The Polish presidential election, explained
Can Confederation begin supplanting Law and Justice as the main right-wing opposition?
The Polish Presidential Election, which will be held on May 18, is shaping up to be a historic one. Two parties have dominated Polish politics for twenty years: the centrist Civic Platform and the centre-right Law and Justice, the two biggest parties in the last ten consecutive elections, presidential and parliamentary. No matter what happens on May 18, Civic Platform will remain the dominant centrist force, but there is a chance that Law and Justice might be supplanted by a more right-wing alternative.
To understand how Polish politics came to be dominated by these two parties (and why Law and Justice is now under threat), we need to go all the way back to the fall of Communism in 1989. Poland’s first democratic elections were held that same year, and all the seats the outgoing Communist government allowed to be freely and democratically contested were won by the Solidarity Citizen’s Committee. This was a broad, big-tent, anti-Communist group which went on to form a Government, and subsequently won post-Communist Poland’s first free presidential election in 1990, their candidate being the internationally-famous Lech Wałęsa.
However, the Solidarity Citizen’s Committee soon collapsed, leading to intense political fragmentation on the centre and centre-right from 1991 until 1996. This gave a big opening to the Polish Left, for which the preeminent party was the Democratic Left Alliance (the SLD, Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej, later the SLD-UP), which benefitted from the various left-wing social and political networks that survived the collapse of Communism, as well as Wałęsa’s own personal failings as a political leader.
In 1996, a new centre-right electoral coalition emerged: Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS, Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność), which was comprised of various splinter groups from the Solidarity Citizen’s Committee. They defeated the SLD in the 1997 Parliamentary Elections, but were unable to dislodge the left-wing president that was affiliated with the SLD, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who had narrowly defeated Walesa in 1995 and won re-election in 2000.
Skipping over a lot of detail that I could not possibly cover in anything short of a book, the AWS itself suffered a major split in the 2000 Presidential Election when an independent liberal candidate, supported by one of the composite parties in the AWS coalition (the Conservative Peoples’ Party), won more votes than the official AWS candidate. It was partly because of this that Kwaśniewski easily won re-election, as the opposition split their vote heavily. In the 2001 Parliamentary Elections that followed this debacle, AWS completely collapsed, failing to even reach the 8% threshold.
In AWS’s place, the two parties that have dominated Polish politics since the Millennium emerged. The liberal parties which were members of the original AWS coalition left to join the aforementioned independent presidential candidate’s new electoral coalition, the Civic Platform (PO, Platforma Obywatelska), winning 65 of the Sejm’s 404 seats. Meanwhile, the country’s popular Minister of Justice, Lech Kaczyński, also a former AWS member, founded Law and Justice (PiS, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) that same year, mostly picking up votes from the AWS’s right-wing. As the name suggests, PiS focused on fighting crime and corruption in its earliest iteration. Lech built the party with his twin brother Jarosław, securing 44 seats; the following year, Lech would become Mayor of Warsaw.
Due to their ideological proximity at this time, as demonstrated by the fact that most of their senior members were previously in the same electoral coalition, the two parties actually entered into an alliance in the 2002 Local Elections. After all, the original iteration of PiS was a standard law-and-order party, something that was common across much of Eastern Europe at this time; meanwhile, PO was a neoliberal, pro-EU party focused on the urban middle class, another fairly standard Eastern European political configuration, variously considered ‘liberal-conservative’ or ‘liberal’. These are not the same political platforms, but it is clear how they could cooperate with one another. Today, of course, it is obvious why this no longer holds: in particular, PO play much more strongly into socially liberal themes to help contrast themselves from the very conservative PiS.
As a result, it was widely expected that they would form a coalition government if PO or PiS (or both) did sufficiently well in the 2005 Parliamentary Elections. That this did not happen was mostly because of personal animosity between the party leaders — PO’s Donald Tusk and PiS’s Jarosław Kaczyński — during the campaign and the subsequent negotiations. The final result was 27% and 155 seats for PiS, and 24% and 133 seats for PO. That it was PiS which would win the most seats was unexpected. In the course of the negotiations, in which PiS held the upper hand, PO felt like they were being reduced to a much more junior partner in the coalition than they deserved, and insisted that PiS could not control the Ministry of the Interior.1 Negotiations collapsed, and PiS instead entered into a coalition with the left-wing populist Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland (SRP) and the far-right League of Polish Families.
