Five conclusions from Poland's presidential election first round

The official results from the first round of the presidential election show a narrow victory for Rafał Trzaskowski (31.36%), the candidate of the centrist Civic Platform (PO), Poland's main ruling party, over Karol Nawrocki (29.54%), who is supported by the national-conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS).

They were followed by the far-right figures of Sławomir Mentzen (14.81%) and Grzegorz Braun (6.34%) in third and fourth. Szymon Hołownia (4.99%), another centrist, was fifth, followed by left-wing candidates Adrian Zandberg (4.86%) and Magdalena Biejat (4.23%).

Our editor-in-chief Daniel Tilles offers five conclusions from the first-round results – and looks ahead to what they may mean for the decisive second-round run-off on 1 June between Trzaskowski and Nawrocki.

Trzaskowski wins the battle but may lose the war

It is a strange thing to say about the person who won the first round, but Trzaskowski will be disappointed with the result.

His lead over Nawrocki is much narrower than polls had predicted. Even more problematically, the surge in votes for the far right and disappointing results for the other candidates from the ruling coalition, Hołownia and Biejat, make it much harder for him to chart a path to victory in the second round.

The first round results do not, of course, translate directly into what will happen in the second: some voters who turned up on Sunday may stay at home on June 1, and vice versa; it is hard to predict how the support for some candidates will split in the second round.

However, Trzaskowski now has the unenviable – and contradictory – goal of seeking to win some support from the left-wing and centrist voters who backed Zandberg, Biejat and Hołownia while also seeking to pick up at least some votes from those who backed the far-right Mentzen.

Opinion polls and bookmakers still make Trzaskowski the favorite to win the second round, but it is likely to be an extremely close race.

Novice Nawrocki continues to gather momentum

As I wrote at the start of this month , Nawrocki – a political novice who had never previously run for any elected office – grew into the campaign as he gained experience and recognition. That momentum has so far not been dented by the scandal that emerged over a second apartment owned by Nawrocki and the elderly, disabled man who lives there.

However, as I also previously wrote , the apartment scandal was less likely to affect Nawrocki in the first round – when he could rely on PiS's core voters – than in the second, when he needs to win support from outside the party's base.

Nevertheless, Nawrocki has reason for optimism ahead of June 1. He has a much clearer objective than Trzaskowski: to win over voters from other right-wing candidates and to boost turnout among PiS supporters. That will mean simply continuing what he has been doing already during the campaign, in which Nawrocki has presented himself as a tough, hard-right candidate.

The main difficulty he will face is that, while Mentzen and his voters may be aligned with PiS in their social conservatism, their economic libertarianism is completely at odds with PiS's support for generous social welfare and a strong role for the state in the economy.

In the 2020 election , those who voted for the Confederation candidate, Krzysztof Bosak, in the first round split almost 50-50 between the PiS-backed Duda and Trzaskowski in the second. Nawrocki will need to make sure he does much better than that this time around.

Far right riding high

Mentzen and Braun, who between them took over 21% of the vote, showed that the far right is a potent political force in Poland. That was a significant improvement on their result in the last presidential election, when Bosak won just under 7%.

The result achieved this time by Braun – who ran a campaign that was openly antisemitic , as well as anti-Ukrainian and anti-LGBT – is particularly striking.

While Mentzen has consistently performed strongly in the polls , Braun was initially seen as a fringe candidate, polling between 1-2% for much of the campaign. However, a series of stunts during the final weeks ahead of the vote, as well as the prominence given to him by the TV debates, propelled him to a strong result.

There are still big question marks over the future of the far right, however. First of all, it faces the perennial question of how to achieve power: on its own, it is almost certain never to achieve a majority; but if it aligned with either PiS or PO, the two main parties, that would completely undermine its anti-establishment message.

Second, there are clear tensions within the far right: Mentzen was meant to be their only candidate, but was then challenged by Braun, who was expelled from Confederation as a result.

However, that split may even work in favor of Confederation, whose attempts to establish itself as a political serious party have benefited from removing the extremely radical and controversial Braun, but which also retains the possibility to work with him and his faction in future.

A divided left

By the standards of recent years, when it has often been in the political wilderness, the left as a whole put in a solid performance in this election. Between them, Zandberg and Biejat took over 9% of the vote (which comes to more than 10% when including the 1.1% of the vote won by veteran left-winger Joanna Senyszyn).

That was much better than the results of the left-wing candidates in the last two presidential elections: 2.2% for Robert Biedroń in 2020 and 2.4% for Magdalena Ogórek in 2015.

However, the fact that left-wing votes this time were split fairly evenly between two candidates shows the problem that the left has with unity. Zandberg represents the “purist” wing, who stand for unabashed left-wing views regardless of the political circumstances or consequences. Biejat is from the “realist” camp that believes it is better to compromise and work with centrist parties in order to achieve at least some of their goals rather than none at all.

Tellingly, both candidates finished in this election with less than 5% of the vote: if their parties, Together (Razem) and The Left (Lewica), achieved such a result in parliamentary elections, they would fall below the threshold to enter parliament. That is precisely what happened in 2015, leaving parliament without any left-wing MPs at all.

Disappointment for Hołownia – and a warning to the ruling coalition

When Hołownia and his centrist Poland 2050 (Polska 2050) party agreed to join the coalition government in 2023 – and he himself took the prominent role of speaker of parliament – ​​they hoped it would be a springboard for his presidential ambitions.

In fact, it seems to have harmed him. Hołownia achieved a strong result as a newcomer and independent in the 2020 presidential election, this time around, as much as he tried to deny it, he was clearly standing as an establishment figure, part of a government that opinion polls indicate is not widely popular .

His result and Biejat's offer a warning to the ruling camp, but also to any smaller party that joins a governing coalition. PO and PiS, which have dominated Polish politics for two decades, have a habit of swallowing up smaller partners: see Modern (Nowoczesna) in the case of PO and Sovereign Poland (Suwerenna Polska) in the case of PiS.

With just over two years to go until the next parliamentary elections, expect to see the likes of Poland 2050, The Left and the Polish People's Party (PSL), the final element of the ruling camp, become more assertive as they seek to avoid political oblivion. That, in turn, will make it hard for Prime Minister Donald Tusk of PO to marshal his coalition on controversial issues.

Main image credits: Zala/Wikimedia Commons , under CC BY-SA 4.0 ; Czarnecki Radosław/Wikimedia Commons , under CC BY-SA 4.0 ; Tomasz Molina/Wikimedia Commons , under CC BY-SA 4.0 ; CzarneckiRadek/Wikimedia Commons , under CC BY-SA 4.0 ; Mikołaj Bujak/IPN (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL ); Trzaskowsk.pl ; Braun2025.pl ; Klub Lewicy/Flickr (under public domain). Collage created by Agata Pyka