Szymon Hołownia, the speaker of Poland’s parliament, has questioned the financing of the campaign of the right-wing Confederation party’s presidential candidate Sławomir Mentzen, saying it reminded him of what happened in Romania’s elections last year.
Mentzen’s poll ratings have been improving markedly since February and, according to several polls, he is neck and neck with the Conservative (PiS) candidate Karol Nawrocki in the race for a second place required to make it into the run-off second ballot of the Polish election.
Both Mentzen and Nawrocki trail the front runner, the Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, who is standing for Tusk’s Civic Platform, by more than 10 per cent in the polls.
Speaking to Polish public radio on March 21 Hołownia, coalition partner in the centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who is the Third Way alliance presidential candidate polling between 4-8 per cent in surveys, questioned the surge in support for Mentzen.
He also said he would like to know where the Confederation party was getting its money from to fund, what he alleged, were tens of thousands of its election banners.
“Mentzen will have to show where he is getting the financing for his lavish campaign which he started even before the election had officially been declared. I’d like to know where he’s been getting the money for all this,” said Hołownia, who also leads the centrist Poland 2050 party.
He then compared the situation to the events in Romania.
“We saw all kinds of things in Romania and other places. I would like to know where all these tens of thousands of banners in his support have come from and hope that the Confederation party will be held to account for this spending as it’s of the order of tens of millions of Polish zloty.”
Hołownia’s remarks came in the wake of a decision by the Polish election regulator (PKW) to reject the financial report of the Confederation party for the 2024 European parliamentary elections, which will see the party’s State funding stopped.
The Polish Government had already halted State funding for the PiS, the largest opposition party, despite a court order for that to be restored. The government did not recognise the legitimacy of the chamber of the Supreme Court that made the decision.
In Romania, Călin Georgescu, an independent right-wing candidate, surged in the final weeks of that country’s presidential election to top the polls in November last year.
Despite that, the run-off between him and the centrist Elena Lasconi, who came second to him in the first round of voting, never took place. That was because the country’s Constitutional Court decided to annul the whole election due to allegations of “Russian influence” and alleged election funding violations by Georgescu’s campaign.
The Romanian presidential election is set to be re-run and Georgescu, who was polling more than 40 per cent in the latest opinion surveys, has been barred from standing by the election regulator and the Constitutional Court, having earlier been detained on charges relating to his campaign and alleged extreme political views.
