How to watch the Polish presidential election like a pro

WARSAW — Donald Trump and his followers have a clear favorite in Sunday’s Polish presidential vote — populist right-winger Karol Nawrocki.

However, Poles haven’t yet made up their minds. All the polling in the last couple of weeks shows a statistical dead heat between Nawrocki and his liberal rival, Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski.

The winner will determine whether the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who backs Trzaskowski, can speed up its legislative agenda and continue Poland’s process of reintegration with the EU mainstream.

Nawrocki, backed by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party that ruled Poland from 2015 to 2023, promises a return to traditional values that will block Tusk and once again put Warsaw at odds with Brussels.

Who are the candidates?

Trzaskowski, 53, is a long-time politician who has served as a minister and was also a member of the European Parliament. He narrowly failed in a bid to become president five years ago against incumbent Andrzej Duda.

The multi-lingual son of a jazz musician has been the mayor of Warsaw, Poland’s largest city and its political, cultural and economic hub, since 2018.

There he enraged conservatives by backing cultural diversity and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as not allowing Christian crosses in new office buildings.

He is a deputy leader of the centrist Civic Platform party led by Tusk — which has opened him up to attacks for being closely associated with an increasingly unpopular government.

Nawrocki, 42, is a political neophyte. He was chosen to run as the PiS candidate although he is not a member of the party.

The historian was the director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, where he came under fire over accusations he had changed the exhibit to underline Polish suffering during the war. He’s now head of the Institute of National Remembrance, a state body that investigates crimes against the Polish nation by the Nazis and the communists.

Initially, Nawrocki touted his credentials by jogging and doing push-ups, but the campaign has been brutal for him.

In March it emerged that he had appeared on a TV show in disguise, blurred out and using a pseudonym, to promote a book he had written on organized crime and to praise himself.

Then he came under fire after he was accused of improperly taking over an elderly man’s apartment. He’s admitted to taking part in pitched fist-fights among football hooligans. In recent days he’s been fending off accusations that he had secured prostitutes at a luxury hotel on the Baltic Sea, where he was working as a security guard. As well, a probe into the remembrance institute found spending that was “mismanaged, unreliable, in violation of the law.”

Where does the race stand?

On a knife edge.

Trzaskowski narrowly won the first round of the presidential election on May 18 with just under 31.4 percent of the vote. Nawrocki was close behind at 29.5 percent. Polling done since then hasn’t changed much, with Trzaskowski generally ahead by around a percentage point, but within the margin of error of the surveys.

The two have been scrambling to pick up the votes of the minor candidates who were knocked out of the race.

Trzaskowski is likely to get those of candidates from the centrist and left-wing parties that make up Tusk’s ruling coalition.

The big push is for the disaffected voters angry with both PiS and Civic Platform. Far-left candidate Adrian Zandberg took 4.9 percent, antisemite and Euroskeptic Grzegorz Braun took 6.3 percent and Sławomir Mentzen, leader of the far-right libertarian Confederation party, got 14.8 percent.

After meeting Nawrocki and Trzaskowski on his popular YouTube livestream, Mentzen ultimately ruled out supporting either man.

Nawrocki signed on to a list of demands from Mentzen, including blocking Ukraine from joining NATO. Mentzen denounced Trzaskowski as a “leftist” but then had a beer with him and Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski.

Why should I care?

Poland is a fast-rising European powerhouse. Its economy has exploded from a post-communist basket case into a prosperous member of the EU. It has the largest army in the bloc, spends the most on defense of any NATO member, and is a frontline nation whose support is crucial for Ukraine to continue the fight against Russia.

The presidential race will have a big say on whether Poland plays in the EU’s big league or if it retreats back into isolation alongside other populist-governed countries in Central Europe like Hungary and Slovakia.

During PiS’s eight years in power it got into fights with the EU and other allies over efforts to politicize the justice system, attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, tightening abortion rules and using state money for party aims. However, it also directed a deluge of money toward poorer voters and gave often-ignored people from smaller towns and villages a sense that their more conservative values were important.

Is the president important?

Poland’s president is a largely ceremonial job — the incumbent gets to live in a fancy palace, signs off on people becoming professors, generals and ambassadors, and is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, although it’s the government that sets foreign and military policy, not the president. He can initiate legislation.

But he does have real power — albeit of a negative kind. A president can veto bills that can only be overridden with a three-fifths majority in parliament. That’s a level no party has in Poland’s deeply divided political landscape. The president can also send legislation to be analyzed by the Constitutional Tribunal, a top court, which is largely equivalent to a veto.

Tusk spelled out the perks of the job in 2010: “honors, chandeliers, a palace and a veto.”

PiS-backed President Duda has blocked much of Tusk’s legislative agenda, leading to growing frustration among his voters and one of the reasons that the government is seeing a steady fall in public support.

Running with PiS’s backing, Nawrocki is the party’s chance to keep an important power center under control and continue to torpedo the Tusk government, hoping to fan disillusionment until the next general election in 2027.

Trzaskowski would end all government excuses for inaction. It would also likely set off a civil war within PiS and a battle with Mentzen’s Confederation over which party dominates the right.

In the final stretch of the campaign, Trzaskowski has been doing a straddle — cozying up to far-right voters while ensuring left-leaning voters don’t abandon him and mobilizing people who abstained in the first round.

Trzaskowski has bet on positive messaging, emphasizing cooperation and accord in place of “chaos and uproar,” as well as his experience as mayor and minister.

“Choose wisely, there’ll be no returns,” he told one of his final rallies Thursday.

At one his gatherings, Nawrocki said voters will have to choose either a “flesh-and-blood man” who has “come a long way,” and knows what life is like for ordinary Poles, or a “coward” beholden to “German foundations, German capital, developers, bankers and millionaires.”

Where does Trump come in?

Poland isn’t Canada, where opposition to Trump handed a victory to Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Poland is one of Europe’s most pro-American countries, where the U.S. is seen as the ultimate guarantor of Poland’s security.

Trzaskowski has stressed Poland’s (and his) close relationship with the U.S. “Americans and President Trump are very pragmatic; I have never said a bad word about President Trump, and I have a sensational relationship with the Republicans,” he said.

But Nawrocki visited Trump in the Oval Office in early May, where he said Trump told him: “You will win.”

At this week’s CPAC Poland, the first time the MAGA conservative conference has been held in Poland, Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, endorsed Nawrocki.

“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,” she said, and denounced Trzaskowski as a “socialist” and “an absolute train wreck of a leader.”