A year and a half since Donald Tusk became prime minister of Poland, the last obstacle – as he claims – preventing him from delivering on his election promises has a chance to be removed. Andrzej Duda’s second term as president of the republic draws to an end. And with that – if the right candidate will take residence in the presidential palace – the ruling coalition excuse for their lack of action on topics such as women’s rights, marriage equality or trans rights “Andrzej Duda would never sign such bill, so there is no point to even try” will be finally gone.
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But if anyone hopes for the new president to be more left-wing, I am afraid this is not going to happen. The presidential campaign is basically a right-wing populist parade. The leading candidates spread from “a bit less right than Duda” (Trzaskowski), through “even more right than Duda” (Nawrocki) to “so radical right, that I have to pretend I am not as much right as I am” (Mentzen).
Some readers might be surprised to hear that I class Trzaskowski as right-wing, as his party promoted him during previous elections as a progressive candidate, but apparently, it has been decided that in order to secure more voters he should cater to more right-wing views. True, he still declares that if he becomes president, he will sign the bill to ease anti-abortion laws, but at the same time he tries to lure more right-wing voters by saying, that Poland has to show how strongly it’s willing to defend its borders “even if that means suspending the law” (which, BTW, Tusk’s government already did recently by the way of a new law that allows to “suspend rights to claim asylum for up to 60 days”, which means that the human right violations that are taking place at the Polish-Belarussian border for three years now will now become imprinted in the law. Andrzej Duda of course had no problems with signing this law, which basically means that Trzaskowski and he are now speaking the same language).
Safety and border security are among the issues Poles deem to be the most important, alongside improving the quality of the health service. Here, too, Trzaskowski is no different than his other right-wing adversary as he strongly supports lowering social health insurance costs. This was met with disbelief by many, as it will likely lead to disaster: austerity rarely improves the quality of services, and Polish healthcare contributions, as well as healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP, are already one of the lowest in the EU. If anything, experts have been calling for a long time to raise those costs, at least for the entrepreneurs, as Poland is – apart from Hungary – the only country in the EU where they just pay flat, fixed rates instead of contributing pro-rata to their incomes. However, unlike in Hungary, in Poland, the entrepreneurs are allowed to deduct their healthcare contributions from their taxes, which de facto means that they are paying very little.
As a result of trying to please everyone, Trzaskowski annoys voters on both sides of the political spectrum. Left-leaning will be outraged by his support for the violations of human rights. Meanwhile, the right wasn’t convinced – Radio Maryja for example called it “pretending to be right-wing”. This brings us to a question: is it really a good strategy to alienate left-leaning voters in an attempt to lure the right-wing ones, if the right-wing ones would rather vote for the “real deal”? I guess Donald Tusk’s party just hopes that their usual tune “You have to vote for us, otherwise you’ll get PiS” is going to work again.
But that can be problematic if PiS tricks work. See, there is officially no PiS candidate. Not widely known before, Karol Nawrocki officially runs as an independent candidate. “A people’s candidate” – they say. Coincidentally those people who endorse him seem to be almost exclusively PiS politicians, including Andrzej Duda and Kaczyński himself, as well as pro-PiS media. This might indicate that they are aware of the fact that the PiS brand is really toxic, or that they are not fully convinced that he is the right candidate and want to be able to change him if he dunks in the polls.
For now, they seem to be all in. The campaign is clearly well funded, Nawrocki has hands down the best website and there is a lot of information on it. This is quite in contradiction to him in real life, as while his program on the website is very detailed, he avoids taking a stance in any of the major issues – for example the aforementioned topic of healthcare contributions. Surely though no other candidate makes so many promises as Nawrocki. He’s ready to promise everything to everybody, no matter if such a thing would lie in the presidential prerogatives or not (although to be frank, he is not the only one here). He goes even further, saying he “already sponsored some legal bills as a presidential candidate” – which is, of course, utter bullshit, as a presidential candidate has no such powers – new laws can be proposed by a president, the government, the senate, at least 100 MP’s or a group of 100 000 citizens. The bills he’s talking about happen to be bills proposed by PiS – a party that he claims to have nothing in common with.
The other problem Nawrocki faces in his campaign is image. If you think Duda comes out as thick and awkward, Nawrocki is by an order of the magnitude worse. He looks and talks like a typical gym-goer from the 90s (when this activity was mostly associated with the Polish equivalent of gopniks and petty criminals) and as he is indeed a bodybuilder he had befriended some shady figures from the 1990s crime world in the gyms. The situation got worse when PiS tried to stress his education and started overdoing calling him a PhD to an extreme (the academic titles are used much less often in Poland than they are in the Czech Republic, so this comes out as pompous). Even though he was placed by PiS as a director of the heavy politicized Institute of National Remembrance, he’s not well known for his academic publications. But recently journalists discovered that he published a book about Nikoś, one of the bosses of the Polish mafia in the 1990’s. The book was published under the pen name Tadeusz Bartyr. Nawrocki claims that this was because he wanted to avoid extra attention when he was about to take over the Institute of National Remembrance. Others suspect that it could be because the book, while really bad for a historian, shows fascination and admiration for one of the worst criminals in Polish history. According to those who read it, it is more a hagiography than a biography. And yet, Nawrocki seems to be very proud of his work: he was advertising the book under his own name, and as Bartyr was endorsing Karol Nawrocki as an inspiration.
