Donald Tusk’s ruling party picks Warsaw mayor as Polish presidential candidate

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Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s party has selected Warsaw’s liberal mayor as its candidate for Poland’s presidential elections, which will take place in May.

Rafał Trzaskowski was nominated on Saturday after comfortably beating foreign minister Radosław Sikorski in primaries held by Tusk’s ruling Civic Coalition party.

The outcome of next May’s contest could unlock Tusk’s reform agenda, which has been stalled by outgoing rightwing President Andrzej Duda. 

Tusk ousted the main opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party from office last December. Since then Duda, a PiS nominee, has used his second and final term to block some of Tusk’s bills and stop his pro-EU coalition government from replacing PiS-nominated judges and ambassadors. 

It will be Trzaskowski’s second attempt to become president after he narrowly lost to Duda in 2020.

Trzaskowski, 52, is a supporter of LGBTQ rights and in May he introduced a ban on religious symbols within Warsaw’s city hall. He is also credited with building up support for Tusk’s party among younger voters, which proved crucial in last year’s parliamentary elections when turnout hit a record 74 per cent.

He promised on Saturday to “wake up Poland” before next May’s elections, saying: “I have a lot of energy to win against PiS.”

PiS is expected to announce its candidate for the presidential election on Sunday. 

Opinion polls carried out before either of the two main parties selected their candidates suggested that the Civic Coalition candidate would beat the PiS nominee in the second round of presidential voting.

But the outcome is likely to hinge on who can attract most of the votes won by other candidates in the first round.

Among other nominees so far, the Poland 2050 party — one of Tusk’s coalition partners — is fielding its leader Szymon Hołownia, while the far-right Confederation party selected its co-chair Sławomir Mentzen.

PiS will not hold primaries to select its candidate. Instead it is essentially leaving the choice in the hands of its long-standing leader Jarosław Kaczyński, who recently joked that he would “roll the dice” before deciding. 

The PiS frontrunners include Karol Nawrocki, a historian who runs Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, and former education minister Przemysław Czarnek, who has been dubbed “the Polish Donald Trump” because of his blunt right-wing politics. 

While Trzakowski’s second bid for the presidency was anticipated, Sikorski emerged as a late rival after Tusk’s party decided to hold primaries earlier this month.

Sikorski campaigned as a hardline defender of national security who also pushed for tougher controls on migration and backed Polish claims against Germany and Ukraine relating to atrocities committed during the second world war. 

Earlier this week Tusk unexpectedly waded into the contest by releasing a self-commissioned opinion poll that put Trzakowski ahead of Sikorski and whose result he called “clear”.

Trzaskowski won almost 75 per cent of the votes cast by 22,000 Civic Coalition members.

After announcing Trzaskowski’s victory, Tusk said: “We all know that this is the first step, that nobody will give our candidate anything for free . . . We will have to fight for every vote, convince every Polish woman, every Polish man until the last day of the [presidential] elections.”