Introduction and Context
On 18 May and 1 June 2025, the two rounds of the Polish presidential election were held. Poland uses a majority run-off system, wherein if nobody wins a majority in the first round then the top two candidates go on to a run-off vote. This was an open election, as incumbent President Andrzej Duda was unable to run again having served the maximum two terms. The election was also held in the context of Poland’s sharp political polarization between the nationalist-populist Law and Justice (PiS) party and its allies on the one hand and more liberal centrist or centre-left parties on the other hand. Though the Polish president is formally independent – and constitutionally cannot belong to a political party – the key parties certainly nominate candidates and presidential races are clearly partisan.
In the end, the PiS candidate, conservative historian Karol Nawrocki, defied the polls to narrowly win the presidential election. PiS continues to be quite successful in Polish presidential elections, more so than in parliamentary ones. Importantly, the 2025 outcome maintains the political division between the president and the prime minister and government that has existed since 2023. Poland is a country where these can be of different political stripes necessitating cohabitation between them, to use the French term.
Post-2015 Poland had had unified government. Duda’s victory as the PiS candidate in May 2015 was followed in October by the PiS winning a majority in parliament. By 2023, two parliamentary elections later, the tide turned, and the PiS-led government was narrowly defeated, to be replaced by a diverse coalition government of the Civic Coalition (KO), the Third Way electoral alliance of the rural-based Polish People’s Party (PSL) and Poland 2050, and The Left, itself a coalition of several leftist parties. Donald Tusk, who had returned to Poland after serving as President of the European Council, became prime minister again as he had been from 2007 to 2014.
After a year in office (2024), the government had already become unpopular due to two challenges. First, it was somewhat incoherent in terms of ideology, especially on social issues on which the PSL was more conservative. Second, and more broadly, it only won 248 of the 460 seats in the Sejm (the lower house), less than the 60 percent needed to overturn a presidential veto. Thus, the Tusk government failed to reverse PiS policies such as liberalizing Poland’s almost complete ban on abortion. Nor did it successfully restore the rule of law and media independence which the PiS had undermined, thus transforming Poland from a liberal democracy with a free judiciary and free media to an illiberal, electoral democracy.
The Polish president does not have a lot of powers and cannot call early parliamentary elections as in France, but the Polish president can veto legislation and also send legislation to the Constitutional Tribunal for assessment. Given that the PiS gained control of that body, its control over the judiciary thus delayed or prevented legislation.
Therefore, the government placed its hopes on winning the 2025 presidential election to solve the second problem – ending direct and indirect presidential vetoes. However, this goal required the voters to blame the president and not the government for the lack of reforms. In other words, Prime Minister Tusk assumed that the electorate would simply understand that as conservative President Duda was in office, not much could be done in terms of legislation given his veto power. In fact, this point needed to be communicated repeatedly, something which the Tusk government failed to do perhaps most crucially to disillusioned young voters. Duda also ended his second term as Poland’s most trusted politician, so there was not huge antipathy towards him.
Candidates, Campaign, and Results
In total there were no less than thirteen candidates for president. The three groups in the ruling coalition each presented their own candidate. Marshal (Speaker) of the Sejm Szymon Hołownia ran as the Third Way candidate. Senator Magdalena Biejat ran for The Left. As for the KO presidential nomination, two members sought this: foreign minister Radosław Sikorski and Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, who was the candidate against Duda in 2020. As in the past, a primary was held to pick the KO nominee, which also allowed Prime Minister Tusk to stay neutral (Tusk had passed on being a candidate). Trzaskowski won the primary with some 75 percent support.
On the right, there was no public competition for nominations and the relatively-unknown Karol Nawrocki was picked by the PiS party chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński, who hoped to repeat his success in picking Duda back in 2015, who was also not well known then. Certainly, Nawrocki was just one of many names discussed the year before. Given that Poles expect their presidents to rise above party politics, importantly he was someone who had never been elected as an MP or MEP for the party. Strategically, PiS and Nawrocki sought to make the presidential election a referendum on the Tusk government.
On the free market nationalist-populist right (the PiS being economically interventionist and welfarist) was MP Sławomir Mentzen, the candidate and co-chair of Confederation Liberty and Independence, normally called just Confederation. On the far right was former MP and now MEP Grzegorz Braun, known for his antisemitism – he was expelled from Confederation when he insisted on running for president separate from Mentzen.
