Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski has suffered a blow after his party decided to hold a primary contest to select the presidential candidate in which his rival, Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, appears to have the upper hand.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on November 9 announced that his liberal Civic Coalition (KO), the major force in the ruling government, would hold a primary ballot to choose its candidate for the presidential election due in the spring of 2025 during the term of Poland’s presidency of Council of the European Union.
The choice for the KO presidential candidate will be between Sikorski and Trzaskowsk, the latter of which narrowly lost the 2020 presidential election to Law and Justice (PiS) party incumbent Andrzej Duda, currently serving his second and final term in office.
Tusk, having kept his word that he would not stand for president himself, has opted for a primary to choose the presidential candidate between two candidates who for months have made it plain they would like to run. Both have also pledged that they would support the winner should it not be them.
Speaking at a press conference after a meeting of his party’s ruling body on November 9, Tusk said Trzaskowski had proposed a primary election in November to choose the candidate. He added that both candidates were “excellent”.
According to a source within the KO “this is a ‘Pontius Pilate’ style action by Tusk so that he does not have to choose between his foreign minister and the Warsaw mayor. But it’s good for the party as it will dominate the public space with our two candidates for the next couple of weeks”.
Both Trzaskowski and Sikorski are equally well known but it is the Warsaw mayor who is believed to hold sway among party members and Liberal-leaning voters.
Sikorski had no choice but to accept the primary process once the hoped-for backing of him by Tusk failed to materialise.
The foreign minister’s pitch was that the ruling party needed to broaden its appeal to the centre-right, concentrating on security issues.
In a social media post on X opening his primary campaign, Sikorski said: “The presidential elections will be about Poland’s security. The primaries should produce a candidate who will be effective in these uncertain times.”
He has also claimed he was better known internationally than his rival and would have a more prominent platform in international affairs than him.
This is the third time Sikorski has sought the KO’s nomination to run for president. He lost in internal primaries to Bronisław Komorowski, who went on to become president in 2010, and the party’s executive body nominated Trzaskowski over Sikorski in 2020.
The election in the spring of next year will be keenly contested because Poland’s head of state has the power to veto legislation and control appointments in the armed forces and senior judiciary.
The other parties in Tusk’s ruling coalition, the Left and the centrist Third Way alliance, have yet to choose their candidates but will be doing so because Tusk has ruled out there being a joint candidate agreed for the presidential election representing all the parties in his government.
So far, the only candidate that has been publicly announced for the presidential elections is Sławomir Mentzen, one of the leaders of the right-wing opposition Confederation party.
The largest opposition party, the PiS that ruled Poland between 2015 and 2023, is currently mulling its members’ choice of presidential nominee between several candidates, including former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, head of the PiS parliamentary caucus Mariusz Błaszczak and ex-education minister Przemysław Czarnek, but does not plan to hold primaries.
The choice of the PiS presidential candidate is in the hands of party founder and leader Jarosław Kaczyński who himself unsuccessfully contested the presidency in 2010, after which he said he would not stand again.
