Poland votes in tight presidential election

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Poles vote in a cliffhanger presidential election on Sunday that will determine whether Warsaw remains a staunch EU and Ukraine ally or if President Donald Trump’s Maga movement secures a rare victory outside the US.

The choice is between pro-EU Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, who is endorsed by the government, and rightwing hardliner Karol Nawrocki, backed by the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party. The pair was polling neck-and-neck heading into the run-off, after Trzaskowski narrowly won the first round of voting last month.

The vote is widely viewed as a bellwether for the rightwing populist Maga movement, who backed Nawrocki and dispatched a senior Trump administration official to a rally just days before the vote.

US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday called on Poles to “elect the right leader” and described Trzaskowski as “an absolute train wreck”.

“You will be the leaders that will turn Europe back to conservative values,” said Noem at the Conservative Political Action Conference held in Jasionka near the Polish-Ukrainian border.

A Nawrocki victory would turn the tides on a series of Maga losses in Canada, Australia and Romania and embolden other Eurosceptic and Ukraine-hostile leaders like Czech billionaire Andrej Babiš, who is hoping to return to the premiership after elections in autumn, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán who is seeking re-election next year.

Nawrocki’s better than expected performance in the first round vote was described as a “yellow card” by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has apologised for his government’s shortcomings.

Tusk has warned that a Nawrocki presidency could scupper his long-promised reforms which have been blocked by the outgoing president, Andrzej Duda, also a PiS nominee. Those reforms include reversing a judicial overhaul carried out by the previous PiS government that led to the freezing of Poland’s EU funds. The European Commission released billions of euros when Tusk returned to power in 2023, but the reforms are still due.

“Nawrocki’s victory could be a harbinger of Poland’s backsliding into a domestic political turmoil and his main mission would be to pave the way for PiS’s return to power,” said Piotr Buras, head of the Warsaw bureau of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“It would undermine the Tusk government’s legitimacy and shrink its room to manoeuvre, which would in effect significantly weaken the Polish premier’s international standing,” Buras added.

Regardless of Sunday’s outcome, analysts say the campaign has laid bare deep faultlines that run through Polish society and a growing anger at the political establishment, including the PiS opposition.

In the first round of voting, many younger Poles backed radical candidates from both ends of the political spectrum, in a protest vote against Tusk and his longtime political nemesis, Jarosław Kaczyński, who founded PiS in 2001.

A win for Trzaskowski would bolster Tusk’s fragile coalition and offer a mandate to accelerate stalled reforms. But the prime minister would remain under pressure to deliver.

Ahead of Sunday’s knife-edge vote, Tusk insisted that, even if Nawrocki became president, he would not call snap parliamentary elections before the regular ones scheduled for 2027.

A Trzaskowski presidency would maintain “the government’s current course in domestic and foreign policy, but this does not mean the end of polarisation and that there will not be another battle in 2027,” said Dorota Piontek, a political scientist at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.