A sex scandal (of all things) in the SRP in 2007 soon brought down this coalition, and PiS lost the snap election that followed. However, while this failed coalition only lasted for two years, it nonetheless considerably moulded PiS’s current electoral makeup: PiS hoovered up votes from the collapsed League and SRP, and cemented itself as a party of socially-conservative rural voters with deep ties to the Catholic Church. Additionally, in a process that began in the 2005 Presidential Election, they also increasingly sought to distinguish themselves from PO (while also appealing to these aforementioned voters) by adopting more left-wing economic positions and — importantly — not being led by renowned Europhile Donald Tusk. Meanwhile, the traditional Polish Left fell into terminal decline, principally thanks to PiS’s success among their traditional base. Insofar as the Polish Left exists today, it is a de facto (if not always de jure) new phenomenon, drawing principally from younger voters in the cities, not older voters in the countryside.
This, more or less, has been as things have stood since 2007: a never-ending dance between PO and PiS, based on the personal ambitions of two very different men. The sharp-suited Europhile versus the elderly single man who still lives with his mother and several cats, goes to church regularly, and refused to open a bank account (until 2009) or social media (until 2024).
But, to bring us up to the present day: in 2010, the Smolensk Air Disaster claimed the lives of many influential PiS figures, including President Lech Kaczyński. The acting president after Lech’s death, PO’s Bronislaw Komorowski, would defeat Jarosław in the subsequent presidential election (let it not be claimed that the Poles are sentimental). From 2007 to 2015, PO controlled the Sejm through a relatively stable coalition with the agrarian Polish People’s Party (PSL, Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe). Donald Tusk served as Prime Minister for the first time, remaining in power continuously until finally stepping down in 2014 to become President of the European Council (a post he held until 2019).
In 2015, the year after Tusk’s departure, PO were heavily defeated by PiS in parliamentary elections, securing a historic 235 seats and 37% of the vote; the same year, PiS’s Andrej Duda narrowly defeated Komorowski in the presidential election. This was the first time that a party since the fall of Communism held an outright majority in the Sejm. In 2019, PiS repeated their historic performance, increasing their vote share further while retaining the same number of seats in the Sejm. With the victory of Duda in the 2020 Presidential Election — the first time a Polish President had been re-elected since 2000 — PiS continued to hold control over Poland. That was, until Tusk’s return in 2022.
After their bruising defeats to PiS in 2015 and 2019, under Tusk’s leadership, PO did much better in the 2023 Parliamentary Elections, capitalising off of general voter fatigue with PiS, anger about price increases and welfare spending, and controversy over judicial reform and abortion (which led to EU funds being withheld). However, even in 2023, PO still only managed a (fairly distant) second to PiS in terms of vote share and number of seats. But importantly, they dealt PiS enough of a blow to just barely form a ‘Grand Coalition’ that was capable of forcing PiS out of power, with Tusk becoming Prime Minister for the second time: PO (157 seats), PL2050 (32 seats, centre), PSL (32 seats, centre-right), and The Left (21 seats, left). Together, this Frankenstein coalition amounts to 242 seats in a Sejm of 460. The PiS-dominated ‘United Right’ alliance won 194 seats, with 18 seats being won by the right-wing populist Confederation (more on them later).2
The landscape in 2024
It’s been nearly twenty years since PO and PiS came to dominate Polish politics. Since then, the country has become one of the fastest-growing economies in Europe, a key member of NATO, and a major player in the EU. While it is not the richest of the ex-Communist states that have joined the EU, it is the largest in population by some distance. Poland’s resultingly large GDP, its critical strategic location, and the general perception of its (informal) social, political and economic leadership among other Eastern Europeans makes it something of a weathercock when it comes to the future role of the rapidly economically converging East in European politics more generally.
