Opposition Conservative candidate Karol Nawrocki has won the Polish presidential election, beating Rafał Trzaskowski, the candidate of the ruling centre-left coalition led by Polish prime minister Donald Tusk.
Polling station results state Nawrocki won 50.9 percent of the vote against 49.1 percent for Trzaskowski.
Earlier exit polls had given Trzaskowski a wafer thin lead of 50.2 to 50.3 percent, but pollsters warned that the margin of error was one percent: an estimate which turned out to be prophetic.
Karol Nawrocki is a 42 year old historian who currently serves as head of Poland’s National Institute of Remembrance, the state body investigating and documenting German Nazi and communist era crimes.
A relative political novice, he was a former amateur heavyweight boxing regional champion. Hailing from, Gdańsk, Nawrocki comes from a working class background and has admitted to having been involved in skirmishes between football supporters in his youth.
Throughout the election campaign he was dogged by attempted smears. It was claimed he had acquired a municipal apartment from a senior citizen offering care but had allegedly failed to fully honour his side of the bargain. There were separate claims, which he denied, that he had connections to the underworld. Prime minister Donald Tusk in a televised interview on May 26 accused Nawrocki of pimping in a Gdansk hotel for which the PiS president-elect was a security guard. Nawrocki has denied the allegation and is in the process of suing liberal leaning German-Swiss owned portal Onet for publishing the claim.
Having fought such a bitter campaign to stop Nawrocki, cohabitation between PM Tusk and the new president will be challenging.
The Polish PM will now find it hard to force through his legislative agenda on judicial reform, the liberalisation of abortion legislation and the introduction of civil partnerships for same sex couples.
Tusk’s immediate challenge will be to hold his governing coalition together as it is likely to come under pressure from both PiS and the right-wing Confederation party, who are likely to argue that they rather than Tusk have a mandate to lead the country.
During the campaign, Nawrocki promised he would oppose Ukrainian membership of NATO and any presence of Polish troops in Ukraine. He is also an opponent of any further EU integration as well as the EU’s Green Deal and Migration Pact.
Nawrocki in early May met US president Donald Trump and received the backing of the US administration for his pro-US stance.
The PiS’s president elect, after taking his oath of office in the Polish parliament, will in early August replace the current PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda, who is finishing his second and final five-year term.
As president, Nawrocki will head the armed forces, and will enjoy the right to veto legislation and appoint judges.
The election result can still be challenged in the Supervisory Chamber of Poland’s Supreme Court, a body Tusk’s government claims is illegitimate as a result of European Court of Justice rulings against the last PiS government’s judicial reforms.
