Poland’s radical right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party’s presidential election candidate Karol Nawrocki has swung to the far right in the last days of campaign, as he seeks to pick up every single vote in the extremely tight race for the Polish presidency.

Nawrocki typically trails the liberal mayor of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski in the polls ahead of the run-off vote on June 1 but the margin is anything but conclusive, coming in at below three percentage points in most surveys. That is a fairly strong indication that the actual result of the election will be very close, with less than 500,000 votes separating the rivals.

In the final stretch of the campaign, seeking to win over voters who backed the far-right Sławomir Mentzen and his former party colleague Grzegorz Braun, Nawrocki has gone for endorsing any and all of their policy points.

Nawrocki says he is opposed to liberalising Poland’s strict abortion laws – a standpoint he has long followed – but would also end the annual Hanukah celebrations in the presidential palace, a nod to Braun, who gained notoriety for snuffing out Hanukah candles in the Polish parliament last year.

In another nod to the far-right, Nawrocki also doubled down on foreign policy saying he would “stop the Ukrainisation of Poland,” a slogan Braun is disseminating alongside claims Ukrainians are being given privileges over Poles and are a burden on the economy (research has shown it is the opposite).

Braun who won 6.3% of the first-round vote, publicly asked seven questions of the remaining two candidates ahead of the second round. 

Braun's questions were several hot-button issues, including their stance on the ongoing support of Ukraine, their position on abortion, mandatory vaccinations, euthanasia and the EU’s Green Deal. He also asked candidates whether they would continue the exhumation of victims of the pogrom at Jedwabne in 1941 and “reject Jewish property compensation claims” against Poland.

Trzaskowski has not responded, ruling out flat cosying up to Braun for his anti-EU, anti-Ukrainian and anti-Semitic messaging.

Nawrocki, however, said in a written response to Braun he would “defend Poland against disgusting attacks” by liberal historians and scholars, “protect life from conception” and seek to penalise the “glorification” of the World War Two-era Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who is an icon for Ukraine’s own right-wing nationalists, Notes from Poland reported.

Nawrocki also said he would never send troops to Ukraine but remained vague about Poland’s ongoing support of Kyiv as part of the EU’s programmes and military supplies. 

He did, however, promise to “take action to unilaterally terminate the Migration Pact and the Green Deal.”

The EU’s emissions reduction programme has hit farmers hard, who make up a key voter constituency in Poland, with new restrictions and increased costs that have been very unpopular – not least because of massive amounts of disinformation about them that the far-right has helped spread.

Rural voters also tend to vote for the right wing parties, according to the first-round results.

Nawrocki dodged the antisemitic questions, but on compensation said “all claims stemming from German war actions should be directed to Berlin, not to Warsaw.”

Poland presidential election first round results May 18
Candidate	Party Affiliation	Vote Share (%)
Rafał Trzaskowski	Civic Platform (KO, backed by Tusk)	31.36%
Karol Nawrocki	Independent (backed by PiS)	29.54%
Sławomir Mentzen	Confederation (right-wing)	14.81%
Grzegorz Braun	Confederation (right-wing)	6.34%
Szymon Hołownia	Poland 2050	4.99%
Adrian Zandberg	Razem	4.86%
Magdalena Biejat	The Left	4.23%
Krzysztof Stanowski	Independent	1.24%
Joanna Senyszyn	SLD	1.09%
Marek Jakubiak	Free Republicans	0.77%
Artur Bartoszewicz	Independent	0.49%
Maciej Maciak	Independent	0.19%
Marek Woch	Nonpartisan	0.09%
Source: Central Election Committee

Voter turnout was 67.31%, with particularly high participation in urban areas such as Warsaw (79.29%) and Kraków (75.14%). 

Voting patterns showed better-educated residents of Poland’s urban centres countrywide and those living in smaller towns in the west tended to support Trzaskowski. Voters living in smaller towns and villages voted for Nawrocki, especially in the east and the south-east of the country.

Both Nawrocki and Trzaskowski have also been wooing Confederation party leader Sławomir Mentzen, who won 14.8% in the first roundm, putting him in third place. 

Mentzen has made eight demands of the candidates if they want his endorsement in the next round of voting. Nawrocki has signed off on all of them during a live stream with Mentzen on the latter's YouTube channel, watched by hundreds of thousands of people.

Days later in the same setting, Trzaskowski refused to do so, his calculus being not to discourage his liberal and centre-left leaning voter base.
 
Politically, Mentzen is much closer to Nawrocki than Trzaskowski. Analyses have shown that if he can win over the supporters of both Mentzen and Braun that might be enough to clinch the presidency, despite his first-round defeat.

Trzaskowski does have a way of neutralising that threat, however – by rallying those voters who stayed home for the first round, disillusioned by the track record of the government led by Donald Tusk, Trzaskowski’s party boss. 

Mentzen has not come out in support of either of the two candidates yet, but many of the MPs in his party have endorsed Nawrocki.

A poll by UCE Research for Onet, a liberal-leaning news outlet, found that just over half (54%) of Braun’s voters from the first round will support Nawrocki in the second, while 12% would back Trzaskowski, and the remainder are still unsure or planning to abstain.

Another poll of Mentzen’s voters found just over 60% planned to vote for Nawrocki with 15% supporting Trzaskowski, and the rest saying they may not vote at all.