The two main contenders for Poland’s presidential election on Sunday locked horns over Europe and traded personal barbs this week as they each made final bids for the support of floating voters.
The winner will take over from current President Andrzej Duda, of the nationalist conservative Law and Justice party, at a crucial point when neighbouring Ukraine is battling Russia, and when cooperation between the government and the president is vital to push through reforms.
Looking visibly tired at his rally on Tuesday, Rafal Trzaskowski of the ruling centre-right Civic Platform, stood on a platform at Krakow’s central Market Square amid a large crowd cheering his name, blue European flags fluttering beside the white-and-red Polish ones.
“I didn’t think it would be necessary to remind all of us, especially my main competitor, that honesty is the most important thing, human decency is the most important thing, and selflessness is the most important thing,” said Trzaskowski, referring to a recent news story about his competitor Karol Nawrocki, an independent candidate supported by the opposition Law and Justice party, which ruled Poland between 2015 and 2023.
Nawrocki allegedly purchased a flat in Gdansk belonging to an elderly man in exchange for a promise to provide him with care. According to the man’s family, the promise was not fulfilled, and he was placed in a state nursing home.
In response, Nawrocki has said he will donate the flat to charity and pointed out that under Trzaskowski’s mayorship, families had been evicted from state accommodation in Warsaw.
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Nawrocki’s rally in Zabrze took a different tone – and featured a special guest. Alongside George Simion, the ultranationalist winner of the first round of Romania’s presidential election on May 4, Nawrocki took aim at the EU.
“Together with Romania, when George Simion wins and when we win on May 18, we will build a Europe of Homelands, in which we will not allow the European Union to centralise and turn Poland and Romania into its provinces,” Nawrocki said.
Simion, together with the crowd, chanted “Donald Trump!” and called the United States president “a symbol of the fight for freedom which will transform the whole Europe”. Earlier this month, Nawrocki, who argues that Poland should focus on an alliance with the US rather than the EU, met with Trump in the White House and allegedly received his backing.
Embracing anti-migrant rhetoric – on all sides
In the race for floating votes, both candidates have eased up on some of their parties’ more traditional positions. Nawrocki has abandoned Law and Justice’s commitment to a welfare state in exchange for a message of free market liberalism.
The more liberal Trzaskowski, for his part, has kept relatively quiet about women’s and LGBTQ rights, and embraced a harder line on security and immigration by promising to cut benefits for unemployed Ukrainians who have taken refuge in Poland from the war with Russia and endorsing his government’s suspension of asylum rights last year over what Poland sees as Belarus facilitating migrants to cross their shared border.
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Security and anti-migrant rhetoric have been a key feature in this election, as both main candidates lean closer to the views of the populist Slawomir Mentzen, a tax adviser turned leader of the ultranationalist, conservative Confederation party. He has called for migrants crossing from Belarus to be fired upon, is opposed to welfare payments for Ukrainians and is likely to emerge as third in the presidential race.
“In public opinion polls and focus groups, among all voters, including voters of the new left, there has been a visible anti-Ukrainian trend, which has social and economic rather than cultural roots,” said Bartosz Rydlinski, a political scientist from Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw.
“Poles are not angry at Ukrainians for living separately or not speaking Polish. [But] in a country with highly limited access to public services, there is an irrational sense of injustice. There is a sense that Ukrainians do not work, but use healthcare. Which is nonsense, because most Ukrainians work and pay taxes.”
‘I want to live in a normal country’
At the Krakow meeting, amid the sea of Polish and European flags, the crowd rallied for value-based politics – and change.
“I want to live in a normal country, I want my daughter to grow up in a normal country, in a country with a positive attitude, without any negative emotions. Poland deserves to develop, to be respected in the world and that is why I came here today,” Anna Szol, a 48-year-old entrepreneur, who joined Trzaskowski’s rally with her daughter, told Al Jazeera.
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When asked about the situation at the Polish-Belarusian border – where, since 2021, thousands of migrants to Europe have crossed – and the suspension of asylum rights, Szol, just like her candidate, said she agrees that the move is justified.
“This is the result of Putin’s and Lukashenko’s actions to send to the border poor people who are not aware of what’s going on. Human traffickers are often involved. This is a NATO border and it simply has to be extra secure,” Szol said.
However, Rydlinski said such a suspension of human rights would embolden the far-right agenda in the longer term and weaken liberal parties.
“The difference between liberal and populist parties should be that liberal parties treat human rights seriously,” Rydlinski says. “Research shows that when liberal and left-wing parties accommodate far-right issues, they do not win populist voters, but lose their own.”
Pushing through reforms
The winner of this presidential election will be crucial for the current government, which has been hamstrung from carrying out reforms by the current president, who has used his power of veto to block them.
This includes the reversal of controversial judicial reforms introduced by the Law and Justice government during its eight-year rule. The European Court of Justice deemed several Law and Justice judicial reforms as contradicting EU law, especially regarding the independence of the judiciary, and imposed penalties on Poland beginning in 2021.
“What is at stake in the election is whether the current government is going to be able to carry out its programme in full. One of the key things that has been characteristic of the political scene over the last 18 months is that the government has been essentially blocked in a number of things that it has committed to do,” said Ben Stanley, a sociologist and political scientist at the SWPS University in Warsaw.
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“If Nawrocki wins, it will certainly lead to the maintenance of the situation as it is currently with a hostile president vetoing or threatening to veto what the government wants to do. That will affect both the rule of law issues and also many of the elements on the government’s legislative agenda,” Stanley said.
“It will also send a signal to voters that Law and Justice is capable of winning the next election and that if it does win the next elections [in November 2027], it will have its president in place.”