Karol Nawrocki, the main opposition Conservatives (PiS) candidate in May’s Polish presidential election, has according to the latest opinion poll taken a shock lead and is projected to defeat Donald Tusk’s proxy, Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski.
Pollster OGB, whose data proved to be the most accurate in predicting the result of Poland’s European Parliamentary election in 2024, has conducted a survey published on January 27 in which the PiS candidate Karol Nawrocki is shown to have the support of 51 per cent in an eventual June 1 run-off against Rafał Trzaskowski, the candidate of Tusk’s Civic Coalition.
OGB has also released ratings for all the presidential candidates in the first round of voting due on May 18. Here it is Trzaskowski who holds a lead polling 36 per cent to Nawrocki’s 32 per cent, with a strong third place for the right-wing Confederation party’s candidate Sławomir Mentzen who has 16 per cent of the vote.
The advantage in the run-off for Nawrocki comes as a result of the poor showing of the other pro-Tusk coalition candidates, the Speaker of Parliament Szymon Hołownia (5 per cent), and the Left party’s Magdalena Biejat who has 3 per cent, the same as the support for right-wing maverick MEP Grzegorz Braun, notorious for his attack with a fire extinguisher on a lit menorah in the Polish parliament during Hanukkah.
This is the first major presidential survey conducted since the arrival in office of President Donald Trump in the US, an event greeted with enthusiasm by PiS, and the first of any showing Nawrocki beating Trzaskowski.
Surveys published recently, but before Trump’s inauguration, showed Trzaskowski with a comfortable advantage of between 5-10 per cent over Nawrocki and with Confederation’s Mentzen at around 12 per cent.
The gains being made by the Right are also confirmed in opinion surveys on the popularity of the political parties which are beginning to show PiS slightly ahead of Tusk’s party and being able to form a future government with Confederation, as well as showing the popularity of the government declining.
On the same day as the publication of the OGB poll the pro-Tusk liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza published a story attacking Nawrocki for alleged misuse of an apartment owned by the Word War II Museum in Gdansk while he was its executive director. The story included unsubstantiated allegations coming from an anonymous source about what the apartment may have been used for, with the paper claiming that their source was too scared of Nawrocki to reveal any details.
The PiS candidate has previously been criticised for having contacts with criminals as a result of his participation in a gym and boxing club and a social media post went viral allegedly showing an image of him giving a nationalist salute which turned out to be a photograph of someone else.
PiS MP Michał Woś told conservative portal DoRzeczy that “this paper is trying to create a stink without producing any evidence” and that it had no evidence of any financial or other impropriety having taken place.
He added that “when you read the insinuations it runs out that they aren’t actually about Nawrocki himself. If that is all they have on him then it just shows that he is a strong candidate and they are afraid of him.”
Karol Nawrocki is a conservative historian who has served as director of the World War II Museum in Gdańsk and is currently the head of the Polish Remembrance Institute, a body which conducts research into Poland’s war-time and communist period history. He is supported by PiS but is not a member of that party.
