High stakes as Poland heads to round two of presidential election

Warsaw, Poland – The streets of Warsaw were awash with red-and-white flags last Sunday as two presidential hopefuls and their supporters marched through the capital for one last time before Poland takes to polls on Sunday, June 1, in the second round of voting for the country’s next president.

Rafał Trzaskowski from the centre-right Civic Platform of the governing Civic Coalition and Karol Nawrocki, an independent candidate supported by the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which ran Poland between 2015 and 2023, are the two remaining contenders in the election. In the first round of polls on May 18, Trzaskowski won 31.1 percent of the votes while Nawrocki came second with 29.5 percent.

So far, polling groups say the vote is split fairly evenly between the two for the final round. A poll by IBRiS for Polish news outlet Onet, has found that 47.7 percent of respondents intend to vote for Trzaskowski, with 46 percent indicating they will vote for Nawrocki. The rest are unsure.

One of the two will succeed Andrzej Duda, the outgoing nationalist conservative president who was also backed by PiS and has been blamed for holding up justice reforms by using his veto against the government.

This is a hotly contested race. Trzaskowski and Nawrocki have clashed over the European Union, national security and social values. At the same time, both candidates take a similarly hardline approach to immigration, and have used anti-Ukrainian rhetoric, building on growing resentment among Poles who see themselves as competing for strained social services with 1.55 million Ukrainian migrants and war refugees.

While Trzaskowski has proposed that only working Ukrainians should have access to the country’s child benefit, Nawrocki has gone further, saying he would also be against Ukraine joining NATO or even the EU.

Speaking at his “Patriots’ March”, which gathered about 140,000 supporters last weekend, Trzaskowski took aim at his opponent while calling for unity.

“It’s high time for honesty to win. It’s high time for integrity to win. It’s high time for justice to win. It’s high time for truth to win. That’s what these elections are about,” he declared to a cheering crowd.

“Full determination is needed. Every vote is needed. So that the future wins. So that all of Poland wins.”