Rafał Trzaskowski, the pro-EU frontrunner for Poland’s presidential election, is counting on voters’ long-standing fear of Russia to boost his campaign against nationalist rivals who are struggling to reconcile their support for Donald Trump with the US president’s pro-Moscow leanings.
“Security drives the election,” Trzaskowski, candidate of the Civic Platform party led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, said in an interview, arguing that voters wanted their next president to keep Poland on “solid ground” and at the heart of EU policymaking following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Trump’s criticism of Nato allies and his rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin are forcing Tusk and other EU leaders to accelerate funding for Europe’s defence sector and to consider how to help Ukraine should Trump broker a truce without offering US security guarantees.
At the same time, Trump’s claims that Ukraine rather than Russia was responsible for the war have become an issue for Polish opposition politicians who gave Trump a standing ovation in their parliament when he won the US elections last November.
“The [Polish opposition of the] right thought that Trump’s victory would give them a great boost, but I think people here are now asking more what kind of president we need, and in times of unpredictability, we need someone who is predictable,” Trzaskowski said.
“I know how to build coalitions, I’m really experienced when it comes to the European Union, but my opponents have had zero experience on those issues — and on top of that, both of them are very much lukewarm towards Europe.”
Poland’s election campaign is one of several around the world this year — including those in Canada and Australia — that are being shaken up by Trump’s return to the White House, his questioning of the western alliance and his decision to launch a global trade war.
Now Warsaw’s mayor, Trzaskowski was a minister in a previous Tusk government and is also a multilingual former member of the European parliament.
He holds a double-digit lead in most opinion polls over Karol Nawrocki, the candidate of the main rightwing opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, and Sławomir Mentzen of the far-right Confederation party, who are fighting each other to qualify for a run-off. Neither has previously been in government.
A Trzaskowski victory in the May 18 election should allow Tusk’s coalition government to unlock reforms vetoed by outgoing president Andrzej Duda, a PiS nominee, in collaboration with PiS-appointed judges who pack Poland’s constitutional court.
The institutional stand-off has prevented Tusk from fulfilling many of the pledges he made to return to office in 2023, including one to restore the judiciary’s independence. Trzaskowski promised if elected to “act as a force which would make this government work more quickly”.
“It would be good if in the first 100 days I could make [happen] many things that were vetoed by Duda, as well as things that weren’t even introduced for the signature of the president,” he said.
Nawrocki told a recent PiS rally that Tusk was “babysitting” Trzaskowski’s campaign and that “the vision of my main rival Rafał Trzaskowski is to sign everything that Donald Tusk tells him to”.
But Nawrocki, a former museum director, was himself handpicked by Tusk’s long-standing nemesis, PiS party leader Jarosław Kaczyński. In contrast, Tusk held party primaries, in which Trzaskowski beat foreign minister Radosław Sikorski.
“Nawrocki is just psychologically unable to even criticise Kaczyński in any way, while, with Tusk, we sometimes have differences of opinion,” Trzaskowski told the FT. If elected, he added, “I’m going to collaborate with the government, but I’m going to really scrutinise legislation that they send my way — and if I don’t like something, I’m going to veto it.”
Trzaskowski, 53, is making a second attempt to become president after narrowly losing to Duda in 2020. As Warsaw’s mayor, Trzaskowski helped turn Poland’s capital into a bastion of progressive policies during years of PiS ultraconservative government at the national level. He promoted LGBTQ rights and last year pushed for a ban on the introduction of religious symbols into Warsaw’s city hall.
During a TV debate this month, Nawrocki put a Polish flag on his lectern before walking over to Trzaskowski to gift him a rainbow flag, which Trzaskowski removed while telling his rival that “you have an obsession with gays.” A left-wing candidate, Magdalena Biejat, later crossed the stage to take the rainbow flag from Trzaskowski and display it on her own lectern.
Like the other main candidates, Trzaskowski has acknowledged Polish fatigue with Ukrainian refugees and demanded cuts in their benefits, in contrast to the situation three years ago when Poland served as the EU’s main gateway for millions who escaped Russia’s all-out invasion.
“On migration benefits, we granted Ukrainians citizen-like treatment, which of course was commendable at the beginning, but we cannot keep it up forever,” Trzaskowski said. “This is just common sense and in my view this has nothing to do with veering to the right.”
Nawrocki and Mentzen complain that they are not campaigning on a level playing field because the election commission cut public funding to their parties over alleged irregularities in past election spending. Trzaskowski’s main rivals also say media coverage is unfair, particularly after a Warsaw court this month revoked the licences of two right-wing TV stations on the grounds they were illegally granted by a PiS-controlled media regulator — although the stations continue to broadcast while they appeal against the ruling.
But Trzaskowski argued that any campaign advantage that he now held over his rivals paled in comparison with the “unfair” election he fought in 2020 against Duda, when “they [PiS] spent billions on propaganda” to beat him.
Duda recently said voters might need to hold street protests against ‘’manipulated’’ election results, a threat that echoed Trump’s challenge to his election loss in 2020, and drew a comparison with Romania’s recent contested presidential election. Romania is holding a rerun next month, after its constitutional court banned far-right candidate Călin Georgescu because of alleged Russian meddling to help his first-round win last November.
Trzaskowski said that he was more worried about Russian disinformation influencing voters than about a contested election result. “The Russians are everywhere and they’re trying to influence all the elections, but I hope that they’re not going to be as effective here as they were in Romania,” he said.