During the campaign Trzaskowski made mistakes, especially regarding the television debates. First off, he was ‘too clever by half’ in trying to have a debate with just himself and Nawrocki before the first round. Such a two-person debate did not happen (other candidates were ultimately invited), and there was a separate television debate held right before in the same city with five candidates but not Trzaskowski who was waiting for ‘his’ debate which happened but started late. Then he skipped a later debate. Overall, Trzaskowski wound up looking weak and indecisive. In contrast, Nawrocki ran an energetic and strong campaign. He held many more campaign events than Trzaskowski, speaking at rallies around the country. Moreover, Nawrocki appeared at all the television debates and performed strongly.
The consequence of the campaign was that Trzaskowski’s double-digit first round lead over Nawrocki in the polls during the winter dropped to a few percent by mid-to-late April and stayed there through election day. However, the actual result proved even closer as Trzaskowski only narrowly won the first round receiving 31.4 percent of the vote while Nawrocki took 29.5 percent. Third was Mentzen at 14.8 percent, followed by Braun at 6.3 percent. The combined far right vote was thus quite high at over 21 percent, with Braun surging at the end. Hołownia got just five percent, underperforming versus his polls. This meant that to win the run-off Trzaskowski needed to gain more than just the voters of the other government parties (and the non-government leftist Razem party); right-of-centre voters (or first round non-voters) were also needed by him. Trzaskowski did receive quick second round endorsements from Hołownia and Biejat, though.
The key endorsement was consequently that of third-placed Mentzen, who clearly leveraged this by presenting a set of eight nationalist and conservative points for each candidate to sign onto – something which Nawrocki quickly did. Trzaskowski, in his meeting with Mentzen, did agree with four of the eight points but did not sign the document. In the end, Mentzen did not positively endorse either candidate but was much more critical of Trzaskowski, seeing no reason to vote for him. As some 87 percent of Mentzen’s first round voters would choose Nawrocki in the run-off, this implicit endorsement was understood.
In the run-off, Trzaskowski received 49.1 percent and Nawrocki 50.9 percent. The geography of the result reflected the standard regional division of Polish politics, with a ‘C’ shape of more liberal support in the area historically part of the German Empire and thus more developed, whereas the more conservative support was in the areas that had been part of the Russian and Austrian empires. Trzaskowski thus lost narrowly, as he did in 2020 against Duda. Indeed, the run-off vote percentages were almost exactly the same across the two elections. Perhaps Sikorski would have been a stronger candidate for the KO, given his argument that the ruling party needed to widen its appeal to the centre-right, concentrating on security issues. Sikorski also has often been more trusted. Of course, obviously Sikorski would still have been tied to the government’s record.
Consequences of the Polish Presidential Election
Having lost what amounted to a referendum on his government, Prime Minister Tusk called and won a motion of confidence shortly after. Then in July he reshuffled his cabinet, which included removing the justice minister who had been tasked with restoring judicial independence, and promoting Sikorski to being one of three deputy prime ministers. The government thus carries on but with the risk of being essentially a lame duck one. Overall economic growth continues to be quite strong, though this seems to be taken for granted by Poles rather than being something increasing government support.
For his part, President Nawrocki is likely to be even more combative and hardline than President Duda was, thus making for an all the more difficult cohabitation with the Tusk government in most areas. In his first month in office, Nawrocki had already convened a Cabinet Council at which the president meets with the government to discuss policy issues, and in this case saw the president criticizing the government. This is a rarely used constitutional power of the president, and President Duda only called two Cabinet Council meetings during his ten years in office. Nawrocki also has been more active in foreign policy than Duda was, suggesting a struggle over the Polish president’s role in foreign policy which constitutionally belongs to the government. This was seen in Nawrocki’s trip to Washington at the start of September to meet President Trump – an unprecedented move that did not include any government representatives in the delegation. And needless to say, like Duda, Nawrocki will keep blocking reforms to improve the rule of law.
Looking forward, the next Polish parliamentary election should be in autumn 2027, assuming the governing coalition holds together. Compared to the 2023 parliamentary election, the biggest shifts in the opinion polls have not concerned the two main groupings of the PiS-led United Right alliance and the Civic Coalition, each of which are down a bit. Instead, the main changes have been the decline in support for the former Third Way components, the Polish People’s Party and Poland 2050 (which separated after the presidential election), and the rise in support for Confederation. This will presumably yield a hung parliament in 2027, but assuming the polls hold, one in which there will be a right-of-centre majority – such an outcome ending the current cohabitation.
