The Presidential Campaign Has Started in Poland

The campaign to elect the next president of Poland is heating up, even though the election is scheduled for May next year.

Politico writes about it.

Formally, the position of president in Poland is not very powerful. However, the president has the ability to block much of what the government wants to do. And incumbent President Andrzej Duda has been doing just that with the administration of Prime Minister Donald Tusk - preventing it from implementing much of its election programme and even refusing to sign off on the government's ambassadorial nominees.

‘The president is not formally very powerful, but he has a position that is extremely important for the country and Polish democracy,’ said Jacek Kucharczyk, head of the Warsaw-based think tank Institute of Public Affairs.

The change in the presidency has implications for the government's programme, as well as for the survival of the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, which lost power in last year's parliamentary elections. Duda has completed his second five-year term and is therefore not eligible to run again

The likely date of the first round is May 2025. If no one wins an absolute majority, a second round with the top two candidates will take place two weeks later.

This Friday, Tusk is holding a rally with Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, the likely candidate of his centrist Civic Platform, to help kick off the campaign season - although the party is not likely to formally name its candidate until later in the year.

Tusk says he is not running.

‘I am not going to run,’ he said last week.

Trzaskowski, 52, is deeply disliked by conservatives for his strong record on LGBTQ+ issues and his secular tendencies, such as his removal of crosses from city offices in Warsaw. But Trzaskowski already has a very high national profile, having run for president in 2020, when Duda beat him by a narrow margin.