Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski appears poised to meet historian Karol Nawrocki in the run-off vote to elect Poland’s new president next year.

Trzaskowski won the primary of his party, the centrist Civic Coalition, which is the mainstay of the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, on November 23. Nawrocki was anointed by the radical right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) on the following day.

Polls right now give other candidates little chance of winning the election, which is due on a yet-unspecified date in May. It also seems extremely unlikely that anyone but Trzaskowski and Nawrocki will make it to the run-off vote two weeks later, in May or June.

Trzaskowski is also a strong favourite to beat Nawrocki and claim the presidency, which he was narrowly denied in 2020. Back then, the Warsaw mayor narrowly lost to the incumbent President Andrzej Duda, who won 51.03% of the vote against Trzaskowski’s 49.97%.

“I’ve got matters to settle with PiS,” Trzaskowski said before the primary results were announced.

After it became clear he beat Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski by 75% to 25% in the primary, Trzaskowski said: “I’ve got a very strong mandate. And I have courage and determination to beat PiS.”

A friend in need

Having a sympathetic president is the key element in the Tusk government’s plan to enact its agenda, which it has struggled to do in the almost one year that has passed since the government was sworn-in.

Duda has blocked key legislation by either sending it for review to the Constitutional Tribunal, a PiS-controlled body, or vetoing it. The ruling majority is not strong enough to override presidential vetoes.

Duda has also obstructed the government by refusing to sign off on ambassadorial nominations presented to him by Sikorski.

There is little doubt that another PiS president will continue Duda’s obstructionism, in the hope that the Tusk coalition – which has no shortage of internal disagreements – will cave in if it is unable to carry out reforms, the promise of which mobilised voters in 2023.

At his nomination rally in Krakow, however, Nawrocki and PiS’s chairman Jaroslaw Kaczynski tried to strike a conciliatory note. “We don’t want Poles at war against one another,” Kaczynski said.

Following PiS’s announcement of his bid, Nawrocki said: “I will be everyone’s president”. He also described the result of last year’s parliamentary election, which cost PiS power, as “wronging the people who believed things could get better in Poland”.

In his speech, Nawrocki emphasised his working class background in a thinly veiled attack on Trzaskowski, who PiS says is the candidate of the elites detached from rank and file Poles.

Indeed, the campaign will play out to a large extent outside of Poland’s big cities where Trzaskowski is likely to sweep his rival. Small-town and rural Poland could prove difficult battlegrounds for the Warsaw mayor.

Dreaded word: complacency

Nawrocki has a steep mountain to climb himself if he dreams of getting within a stone’s throw distance of Trzaskowski, as Poland’s extreme polarisation means liberal and left-leaning voters wrote him off as soon as took the stage in Krakow. 

Trzaskowski leads in the polls in a likely run-off with a PiS frontrunner is 57% to 43% (the poll was carried out before Nawrocki’s nomination). Nawrocki is also quite unknown to the wider public. Compared to Trzaskowski, who 97% of Poles recognise, only 39% Poles know who Nawrocki is.

Nawrocki is just 41 and a historian of Poland’s contemporary history. While he is not a member of any political party, his work as a historian has been closely linked to PiS’s idea of how history should influence policy.

The PiS frontrunner used to head the Institute of National Remembrance, a state body that studies the years of World War 2 and communism in Poland. He was also the director of the World War 2 Museum in Gdansk, which he tweaked to reflect PiS’s nationalistic views.

But Trzaskowski and his camp did not dare to utter anything during the weekend that might have suggested the election will only rubber-stamp the obvious. 

Wary of Duda’s stunning defeat of Bronislaw Komorowski in 2015, they rather underlined the campaign will be fierce and dirty, and the PiS candidate’s relative obscurity must not lead to underestimating him.

Poland’s presidential campaign kicks off officially on January 8, although the weekend rallies have launched it already. “See you on the campaign trail,” a host at the Nawrocki rally cried as the event wrapped up with the national anthem. 

Other than the two main contenders, the first round of the election will see bids from other parties making up the Tusk-led coalition: parliament Speaker Szymon Holownia of Polska 2050 and the yet-unspecified candidate for the Left. The far-right opposition party Konfederacja has fielded one of its leaders, Slawomir Mentzen.