Poland is set for a fortnight of political campaigning that will be combative, intense and is likely to involve “dirty” smears of the challenger from public media outlets, before a presidential run-off on 12 July.
Most polls have shown the vote is likely to be extremely close and the result will be decisive for the country’s political trajectory.
In Sunday’s first round, the incumbent, Andrzej Duda, allied to the rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) government, won 43.7% of the vote, while his main challenger, Rafał Trzaskowski, won 30.4%.
PiS won power in 2015 and embarked on an agenda that has mixed rightwing populist rhetoric on social and cultural issues with increased government spending. Duda has been a loyal ally, signing off on almost all of the PiS legislative programme, as the government has been accused of democratic backsliding and weakening the rule of law by European officials and civil society organisations.
“It’s the last battle, it’s a battle about everything. It’s historical. Three more years for them is enough time to finish building this entire infrastructure of power,” said Sławomir Sierakowski, the head of Krytyka Polityczna, a leftwing publishing house in Warsaw.
Opponents of PiS say that if Trzaskowski wins, he will be able to frustrate the legislative agenda of PiS through the presidential veto, as well as provide a different face of Poland to Brussels and the outside world.
Duda, who made attacks on “LGBT ideology” a major part of his campaign, will carry a strong advantage from the first round into the run-off, and said on Sunday night he had received a higher percentage than he had done in the first round five years ago. However, he will face a stern task to gain the extra 7% he needs to beat Trzaskowski, because the anti-PiS vote is likely to coalesce around the challenger.
The former president Aleksander Kwaśniewski said on Monday he expected a “dirty campaign” over the next two weeks, with a potential media smear campaign against Trzaskowski.
Duda has taken advantage of the support of Poland’s partisan public television network, which has boosted his campaign, while portraying Trzaskowski as beholden to LGBTQ+, Jewish and foreign interests. Analysis by the OKO.press news portal found that in the three hours after polls closed, public television showed Duda speaking for 56 minutes, while Trzaskowski was featured for just eight minutes.
Election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said on Monday public media had heavily favoured Duda and had “failed in its duty to offer balanced and impartial coverage”. In a statement, the OSCE also accused Duda of using “inflammatory language” and running a campaign that “was at times xenophobic and homophobic”.
Voters of the far-right Konfederacja party, whose candidate Krzysztof Bosak received 7% of votes in the first round, could play a decisive role in the second round, as well as the 14% of the electorate who voted for the independent candidate Szymon Hołownia.
In the last days of his campaign, Duda stepped back from some of his more homophobic rhetoric, in an apparent attempt to focus on the middle ground. Although he used a radio interview on Monday morning to call same-sex marriage “alien”, he spent most of his speech on Sunday night emphasising economic issues and investment in infrastructure. He promised an “ambitious” future, in which more Poles who left the country for work in western Europe in recent years would return.
Pitching for the middle ground in strongly Catholic Poland, and trying to shake off claims by pro-government media that he is an “extremist candidate”, Trzaskowski has sidestepped the LGBTQ+ rights issue for most of the campaign. Instead, he has spoken about equality and tolerance in general terms.
On Sunday night, he appealed to the votes of the dissatisfied on all sides of the political spectrum. “This result shows one thing that is most important: over 58% of our society wants change. I want to say clearly to all these citizens – I will be your candidate. I will be the candidate of change,” said Trzaskowski.
An exit poll on Sunday evening showed that nearly 10% of voters in the first round were not yet sure who they would vote for in a run-off. “The fact that there is such a cleavage in Poland creates an illusion that you don’t have anything in the middle, but you do,” said Sierakowski, suggesting that the next two weeks would be focused on winning these voters around.