But generally speaking, while sets of Trzaskowski and Nawrocki’s voters are rather mutually exclusive. The biggest problem for them will be third most popular candidate: Sławomir Mentzen of the radical right Konfederacja. While polls show Trzaskowski at stable 35%, Mentzen is catching up with Nawrocki who has just over 20% according to the latest polls, although there were already some polls when he managed to overtake him.
Mentzen is an ultimate populist candidate, extremely popular amongst young males, with a great following on social media and skilful image building on TikTok. He presents himself as a economic expert although critics point out that his PhD is not worth very much and it was done at the university where his father works. Mentzen’s main business is a legal company specializing in tax evasion and on his TikTok clips (at least those, that break into the mainstream) he mostly talks about lowering taxes and withdrawing support from Ukraine.
His main problem though is a legacy of his party. Konfederacja is a brainchild of the infamous Janusz Korwin-Mikke and other ultra-right radicals, it’s known for promoting conspiracy theories, Russian propaganda and anti-Semitism and after Korwin-Mikke yet another time defended paedophiles, it has been nicknamed “Kon-paedo-Russia”. Mentzen himself now pretends to be an ordinary, mainstream political, but it’s hard to shred the legacy for someone, who back in 2019 presented five bullet points for his political views: “We are against Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes and European Union”. Even his party decission to drop the problematic Grzegorz Braun, known for being openly pro-Russian and attacking Hanukkah candles with a fire extinguisher, can turn out to be a bad decision, as Braun decided to run for president himself, and with his small but stable following he can bite a bit chunk in the Mentzen’s support.
But the worst thing is that the real Sławomir Mentzen is very different from the image created by his social media team. He had been mocked before for memorizing his parliamentary speeches by heart, but now under closer scrutiny of the cameras turns out to be unable to handle the pressure. He is known for literally running away from his rallies, or sometimes even riding e-scooters. Some suspected this is not a stunt but a method to avoid journalists, and the recent car-crash interview in which instead of answering the simple, but inconvenient question (“Are you against the EU”), he decided to offend and abuse the reporter (but, eventually, succumbed to her and murmured the answer) might be indication that this is actually true.
Mentzen’s rise in popularity coincides with the fact that Szymon Hołownia, a popular speaker of the parliament, who since he entered politics during last presidential election with a fairly decent result was typed to be another serious candidate, is now polling between 4 and 8%. It might be because compared to the aforementioned candidates, he is kind of bleak, avoiding radical claims or populist promises, but also because he is generally seen as a good speaker and even people who don’t support him politically would like him to continue in this role. Hołownia himself campaigns only at half steam, even his or his party’s social media aren’t clearly indicating if he decided to stand up in the elections or not.
And what about the left? After the schism in the young democratic party Razem, after sitting on the fence for a year decided to finally leave the ruling coalition and formally move to the opposition, some of its members decided to quit and stick with Tusk instead. One of those politicians, a deputy speaker of the Senate Magdalena Biejat, was rewarded for that with being made an official presidential candidate of the Lewica, a conglomerate of small left-wing parties, most of them past their prime, that forms part of Donald Tusk coalition government. It was convenient for Lewica’s leader Włodzimierz Czarzasty too, as by putting Biejat forward, he doesn’t need to set up any of his own people for failure – as the Lewica candidate is currently polling at just under 2%. The whole situation can be compared to Magdalena Ogórek, another pretty female face put forward by the Left back in 2015. She came up with a disastrous (for the Left in 2015) result of 2.38% and then further humiliated leaders of the Left by switching sides and becoming one of the leading PiS propagandists. But even 2% might be a challenge for Biejat, as her former party colleague and long-time leader of Razem Adrian Zandberg also decided to run for president again and despite representing just one left-wing party, he’s polling regularly at 3% or even more.
And so it seems it will be about who – Mentzen or Nawrocki – will face Trzaskowski in the second round. Most commenters predict that in any case, Trzaskowski will win as Poles will vote for him to prevent the radical right from winning, but I am not so sure. Many Poles express their tiredness with constantly having to choosethe lesser evil, and with a widespread disappointment with Donald Tusk’s performance after record numbers of voters went to the polling stations, the turnout might be pretty low, which historically benefits PiS. And if we remember that Russia will surely try to interfere, we can be sure of one thing: everything can happen.
This piece was published in Britské Listy
Collage created using public domain pictures and promotional materials of the candidates.
