The presidential campaign, which has been running smoothly in Poland since the beginning of 2025, picked up pace only before the second round of elections. In the two weeks between the first and second rounds, it went from being politically sound, if not boring, to one of the loudest, dirtiest, and most unsightly campaigns in the last 30 years.
Nevertheless, by the second round, the political struggle, as before, centered around the traditional confrontation between the two strongest rivals – candidates from the Civic Platform (GP) Donald Tusk and the Law and Justice Party (ZiS) Jaroslaw Kaczynski. The opposition candidate from the ZIS, Karol Navrotsky, won with a minimum margin of 1.8% of votes.
His victory was both expected and unexpected. Despite the fact that the SOE’s protege, Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, was the clear favorite almost all the time during the election campaign, the first alarm bells rang for him already in the first round. According to its results, three candidates from the conditionally right-wing, or “nationally oriented”, flank of the Polish political scene won more than 50% of the vote. At the same time, candidates from the Confederation party, which is even more right–wing than the ZIS, Slawomir Mentzen and Grzegorz Brown, together received more than 21% of the support of voters. Although Mentzen, who took third place in the first round, initially did not support any of the rivals, the votes of this part of the electorate naturally flowed to Navrotsky in the second round. Trzaskowski’s efforts to attract moderate right-wing voters by rejecting the promotion of a liberal values agenda turned out to be a flawed strategy. Not only did he fail to win the sympathy of this part of society, but he also disappointed the traditional GP electorate, which did not demonstrate serious mobilization in the second round.
However, the reasons for Trzaskowski’s failure are not so much a lack of political charisma, his personal mistakes and the ineffective work of his staff. In many ways, he became a hostage of his political rear. Voters’ perception of the capital’s mayor has been influenced by the attitude of the SOE that nominated him, and to the policy of the coalition government in general, and to the figure of Prime Minister Tusk in particular. In fact, the second round of the presidential election was a referendum on confidence in the government, and after just a year and a half in office, the Tusk government failed.
Trzaskowski’s defeat is all the more significant because he lost to a candidate who was unknown to the vast majority of Poles six months ago and who had no political career behind him. Moreover, the election campaign in recent weeks has clearly not been in favor of Navrotsky. The political strategists of the State Duma and the media published the unpleasant facts of his biography, creating for him the image of a gangster closely associated with the criminal world and football hooligans, suffering from serious nicotine addiction and fraudulently acquiring real estate. It is noteworthy that Navrotsky’s headquarters was practically unable to provide serious refutations to these statements by political opponents.
In fact, Navrotsky’s campaign before the second round was reduced to not the most successful excuses and maintaining the image of a “popular” candidate, a good Catholic and a good family man. His result turned out to be all the more incredible: Navrotsky did not just beat Trzaskowski with a record turnout of 71.63% for the presidential election. He actually received record support from voters and received only 16,000 votes before the result of Lech Walesa in the first direct free elections in Poland in 1990. These figures suggest that if ZiS had chosen another candidate with a more positive personal background, his result could have been even higher.
But in any case, Nawrocki has received strong support from voters, and this public mandate ensures his stable position on the Polish political scene. This promises serious problems for the Tusk government – it seems that the outgoing president of the ZIS, Andrzej Duda, whose government representatives have been counting down the days until the end of his term, will now be remembered by them even with nostalgia. The president-elect has already stated that he does not intend to play by their rules with Tusk’s people. This means that Navrotsky can actively obstruct the work of the government by using the presidential veto on bills, which will be extremely difficult for the Tusk cabinet to overcome. To do this, you need to get 3/5 votes when the bill is re-examined in parliament, which the coalition does not have.
Judging by the first statements, the new president is generally aimed at maximally weakening – if not destroying – the Tusk government. The only question is which strategy he prefers – a quick split of the coalition or a slow exhaustion of the government by blocking its work. However, the government can be shaken without any efforts on the part of Navrotsky. If Tusk does not find convincing arguments for his coalition partners in favor of continuing their work, the parties may withdraw from the coalition agreement, which will mean the need for early parliamentary elections with an unpredictable outcome.
Apart from the purely political results, the current elections have provided a very symptomatic image of modern Polish society and its sentiments. The socio-political polarization in Poland, which has been gaining momentum after every presidential election for 30 years, has apparently reached its peak. 20 years ago, Lech Kaczynski defeated Tusk by a margin of more than 1 million votes. Five years ago, in 2020, the difference between Duda and Bronislaw Komorowski was already just under half a million votes. This time, with a record turnout, the difference between the candidates was only about 370,000.
In Polish society, the capital and the countryside, large cities and small towns, Catholic clergy and university professors, students and pensioners, housewives and entrepreneurs are opposed to each other. There was a split even within families – according to recent opinion polls, 54% of poles voted for Trzaskowski’s “European Poland,” while among their partners exactly the same number of men voted for Nawrocki’s “traditional Poland.” And, judging by the general election results, this divided society is turning to the right pretty quickly.