Rafal Trzaskowski will be the candidate of the current Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s party in the next presidential elections in Poland. If he wins, both the prime minister and the president will be the expression of the same political movement: the Civic Coalition.
Problems with the government
Trzaskowski is mayor of Warsaw, but he had already run for president in 2020 where he was defeated, albeit very slightly, by the current president Andrzej Duda, close to the far-right Law and Justice (PiS) party. Until last December, the government was also led by PiS, with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
Since last year, the Polish executive has been led by the popular Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council and leader of a liberal and pro-European government coalition. The change of government sparked celebrations from progressive Poles and relief from Brussels, where eight years of PiS rule had put Poland in conflict with European bodies.
When the new government took office, however, Duda still had a year left in his mandate. In this period of “cohabitation”, the president has repeatedly vetoed legislation presented by the government, complicating the use work. This is why the next presidential elections take on particular significance as “depending on the result, the government will be able to govern and reform effectively, or not”, explained Wojciech Przybylski, of the Visegrad Insight thinktank in Warsaw.
The race for president
The announcement that the Civic Coalition’s candidate for president was the mayor of Warsaw came last Saturday, after Trzaskowski won the party’s internal primaries, beating the current Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski. “I have a very strong mandate and a lot of energy, determination and courage to beat PiS,” Trzaskowski said.
Poland remains deeply polarized and next spring’s vote promises to be hotly contested. It is expected that other candidates in addition to the representatives of the PiS and the People’s Party will also present themselves in the presidential race, but that the run-off will most likely be between Trzaskowski and the new PiS candidate Karol Nwrocki, chosen by the party president Jaroslaw Kaczynski because Duda cannot run for a third term.
