warsaw through infrastructure, public transit expansion and cultural investments. He is widely seen as pragmatic and focused on strengthening ties with other European nations.

A global ideological war

Nawrocki recently received a boost from Trump and other US conservatives, who see the Polish election as part of a global battle between liberal and populist right-wing forces.

His campaign has echoed themes popular on the American right, including skepticism toward EU bureaucracy and emphasis on Christian identity. His supporters feel that Trzaskowski, with his pro-EU views, would hand over control of key Polish issues to Paris and Berlin.

Nawrocki also has been endorsed by the Trump administration and conservative Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Many European centrists are rooting for Trzaskowski, seeing in him someone who would defend democracy as it faces pressure from authoritarian forces across the globe.

He has received the support of new centrist Romanian President Nicusor Dan – who recently defeated a far-right nationalist.

Nawrocki’s scandals

Nawrocki has faced a number of scandals over the past months, but it’s not clear that they are hurting him. In fact, they might have the opposite effect. Many right-wing voters don’t believe the allegations and accuse the media of using its power to hurt him, creating what appears to be a rallying effect around him.

Nawrocki himself has acknowledged that he took part in an organized brawl, including football hooligans in 2009. A former boxer, he said he has taken part in various forms of “noble male battle” in his life.

Polish media have also reported on his connections to gangsters and the world of prostitution.

T

usk accused Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski of tapping Nawrocki despite questions about his past.

“You knew about everything, Jaroslaw. About the connections with the gangsters, about fixing girls,'” Tusk wrote on X. “The entire responsibility for this catastrophe falls on you!”

The key issues at stake

1. Security and war in Ukraine: With Russia’s war in Ukraine in its fourth year, Polish voters are acutely attuned to issues of regional security. Both candidates support continued backing for Ukraine, but to different degrees. Nawrocki believes that Ukraine should never join NATO, while Trzaskowski believes Ukraine should be allowed to join one day when the current war is over.

2. Rule of law and democracy: Trzaskowski has pledged to support the restoration of judicial independence and repair relations with the EU, which viewed changes by Law and Justice as anti-democratic. Tusk has tried to change some legislation, but has faced resistance from the outgoing president, Duda. Nawrocki, while less outspoken than his party patrons, is seen as likely to preserve Law and Justice’s changes that politicized the courts.

3. Women’s rights: Abortion remains a divisive issue in Poland, especially after a near-total ban was imposed under Law and Justice. Trzaskowski supports loosening restrictions and has backed proposals to legalize abortion up to 12 weeks. Nawrocki opposes any liberalisation and has campaigned as a defender of traditional conservative values.

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Poland’s two presidential candidates, Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski and historian Karol Nawrocki, clashed over the country’s relationship with Ukraine on May 23, just a week before Poles head to the polls in the June 1 presidential runoff.

Nawrocki, backed by the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, claimed President Volodymyr Zelensky “treats Poland badly” and defended his criticism of Ukraine’s NATO bid by insisting, “I speak the language of Poles.”

Nawrocki has signed an eight-point declaration that included a pledge to block Ukraine’s accession to NATO in a bid to win support from far-right politician Slawomir Mentzen, who came in third in the first election round with almost 15%.

“You’re using (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s language,” Trzaskowski reacted, slamming Nawrocki’s stance on NATO and Ukraine.

The conservative candidate rejected accusations of echoing Putin, saying, “Millions of Poles today would like to say this, but they can’t, because the slogan ‘you speak Putin’s propaganda’ immediately appears.”

For years, the Kremlin has cited NATO expansion as a pretext for its aggressive behavior toward neighboring countries, using it to justify military actions in Ukraine and Georgia. A ban on Ukraine ever joining NATO is among the Kremlin’s main demands for concluding a potential peace agreement to end the war it had started.

Liberal Trzaskowski, who is backed by the ruling coalition, narrowly led the first round on May 18 with 31.4% of the vote. He will face conservative Nawrocki, who came in second with 29.5%.

