Right-wing opposition candidate Karol Nawrocki narrowly won Poland’s second round presidential election, official results showed, dealing a huge blow to prime minister Donald Tusk’s reform agenda.
Nawrocki won Sunday’s election with 50.89% of votes, the electoral commission said early on Monday on its website, ahead of his rival, Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal Warsaw mayor and an ally of Tusk, with 49.11%.
Nawrocki’s candidacy was backed by the right-populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, which ruled Poland until Tusk’s victory in parliamentary elections in late 2023. Given the president’s veto power, Nawrocki’s victory will make it difficult for the government to pass any big reforms before the 2027 parliamentary election.
Nawrocki’s win was a dramatic reversal of projections, after an exit poll, published as voting concluded, appeared to show Trzaskowski would edge the contest with a 0.6% advantage. That prompted Trzaskowski to declare victory on stage at his campaign headquarters.
“We’ve won!” he announced to whoops and cheers from the crowd. “This is truly a special moment in Poland’s history. I am convinced that it will allow us to move forward and focus on the future,” he said.
In a speech at his own campaign headquarters, Nawrocki did not concede, saying he remained confident he would win when all the votes were counted. “We will win and save Poland,” he said. “We must win tonight.”
During a bitterly fought and often bad-tempered campaign in recent weeks, the two men have offered very different visions of Poland, and the result of the race will have enormous implications for the country’s political future, given the president’s ability to veto government legislation.
Trzaskowski, the pro-European, progressive mayor of Warsaw, supports the liberalisation of abortion laws and the introduction of civil partnerships for LGBT couples. Nawrocki, a historian and former amateur boxer, has firmly rejected these moves and would probably veto any moves to implement them.
The runoff came after neither candidate achieved more than 50% of votes in a crowded first-round vote two weeks ago. Nawrocki will replace the outgoing president, PiS ally Andrzej Duda, who will step down in August after completing two terms.
Tusk’s time as prime minister has been marked by difficulties bringing his broad coalition into line, made harder by having an ideologically opposed president in office. While the presidential role is largely ceremonial, it does have some influence over foreign and defence policy, as well as the critical power to veto new legislation. This can only be overturned with a 60% majority in parliament, which Tusk’s government does not have.
Nawrocki’s win will likely prolong the deadlock.
“Tusk knows the stakes and that if Nawrocki wins, he’s got a lame-duck administration for the next couple of years. And it will be worse than with Duda as Nawrocki will come in fresh, with a new mandate from what effectively turned into a referendum on the government,” Prof Aleks Szczerbiak, who teaches east and central European politics at the University of Sussex, said.
A Nawrocki victory will also reinvigorate PiS, the party which ruled Poland for eight years and clashed with Brussels overrule of law and other issues. A senior PiS lawmaker and former education minister, Przemysław Czarnek, suggested in a television interview on Sunday night that PiS could try to pick off members of Tusk’s broad coalition, with the aim of creating a new right-wing coalition in parliament.
Nawrocki, a historian and former museum director, has been the head of the Institute of National Remembrance, a state research body often accused of peddling a politicised version of history, since 2021. During the campaign, a number of scandals about his alleged past conduct were aired in the media.
Trzaskowski, the Oxford-educated mayor of Warsaw since 2018, who previously held ministerial posts and served in the European parliament, has sought to project himself as a safe pair of hands to work with the government on implementing progressive reforms.
However, he has had to defend himself against suggestions he is out of touch and elitist, and against allegations over foreign funding for online advertising promoting his candidacy.
In the final days of the campaign, both candidates sought to court voters of candidates knocked out in the first round and mobilise their supporters. “This election could be decided by single votes,” Nawrocki told a rally of supporters last week.
Trzaskowski also said every vote would be crucial. “Encourage everyone, so that as many Poles as possible vote in the presidential election,” he told a rally on Friday. A high turnout in the parliamentary vote in 2023, especially among younger urban Poles, was seen as crucial to securing victory for Tusk’s coalition.
