By Konstanty Gebert, Project Syndicate | May 28, 2025
The presidential election has more than symbolic significance. Given the president’s robust veto power, the outcome is likely to determine whether Poland remains on the liberal, pro-European path it took in 2023, or begins backsliding toward right-wing populism.
WARSAW – Poles will vote this Sunday in the second round of a presidential election that local commentators have already called “historic,” though much of the world beyond Europe is not paying much attention. The world, of course, has no shortage of big issues to grapple with, and Poland, no longer in the European Union’s doghouse after emerging in 2023 from eight years of ornery autocratic rule by Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice (PiS) party, seems again to be a darling of the West, as it had been throughout much of its post-1989 transformation. The current government is a broad coalition built around former European Council president Donald Tusk’s liberal Civic Platform (PO).
Now the candidates of these two antagonists, Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski for PO and Karol Nawrocki, a historian and museum director backed by PiS, will face off for the presidency. A victory for Trzaskowski will be seen as validation of the choice made in 2023 and an indication that the threat to Polish democracy posed by right-wing PiS populists has been finally put to rest. A Nawrocki victory, however, could turn the 2023 vote into a mere bump in the road toward a conservative, authoritarian Poland, imbued with Catholic nationalism and ill at ease with the EU. The choice could not be starker.
The outcome has more than symbolic significance. Poland’s constitution grants the president robust veto power, and the PiS-aligned incumbent Andrzej Duda has made ample use of it, sabotaging the Tusk government’s policy agenda. If Nawrocki succeeds Duda, he will continue doing so, and governing will be impossible, as the coalition lacks the qualified parliamentary majority needed to override a presidential veto. This might make early elections necessary, and, in the wake of a Nawrocki victory, Tusk’s coalition would probably lose.
One of the laws Duda vowed to veto would have liberalized access to abortion, which is now all but illegal in Poland, forcing women to travel to neighboring Germany if they can afford it (or to Belarus if they cannot). The PO coalition’s campaign promise in 2023 to repeal the current law fueled a surge in voter participation, especially among young people and women, with turnout reaching a record-high 74.4%. But in the first round of the presidential election, turnout was down to 67.3% – and though Trzaskowski emerged as the front-runner out of 13 candidates, he received only 31.4% of the vote.
This was just marginally better than the 30.7% of the vote that PO won in 2023 – and less than 2% more than Nawrocki received. Together with its left-wing and conservative allies (who had fielded their own, unsuccessful candidates in the presidential election), however, the PO-led coalition won the support of 53.7% of voters in 2023, establishing a clear mandate to govern. Thus, between 2023 and 2025, the coalition lost more than two million voters. Trzaskowski needs to recover at least three-quarters of them if he is to win the second round.
What went wrong?
Tusk’s government inherited a state badly damaged by eight years of PiS rule. Public media had become a channel for government propaganda. “What more can we do to ensure your re-election, Mister President?” a reporter asked Duda in an interview ahead of the vote in 2020 (which he won narrowly over Trzaskowski, already the PO candidate).
The judiciary, too, had been taken over, and the European Court of Justice ceased to recognize the Constitutional Tribunal and parts of the Supreme Court as courts in the sense of European law. Trying to reverse this state of affairs within the limits of the law while saddled with presidential vetoes was impossible, leaving the government unable to fulfill yet another campaign promise.
But popular disappointment over the abortion law was particularly damaging. The ban not only took away women’s reproductive freedom, but also cost several women their lives, as doctors were fearful to perform even medically necessary life-saving abortions. While Duda had vowed to veto any change to the law, the coalition could not even rally a parliamentary majority in favor of it, because its conservative parties refused to support it.
On other key issues, including migrant rights and civil unions, the coalition largely adopted the positions of its PiS opponents, out of fear of alienating the right-wing voters it needed to win the presidential election. This tactic predictably backfired: the right-wingers stayed with PiS, and progressive voters, taken for granted one time too many, largely stayed home. In fact, Trzaskowski opposed his own, liberal brand of populism to PiS’s authoritarian version. Many voters decided that they do not have a dog in that fight.
They are wrong. Nawrocki is campaigning on a nativist platform directed against Ukrainian refugees and other migrants. Needless to say, he will not liberalize abortion or promote civil unions. And his own past, which included procuring prostitutes for guests of a luxury hotel where he worked as a security guard, and concealing the purchase of a municipal apartment, suggests that he is no friend of the rule of law he will be obliged to uphold. His endorsement by US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Poland will likely solidify his support base. “Donald Trump is a strong leader for us, but you have an opportunity to have just as strong of a leader in Karol if you make him the leader of this country,” Noem gushed.
And there is worse behind him. The candidate for Konferedracja, a far-right party that ran on a platform of opposition to “Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes, and the EU” in the 2019 European Parliament election, won 14.8% of the vote in the first round. Most of his voters will endorse Nawrocki, and so will those – over 6% – who supported the openly antisemitic, anti-Ukrainian, and fascist Grzegorz Braun, who rails against “Communism, Jew-Communism, and Jew-EuroCommunism.”
Poland has not yet rejected authoritarian populism. It remains split, and voter apathy could decide the outcome.
Konstanty Gebert is a Polish journalist, former anti-Communist activist, and the author of 14 books on Polish, Jewish, and international affairs.
Copyright Project Syndicate
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