Like many elections over the last couple of years, the three main issues are the cost of living, national security (even more pertinent given Poland’s close proximity to, and poor relations with, Russia), and immigration. The first and second issues should speak for themselves, but those who have grown up seeing all the ‘Based Poland’ edits might be confused by the last one. While it is true that PiS had, in general, a fairly good track record on illegal migration, and that Poland did not suffer from any major terror attacks during the migrant crisis, legal migration was still uncomfortably high for much of the public. These migrants were typically Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, and Ukrainians, with Third World nationals (Indians, Nepalese, etc.) increasing their presence in more recent years. The presence of Ukrainians has become especially controversial, partly due to the sheer numbers, and partly due growing resentment against the very high spending on Ukrainian refugees and the war more broadly.3 This, together with the party’s somewhat socialistic economic leanings, has drawn right-wing voters (and especially young right-wing voters) away from PiS.
What is principally at stake is control over the presidential veto. The Polish political system (especially domestically) is dominated by the Prime Minister, not the President, but the veto remains a very powerful tool, requiring a three-fifths majority to override. The incumbent PiS President Andrzej Duda has used his veto several times to fight PO’s legislation. A victory here would give PO full control over the country for the first time since the two defeats of 2015.
The campaign itself has been focused almost entirely on personalities, partly because parliamentary elections are not taking place this year. So, now that we have the background to these elections out of the way, let’s meet our main candidates.
Rafał Trzaskowski, Civic Platform (PO)
Rafał Trzaskowski is the current frontrunner, polling at 31%. His lead has, however, eroded over the course of the campaign. He is the Mayor of Warsaw, a position he has held since 2018, and is a former political scientist.
Trzaskowski is firmly on the ‘progressive’ wing of PO, easily defeating the much more right-wing (if highly opportunistic) Radek Sikorski in PO’s presidential primary. Notoriously, Trzaskowski has tried to ban Poland’s internationally famous Independence Day parade. He has focused on being the ‘very explicitly not PiS’ candidate, despite the fact his party has now been in charge for two years. Trzaskowski has promised to approve Tusk’s abortion law reforms, reversing PiS’s controversial ban, and is a firm supporter of LGBT rights. But he is also, in typical Eastern European liberal fashion (see also Romania’s USR), in favour of deregulating the economy and cutting state spending.
What explains this apparently contradictory (from the British standpoint) political agenda? In short, most young and early middle-aged people in Poland believe that PiS’s economic and welfare policies have benefited boomers at the expense of everyone else. As such, deregulation is championed by ‘progressives’ in the Polish context, with the young, tattooed, urban types who disagree with this pro-market analysis currently only making up a small minority of the electorate.
Trzaskowski has done reasonably well in debates, and is the most experienced candidate on the ballot: he ran for President against the incumbent Duda in 2020, and lost by less than 2%.
(While not worth discussing in detail, the other centrist and left-wing candidates of note are Szymon Hołownia of the centrist Poland 2050, who is polling at around 7%; Magdalena Biejat of The Left, polling at around 6%; and Adrian Zandberg of Razem, a more left-wing party that refused to serve in the PO-led coalition (despite being a member of The Left’s electoral alliance in 2023), polling at around 5%.)
Karol Nawrocki, Law and Justice (PiS)
In choosing Karol Nawrocki, I have to say that PiS basically admitted to the public that they don’t think they will win. Nawrocki, whose support has been mostly steady throughout the campaign, is polling at around 25% — very weak for a party that has been as dominant as PiS over the last ten years. While this isn’t so far behind Trzaskowski, his polling is predicted to decline further thanks to a recent scandal in which he was accused of coercing a pensioner into giving him his flat (yes, really).
Nawrocki has been widely mocked on social media, from all sides, for his media gaffes and cringe-worthy stunts. Some highlights include the inability to pronounce the Polish word for ‘gender’ properly, shredding an LGBT book on stage, giving his opponent a rainbow flag, and basically doing anything to appear ‘cool’ — like Donald Trump, presumably. This strategy has been a total failure. I am very sceptical indeed about Nawrocki’s chances against Trzaskowski in the second round (particularly as I suspect that many supporters of Mentzen will not bother to vote for him, something that is not true of people who are supporting candidates who oppose PO from the Left). It still isn’t impossible for Nawrocki to win, but he is definitely the underdog, far behind in all the head-to-head polling against Trzaskowski.