The debate was the last major televised showdown before the June 1 runoff, in which voters will choose between the two candidates.

While the Polish presidency is largely ceremonial, it has veto power — a critical check on the government. With Tusk’s coalition lacking a three-fifths majority in parliament to override presidential vetoes, the outcome of the June 1 vote will shape the pace and direction of key domestic reforms.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — There’s a way to go yet in Poland’s presidential election but Sunday’s first round was a good day for candidates on the political right and far right, and it flashed a big red warning signal for the moderate government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

Tusk’s candidate, liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, and a conservative opponent backed by the Law and Justice party, Karol Nawrocki, emerged ahead in a pack of 13 candidates.

They were extremely close. Trzaskowski got 31.36% of the votes and Nawrocki — who was endorsed by U.S. President Donald Trump — won a better-than-expected 29.54%, according to final results released Monday morning.

Poles now head to a nail-biting second round on June 1, with much resting on the outcome of the runoff.

“The campaign in the next two weeks will be very polarizing and brutal — a confrontation of two visions of Poland: pro-EU, liberal and progressive versus nationalist, Trumpist and conservative,” said Piotr Buras, head of the Warsaw office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The race is not only for the presidency, an office with the power to influence foreign policy and veto laws. It will also seal the fate of Tusk’s efforts to repair the country’s relationship with European allies after years of rule by conservatives from Law and Justice, which was often in conflict with Brussels.

Sunday’s election came on the same day that Romania’s centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, won the presidency in a country that, like Poland, is located along the eastern flank of NATO and the European Union, where Russia has waged a three-year war in Ukraine. Dan managed to overcome a threat from a hard-right anti-Ukrainian nationalist, offering relief to those in Europe worried about a stance viewed as helpful to Moscow.

Tusk has been trying to reverse changes to the judicial branch that were considered undemocratic by the EU, but his efforts have been hampered by outgoing conservative President Andrzej Duda.

Many centrist and progressive voters are disappointed that Tusk has not delivered on other promises, like liberalizing the restrictive abortion law. He has also been criticized for the heavy-handed way he took over control of public media from Law and Justice, and the continued politicization of taxpayer-funded public media.

2 candidates hit the streets ahead of a runoff

Trzaskowski and Nawrocki wasted no time at all as they head toward the finish line. They got out on the streets early Monday to meet with voters. Trzaskowski handed out sweet yeast buns on the streets of Kielce, and Nawrocki distributed donuts and posed for selfies with supporters in Gdansk.

Trzaskowski, who ran and barely lost to Duda in 2020, was long considered this year’s front-runner. After Sunday’s vote he can’t be sure.

Nawrocki declared himself “full of energy and enthusiasm on the way to victory” in a statement to the media, adding that “probably all of Poland saw that Rafał Trzaskowski is a candidate who can’t cope.”

Meanwhile, Trzaskowski vowed to fight until the end. “I will try to convince young people and all those who voted differently that it is worth voting for a normal Poland, not a radical Poland,” Trzaskowski told reporters in Karzysko-Kamienna.

The two men’s political fates rest to a large extent with voters who chose other candidates in the first round, and how they will vote can be difficult to predict. Experts say there isn’t an automatic transfer of votes from certain candidates to others; some who don’t get their chosen candidate might not vote at all.

The rise of the far right

Still, Trzaskowski has a lot to worry about.

More than 20% of voters opted for candidates on the far right, whose conservative and nationalistic worldviews overlap with Nawrocki’s.

Sławomir Mentzen of the hard-right Confederation party won 14.8% and — in one of the biggest electoral suprises — a far-right extremist, Grzegorz Braun, won over 6%.

Both have embraced antisemitic and anti-Ukrainian language but Braun has taken his stance much further.

During the campaign Braun stormed a hospital with supporters and tried to carry out a citizen’s arrest of a doctor who had carried out a legal late-term abortion on a woman whose fetus was diagnosed with severe condition, putting her health at risk.

