The ‘Illiberal Detox’: Polish Voters Go to the Polls With Center-Left Ahead

Polish presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki, standard bearer of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, likely had a 50-50 chance of becoming the next head of state in his central European country on May 18 before a scandal related to an apartment broke. 

Nawrocki claimed to be a man of the people, one who owned a single apartment. He failed to mention that he owned a second one through circumstances that looked shady at best, however. He later donated the property to charity. But that and other bizarre episodes – in a televised video hawking a book, he interviewed himself in disguise – are why he might lose a major ideological battle for Poland’s future. 

Nawrocki is trailing Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski in the polls in the run-up to the presidential elections, Politico reported. Trzaskowski is part of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s progressive Civic Platform party, which unseated the PiS government in 2023 after years of ruling the country under tight control. PiS notoriously took control of public broadcasters, installed compliant judges, and hollowed out any other power centers in the civil service, earning rebukes from the European Union. 

Now, to advance his euro-centric, center-left agenda, Tusk wants a Polish president who is friendlier than incumbent President Andrzej Duda, a PiS stalwart, explained the Fondation Robert Schuman. Reflecting his conservative instincts, Duda, for instance, has vetoed laws giving women free access to the morning-after pill and recognized Silesian as a minority language, among other progressive policies. 

“Tusk’s victory 18 months ago was seen as a model for how to defeat the kind of right-wing conservative, anti-establishment parties that have gained so much ground in recent European elections,” University of Sussex politics professor Aleks Szczerbiak told the British think tank, Chatham House. “This election will show to what extent the Polish electorate has rejected that kind of politics.” 

The Civic Platform isn’t taking any changes, though. Sensing the direction of the wind, the Trzaskowski campaign has tacked to the right to gain votes, advocating for a tougher stance on migrants, including rejecting European quotas and imposing more stringent rules for Ukrainian refugees. He says he would also cut the stipends for Ukrainians, compelling them to find work rather than live on social benefits, added Balkan Insight. 

Nawrocki also appeared to be losing support to Sławomir Mentzen, a far-right candidate who is garnering around 20 percent of the vote, especially among young men. In the past, he has expressed his opposition to “Jews, homosexuals, abortion, and taxes,” noted Euractiv. 

The ideological battles aren’t going away soon. But they might be put on hold temporarily, say observers.   

The European Consortium for Political Research detailed how, since 2015, there has been a shift in Poland toward democracy that culminated in the 2023 presidential election, which ejected Poland’s illiberal government. “Yet the 2025 presidential election may prove equally critical,” it added, saying that “If the EU’s future will be decided in central Europe, it is critical that Poland’s ‘illiberal detox’ succeeds.” 

As a result, the election may decide the future of the populist-nationalist PiS and also be a bellwether for other European countries where hard-right parties have recently gained increasing power and prominence, the Economist wrote.  

“Either PiS will be “on a highway to return to power,” Andrzej Bobinski of Polityka Insight, a think tank in Warsaw, told the British magazine. “Or it will be the end of PiS as we know it.”