Liberal Trzaskowski already called out victory, but his rival Nawrocki leads the neck-on-neck race in Poland

In Poland every voice really counts. The Polish presidential elections have proved to be an unprecedented neck-on-neck race. On Sunday night, the penny was to change who would become the new president of Poland. The liberal mayor of Warsaw and party member of the center-liberal Ko, Rafal Trzaskowski, cried the victory just after the ballot buses closed after a narrow lead in the exit poll. But two hours later, historian Karol Nawrocki of the national-conservative PIS party was in the lead.

The difference between the two candidates is not yet a percentage point. At 1 am Sunday night, a late poll – a combination of the exit poll with a large number of votes counted – that Nawrocki would get 51 percent of the votes compared to 49 percent for Trzaskowski.

But the result can still go in all directions. The expectation is that the final winner may have extra tens of thousands of votes. A small margin among the more than twenty million Poles that went to the polls on Sunday. With an expected rise of the around 72 percent, that is a record since the first free elections in Poland in 1990, when trade union leader Lech Walesa became the first president of Poland after the fall of communism.

The final results are expected to be announced on Monday. Five years ago, Trzaskowski also participated in the presidential elections and the course of Andrzej Duda – candidate for Pis and now retiring president. The difference was then around 400,000 votes.

Red card for Tusk

Anyway, the result is a red card for the coalition of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who came to power at the end of 2023. His government wanted to reform Poland quickly after two PIS governments (2015-2023) managed to dismantle the independent constitutional state into the great anger of Brussels. Moreover, Tusk promised to relax the abortion ban and came up with 100 promises that his government would live up to in 100 days. They were not much more than a dozen that made promises.

That is not only the fault of the government of Tusk, within which mutual frictions soon arose between the various parties. The biggest cause of the political impasse in Poland is the resigning president Andrzej Duda. Thanks to his veto right, he blocked the most legislation of the government.

Tusk wanted to put an end to this with these presidential elections. Trzaskowski promised that he would support the Tusk government and sign their reforms. But the voter showed his dissatisfaction and already voted in the first round, two weeks ago, with a narrow majority of ultrarchy presidential candidates. The expectation is that Nawrocki as a president will veto more rigorous than his predecessor Duda legislation.

Moreover, many voters in Poland are the duopoly in politics between the KO (earlier PO) of Tusk and Pis of party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Both men founded their party in 2001 and since 2005 one of the two parties has been in power. Many voters called for ‘Popis’ during this campaign.

That duop oil led to enormous polarization in Poland in recent years. There is division between large cities and the countryside, between liberals and conservatives and between high and low-skilled. Each group reads, listens and looks at his own media channels and gets it together with each other when it comes to politics. Even between family members, sometimes no more contact is because they do not agree politically.

New elections

Tusk was unable to put an end to that polarization. In fact, the Trzaskowski campaign made a jerk to the right in recent months. Trzaskowski was known as an LGBTI-Supporting Mayor and non-Traditional Catholic who was discredited because he reflected religious crosses from new government buildings. In order to meet the right-wing voter, Trzaskowski was critical of Ukrainians in Poland who did not work, he almost stopped about LGBTI and Women’s Rights and drank beer with the ultra-right politician Slawwomir Mentzen. With that he lost support from many left -wing voters.

Nawrocki, on the other hand, was a stranger to the general public until this year. To everyone’s surprise, the former museum director was put forward as a candidate of Pis. In recent weeks he had many attacks to endure after several media came up with revelations about his past. For example, the amateur boxer Namrocki participated in street fights with hooligans, he stamped a house of a retired person under false promises and he introduced sex workers at Hotelgasten as a security guard.

But all those attacks made little impression on his electorate, according to the provisional election results. Nawrocki put himself down as a ‘normal pole’ that is no different than his voters. That seems to have worked in the election struggle with Trzaskowski, which was labeled as elitist: from a jazz family and coconulating with his knowledge of many languages.

If Monday it appears that Nawrocki will indeed be the president of Poland in the coming five years, then that will probably lead to a political crisis in Poland, where new parliamentary elections are not excluded. The expectation is that especially the radical-right Konfederacja will benefit from this.

That will lead to frustration in Brussels. In the past year, the European Commission released around 100 billion euros to EU funds after they were frozen under the PIS governments due to the breakdown of the independent constitutional state. That release was perhaps too premature as new parliamentary elections indeed follow. Tusk also tried to play a leading role in the EU defense and Ukraine policy and with the leaders of France, Germany and Great Britain. With the Ukraine-critical Nawrocki as president, the role of Tusk-and therefore Poland-will be weakened.

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