Supporters at one of his rallies pulled down a Ukrainian flag from city hall in Biała Podlaska. Braun was already known as a provocateur known for spreading Russian propaganda. In 2023, he used a fire extinguisher to put out candles on a Jewish Hannukkah menorah in the Polish parliament.

Candidates from parties in Tusk’s coalition government, which includes left-wing, centrist and center-right parties, together won about 40%.

“Right-wing and far-right candidates gathered as many as 54% of votes — this is the most surprising result of the first round of the presidential election,” Buras said. “This brings Nawrocki into a favorable position ahead of the run-off on June 1. He will have a larger pool of votes to draw upon.”

Vanessa Gera, The Associated Press

Liberal Polish presidential candidate Rafal Trzaskowski, right, shakes hands with Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, the head of the Polish People’s Party and the deputy prime miniser, as they arrive to speak to voters in Warsaw, Poland, on Monday, May 19, 2025. [AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski]

Around 29 million Poles were called to the polls on Sunday to elect a new head of state. Incumbent President Andrzej Duda was ineligible to run for re-election after two terms in office. As predicted, none of the eleven candidates won an absolute majority in the first round, meaning that a runoff will be held on 1 June. The election is considered a historic turning point for the development of Poland and Europe. At 67 percent, it also saw the highest turnout in a first round of voting since 1989.

The frontrunner, Rafał Trzaskowski, surprisingly won only 31.3 percent of the vote, significantly less than predicted before the election. The mayor of Warsaw is the candidate of the right-wing Civic Platform (PO) and thus the ruling party of Donald Tusk.

Karol Nawrocki is close behind him and significantly stronger than expected with 29.5 percent. The non-party historian was head of the far-right Institute of National Remembrance and, like his predecessor Duda, is the candidate of the far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS). In accordance with electoral law, Trzaskowski and Nawrocki will face each other in a runoff election on 1 June.

The fact that Trzaskowski and the other candidates from the ruling camp only received around 41 percent of the votes in the first round is a bitter blow for the Tusk government. Szymon Hołownia performed particularly poorly. The former journalist and presenter had surprisingly come third in the 2020 presidential elections with 13.9 percent of the vote as a newcomer. Since then, he and his party Polska 2050, together with the farmers’ party PSL, have been one of the most important coalition partners of the Tusk government. Now he came fifth with only 4.9 percent.

Third place went to 38-year-old Sławomir Mentzen. With 14.8 percent, the candidate of the far-right Konfederacja party roughly doubled his party’s share of the vote compared to the last election. Mentzen belongs to the New Right, which presents itself as young, modern and an anti-establishment force. He summed up his mixture of fascist and economic libertarian views with the slogan “We don’t want Jews, gays, abortion, taxes or the EU.”

In fourth place was Grzegorz Braun, another openly fascist candidate, who received 6.3 percent of the vote. Braun, who sees himself as a monarchist and repeatedly attracts attention with physical attacks, split from the Confederation shortly before the election. Both far-right candidates are benefiting from the massive discrediting of the old establishment of PO and PiS, including the state apparatus. Their rejection of the war in Ukraine, which they formulate from a reactionary, nationalist standpoint, also resonates with voters.

In a distorted form, the share of the vote won by Adrian Zandberg (4.8 percent) and Magdalena Biejat (4.2 percent) from the pseudo-left Razem party also reflects the growing opposition to the united political course of PiS and PO. It is the best election result for nominally “left-wing” candidates in presidential elections since 2010.

Biejat, along with four other MPs, left Razem only last year because she—together with the social democratic Nowa Lewica—wants to continue supporting the Tusk government. Although Razem has never entered government and, unlike Nowa Lewica, does not hold any ministerial posts, it voted for Tusk, supports his pro-war policies and has acted as a loyal opposition.

Due to the increasing discrediting of the Tusk government, Zandberg, a popular frontman and disciple of Pabloite Jacek Kuroń, had recently sought to distance himself and left the joint parliamentary faction Lewica.