Nawrocki, who is a historian by training, has no political experience whatsoever. (For whatever reason, academics of various types, or at least those with doctorates, are even more prominent in Polish politics than in German, let alone British or American.) He previously headed the Institute of National Remembrance, an anti-Nazi and anti-Communist research institute. This is a body that I like quite a lot, but most Poles see it as little more than a nationalistic propaganda outlet. Partly due to his lack of political experience, he has no real base of his own; as such, it is reasonable to expect that he would be little more than a puppet of Kaczyński if he is elected. Kaczyński is not currently a popular figure in Poland, so this perception is bad for him electorally.
Nawrocki, by contrast to his PO rival Trzaskowski, has promised to increase benefits, social spending, and pensions. Fortunately, this has not proved popular with the electorate. On a more positive note, he has also pledged to oppose the European Green Deal and the Migration Pact.
Sławomir Mentzen, Confederation (Konfederacja)
Sławomir Mentzen of Confederation is the candidate that people outside of Poland might actually have heard of. Mentzen, a businessman and accountant who also has a PhD in economics, is Poland’s most popular politician on social media. He is currently polling at 13%, and despite some troubles at the start — primarily because he began his campaign early, which is illegal — Mentzen has maintained a consistent share of the vote (barring a surge in early March, followed by a falling back to earth), and is doing very well with the youth. I think it is likely that he outperforms his polling.
His party, notoriously, are the former party of ex-MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke, of ‘Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Ticket’ fame on YouTube. Some readers will be sad to learn that in 2023, the highly eccentric, thrice-married, five-time presidential candidate Korwin-Mikke, a ‘paleolibertarian’ notorious for his comments on the age of consent and female intelligence (among other things), was removed from the party he founded. His removal coincided with the general efforts of Mentzen — who has headed Confederation since 2022 — at internal reform of the party. This process has stripped Confederation of many of its more wacky elements, as Mentzen has attempted to reposition it from a far-right party to a more ordinary, right-wing populist party in the typical European model, hoping to win broader appeal. For the most part, this has undoubtedly been a good thing: both for Confederation, which is now a serious political threat to the incumbents rather than a minor irritant; and for Poland, which desperately needs a right-wing and pro-youth alternative to the increasingly geriatric and economically left-wing PiS.
In many respects, Confederation are now similar to Reform UK, albeit still with a much sharper edge to them. But in terms of differences, Confederation are actually youth-orientated; they are also, at present, less electorally successful. And yet, a handful of polls a few weeks ago placed Mentzen ahead of Nawrocki; others claimed that Mentzen would run Trzaskowski very close in the second round.
I do not think that this is likely to happen. But if it did then this, to put it mildly, would cause complete carnage, perhaps even leading to the courts getting involved (like in Romania). This is because Mentzen has promised to gut Poland’s tax regime, end all military and financial involvement in Ukraine, a full ban on abortion, and a reversal of most LGBT rights.
Critics of Mentzen from the Right have accused him of softening his rhetoric in an attempt to appeal to centrists. In my view, this is absurd, and comes purely from the most unelectable (and delusional) wings of his party.
Grzegorz Braun, Independent
The only reason anyone could think that Mentzen is a ‘moderate’ is the fact that Grzegorz Braun exists. Braun, previously a minor filmmaker, rose to international prominence several months ago after he went viral for extinguishing a Menorah in the Sejm. There have been many other bombastic far-right stunts, both before and since: the vandalism of LGBT material and Ukraine and European flags; threatening to shoot a journalist (while illegally carrying a firearm); calling Lithuania an ‘Anglo-Saxon and Jewish’ state; being given an ancient medieval sword by Cossack LARPers at a campaign rally; and calling for the lynching of the health minister.
Braun is the leader of the Confederation of the Polish Crown (KKP, Konfederacja Korony Polskiej), a small far-right monarchist party. He is a ‘traditionalist Catholic’ who, in short, believes that Mentzen has sold out to the Jews to win the election. He announced his candidacy very late, mostly because of an internal struggle within Confederation. Because Braun is an unlikeable middle-aged egomaniac, a group of younger MPs, led by Mentzen, shunted Braun off to the EU Parliament and cancelled the primaries for Confederation’s presidential candidate. It has been alleged that Braun demanded higher and higher offices, more and more money, and kept threatening to run against Mentzen, destroying the party in the process. He has gained immense support among far-right accounts on X, and even received an endorsement from Korwin-Mikke.
