Presidential election in Poland: a close vote and rising mobilization
Poles will vote this Sunday, June 1st, in the second round of the presidential election. The two rivals still in the running are neck and neck, and the result is likely to be extremely close, according to the Polish press. Liberal Rafal Trzaskowski is facing off against national conservative Karol Nawrocki at the polls.
On Sunday, June 1st , Poles will be called upon to choose their future president in the second round of a hotly contested presidential election. Warsaw's liberal mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, from the Civic Coalition (KO) – the party of Prime Minister Donald Tusk – is facing off against Karol Nawrocki, a conservative historian who enjoys the support of the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which was in power between 2015 and 2023.
In the first round, which took place on May 18, Trzaskowski received 31.36% of the vote. But the narrow margin over his opponent Nawrocki, who received 29.54% of the vote, and the breakthrough of the far right (21%) surprised analysts. This was a shock for the center-right, in power since 2023, which had hoped to end a stormy cohabitation and was forced into a corner by unfulfilled election promises.
"The ruling coalition lost two million voters" in the first round, political scientist Wojciech Rafalkowski wrote in the business daily Dziennik Gazeta Prawna . "Many voters [who had brought the coalition to power] , reassured by the good polls, did not go to the polls on May 18," the Catholic-inspired weekly Tygodnik Powszechny reported .
After two weeks of intense campaigning, a presidential debate in which the two candidates pitted themselves against each other, and two mobilizing marches in each of the two camps, Rafal Trzaskowski seems to have regained some
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