Even if Zandberg primarily serves as a left pressure valve, the approximately one million votes he received show that many workers and students in Poland are looking for a left-wing alternative. Zandberg was the only candidate who clearly spoke out in favour of higher taxes on companies and the rich, social redistribution and against anti-refugee sentiment.

The shift away from the establishment parties, particularly among young voters, becomes even clearer when analysing the distribution of votes by age group. The 18-29 age group had both the highest turnout and the lowest results for PO and PiS: while both parties only achieved 12 and 10 percent respectively, Mentzen won 36 percent and Zandberg around 20 percent of the votes in this age group.

The younger generation in Poland knows nothing but the power struggles between PO and PiS – but they have experienced first-hand that behind the staged hostility there are hardly any differences between the two camps. Social inequality has exploded, the education and health systems have been steadily dismantled, and affordable housing is almost impossible to find.

To break with these policies and build their own socialist party—a Polish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International—workers and young people need a clear understanding of the history and political forces they are confronting. The roots of today’s party landscape and the careers of Tusk and Kaczyński go back to the trade union, which emerged in 1980 in a rebellion against the Stalinist bureaucracy. Under Lech Wałęsa, however, it quickly became the driving force behind capitalist restoration in Poland.

PiS and PO emerged in 2001 from the collapse of the Solidarność electoral alliance and the government of Jerzy Buzek, which initiated Poland’s path into NATO and the EU. The associated privatisation and austerity policies were then continued by Leszek Miller of the social democratic SLD–until this government also collapsed in 2005. PO and PiS emerged as the dominant forces from this political wreckage. A brief PiS government under Kaczyński was followed by eight years under Tusk.

Tusk moved to the top of the European Council in 2014. In the parliamentary elections a year later, his coalition of PO and PSL lost almost three million votes. The PiS won with a popular social programme that deliberately targeted Tusk’s business-friendly policies: early retirement, tax breaks for low earners and the introduction of child benefits.

When PiS candidate Duda became president in 2015, the party soon gained an absolute majority in the Sejm (parliament). Backed by this majority and the presidency, it attacked democratic rights, pushed for the enforced conformity of the judiciary and the media, and fuelled anti-European nationalism–especially against Germany.

The global economic crisis of 2008 and the euro crisis of 2013 had already triggered massive social upheaval. Based on strong economic growth in the interim, PiS pursued a limited redistribution policy–but this was not to last. The de facto abolition of abortion rights, reactionary coronavirus policies and the ensuing economic crisis led to the decline of PiS. In the 2023 election, it lost over eight percent of the vote and was ousted from government by a broad coalition led by Tusk.

Since then, there has been a stalemate between President Duda and the Tusk government. Duda can block laws, grant amnesties and, as head of state, has supreme command of the armed forces.

But despite all the factional rivalry, there is broad agreement on the fundamental issues. The Tusk government has intensified the rearmament already begun by PiS and established an arms budget of five per cent of GDP–the highest in the EU. The goal of building the largest land army in Europe and militarising the entire society, including shooting lessons in schools, is a cross-party consensus.

Duda not only approved the defence budget but also intensified attacks on refugees and the de facto abolition of the right to asylum. Just a few days before the election, Tusk announced that an additional ($3.4 billion) would be invested in the police, fire brigade, border guards and state security. “Security is not about words, but about deeds and money,” he declared.

Even the limited liberalisation of abortion laws failed not because of Duda’s veto, but because of resistance from Tusk’s far-right coalition partners, especially the peasant party PSL.

What Tusk really needs presidential support for are the planned attacks on the working class. To finance military spending, the government will be forced to cut the already meagre social programmes of the PiS era. At the same time, there will be tax breaks for big business. In early May, Duda blocked a government decision to reduce health insurance contributions for the self-employed—a policy that Trzaskowski openly supported during the election campaign, declaring that “there will be no such blockades” with him in power.