Despite all this smoke, there has been little fire thus far: he is polling at just 3% (though there are a number of outliers here, and Polish polling is, if anything, unreliable). He is only being mentioned here because Pimlico Journal is a right-wing publication, and because he handily beats all the other minor candidates in entertainment value.
Braun’s most notable contributions to this campaign have been some frankly hilarious moments during presidential debates, in which other candidates are forced to deal with his schizophrenic ramblings face-to-face. He is currently being investigated for ‘hate speech’ after he accused Trzaskowski of wearing ‘Jewish daffodils’ at a commemoration event for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.
My prediction
To return to my opening observation, that this election will be ‘historic’, the reason for this is that — no matter what happens — this will be the first time PiS has ever been credibly challenged on its right flank. Additionally, a PO loss, including to PiS, will undoubtedly change Poland’s relationship with Ukraine. This is because Nawrocki, while not going as far as Mentzen, has sought to distance himself from PiS’s pro-Ukraine policies in the past, and has recently accused Zelensky of not acting in Poland’s best interests. This is a pretty shameless attempt to copy Mentzen, but if Nawrocki wins, that won’t matter one bit for EU-Ukraine relations.
Furthermore, a victory for either Nawrocki or Mentzen might force Tusk’s coalition to disband and a snap election to be called. Major reforms on abortion and healthcare have already been vetoed by the incumbent President, the PiS-aligned Duda, and it is known that Tusk’s coalition partners — with voters who are often to the Left of Tusk on social and welfare matters — are growing increasingly uncomfortable with their legislative impotence. If forced into another five years of cohabitation with PiS (never mind Confederation), Tusk may gamble on a snap election to try to secure a three-fifths overriding majority for him and his coalition partners — a gamble which, polling suggests, would not work.
But unfortunately, the most likely outcome is that Trzaskowski wins the Presidency with something like 52% of the vote. Basically every poll now indicates that he will face Nawrocki in the second round — which will take place on 1 June — not Mentzen. Nawrocki is a nobody, and there simply hasn’t been enough time for PiS to make a credible pitch to the electorate that they have changed since 2023. Indeed, they are still run by Lech Kaczyński, who is currently being investigated for misuse of Israeli Pegasus spyware and has had his immunity lifted. He’s also facing a defamation lawsuit, and is generally polarising and unpopular — not surprising given that he has controlled the party since 2003. Of course, it is true that PO is not overwhelmingly popular. Yet their vote from the last election has remained sticky, and supporters of the coalition are eager to avoid the prospect of another PiS president.
If Mentzen somehow made it to the second round — and, given the surprising performance of Reform UK and, even more pertinently, Călin Georgescu recently, this is not at all impossible, whatever the polls say — the idea that he would win against Trzaskowski is nonsense. Confederation is still a very controversial party, and the average voter either doesn’t trust them, or actively thinks they’re neo-Nazis. That being said, Confederation’s actual goal in this election is not to win, which is unrealistic, but to supplant (or to go some way towards supplanting) PiS as the country’s right-wing opposition. This is definitely manageable.
In terms of the electoral map, the split will primarily be rural-urban. It is is likely that rural voters, traditionally PiS die-hards for the reasons explained above, will continue to support them. However, in the cities, Mentzen is expected to do well, especially with young men. Young women are, like elsewhere in Europe, much more left-wing: those who eschew PO are more likely to vote for Biejat, the left-wing candidate promising to be even more radical on abortion than Trzaskowski.
Image credits: CzarneckiRadek, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
This article was written by an anonymous Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.
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Beyond this, Tusk and Kaczyński generally disliked each other, and the two parties couldn’t agree on who would be the Speaker of the Sejm (which, like in the United States, is an internally-elected position). Furthermore, Jarosław Kaczyński’s twin brother, Lech, was elected President during the negotiations, which cemented PO’s inferiority.
The remaining seats are held by Razem, a left-wing party that refused to join PO’s coalition despite being part of ‘The Left’ electoral alliance, and one independent.
There are often allegations that Ukrainians are given outright privileged access to welfare and housing at a time of general economic strain. Additionally, there are historical tensions at play, especially regarding the legacy of Stepan Bandera. The Polish and the Ukrainian Right have completely different national heroes, who each committed crimes against each other.