Poland's presidential election tests Tusk's reform agenda and EU relations

Poland goes to the polls on 18 May to choose a successor to Andrzej Duda, the Law and Justice (PiS) president whose veto pen has paralysed Donald Tusk's coalition government for the past 18 months. The contest has narrowed to a duel between Rafal Trzaskowski, the Civic Platform mayor of Warsaw and the ruling alliance's standard-bearer, and Karol Nawrocki, an independent historian backed by PiS. What looked like a referendum on Poland's European direction has mutated into a bidding war over migration, welfare and allegiance to Washington.

Two candidates, one migration line

The most striking feature of the campaign is how little daylight separates the frontrunners on borders and asylum. Trzaskowski, a liberal by Polish standards, has endorsed the government's controversial suspension of the right to asylum at the Belarus frontier, a measure introduced in 2024 that Frontex and human rights organisations say contravenes international law. He has also pledged to cut benefits for unemployed Ukrainian refugees, of whom Poland hosts nearly a million. Nawrocki goes further, echoing the Confederation's Slawomir Mentzen in demanding that migrants crossing from Belarus be fired upon.

This convergence is no accident. Polling and focus groups reveal a broad anti-Ukrainian current cutting across party lines, including among Left voters. Bartosz Rydlinski of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University argues the sentiment is economic, not cultural: in a country where public healthcare and housing are scarce, many Poles resent newcomers they perceive as jumping the queue. "Most Ukrainians work and pay taxes," Rydlinski notes, "but the sense of injustice is irrational and politically potent."

The veto that froze a government

Since taking office in December 2023, Tusk's cabinet has passed legislation to reverse PiS's judicial overhaul, the very reforms that prompted the European Court of Justice to impose daily financial penalties on Poland from 2021 onward. Duda has vetoed or referred every major bill to the Constitutional Tribunal, a body stacked with PiS appointees. The result: the rule-of-law conditionality that unlocked EU recovery funds remains only partially satisfied, and the government's broader agenda, from liberalising abortion law to restructuring public media, sits in legislative limbo.

Ben Stanley of SWPS University puts it bluntly: a Nawrocki victory "will certainly lead to the maintenance of the situation as it is currently with a hostile president vetoing or threatening to veto what the government wants to do." That would affect not only judicial independence but the entire legislative programme. It would also, Stanley adds, "send a signal to voters that Law and Justice is capable of winning the next election", scheduled for November 2027, "and that if it does win, it will have its president in place."

Nawrocki's Atlanticist gamble

Nawrocki has made the US alliance the centrepiece of his foreign policy pitch. Earlier this month he travelled to Washington and, according to his campaign, secured Donald Trump's backing. At a rally in Zabrze he appeared alongside George Simion, the Romanian ultranationalist who won the first round of his country's presidential election on 4 May. Together they proclaimed a "Europe of Homelands" that would resist EU centralisation. Simion led chants of "Donald Trump!" and called the American president "a symbol of the fight for freedom which will transform the whole Europe."

The Atlanticist framing serves a domestic purpose. By positioning himself as Trump's man in Warsaw, Nawrocki signals to PiS voters that he will shield Poland from Brussels' demands, on migration quotas, climate targets, or judicial standards, while counting on American security guarantees against Russia. It is a high-wire act: Poland's defence modernisation depends on both NATO integration and EU defence funds, and Tusk's government has worked to deepen both.

Trzaskowski's defensive crouch

Trzaskowski's Krakow rally this week was a study in defensiveness. Blue EU flags fluttered beside Polish ones, and the candidate lectured his rival on "honesty, human decency, selflessness", a reference to allegations that Nawrocki bought a Gdansk flat from an elderly man in exchange for a care promise the family says was broken. Nawrocki says he will donate the property to charity and counters that families were evicted from municipal housing under Trzaskowski's mayoralty.

The personal attacks mask a strategic problem. Trzaskowski has muted his party's traditional commitments to women's rights and LGBTQ protections, calculating that the median Polish voter in 2025 cares more about prices and borders. His supporters in Krakow's Market Square told reporters they backed him because they want a "normal country" respected in the world. When pressed on the asylum suspension, one voter, Anna Szol, repeated the government line: the border is a NATO frontier manipulated by Putin and Lukashenko, and security trumps procedure.

The third man pulling the strings

Slawomir Mentzen, the Confederation leader polling a steady third, is the ghost at the feast. A tax adviser turned anti-establishment firebrand, he has called for live fire at the Belarus border, opposes all welfare for Ukrainians, and wants Poland out of the EU's Green Deal. His presence drags the Overton window rightward: both Trzaskowski and Nawrocki have adopted chunks of his platform to avoid being outflanked. Rydlinski warns that when mainstream parties accommodate populist demands, "they do not win populist voters, but lose their own." The Confederation's rise, from zero seats in 2019 to 18 in the 2023 Sejm, suggests the dynamic is already entrenched.

Ukraine, Belarus and the security frame

Poland's eastern border has been a flashpoint since 2021, when Belarus began channelling migrants toward the EU. The situation escalated after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which sent millions of refugees westward. Poland absorbed the largest share per capita of any European country. Three years on, the welcome has curdled. Housing shortages, healthcare waiting lists and a cooling labour market have turned solidarity into resentment. Both frontrunners now speak of Ukrainian refugees as a burden rather than a moral obligation, and both treat the Belarus border as a military frontier requiring exceptional measures.

This framing suits Warsaw's NATO allies, who rely on Poland as a logistical hub for Ukrainian aid. But it also hands rhetorical ammunition to the far right. If the only language of border security is suspension of rights, the distinction between a liberal government managing a crisis and a populist one exploiting it collapses. The European Commission has so far refrained from infringement proceedings over the asylum suspension, preferring quiet diplomacy. That calculus may change after 18 May.

Judicial repair: the unfinished business

The ECJ's penalties, initially €1 million per day, later reduced to €500,000, have cost Poland hundreds of millions of euros since 2021. The disputes centre on the Disciplinary Chamber of the Supreme Court, the National Council of the Judiciary's politicised composition, and the regime for appointing judges. Tusk's government has passed laws dismantling the Disciplinary Chamber and restoring competitive judicial appointments. Duda vetoed them. The Constitutional Tribunal, whose legitimacy the ECJ and the Venice Commission have both questioned, sits on the appeals.

A Trzaskowski presidency would not guarantee smooth sailing. The president can still refer laws to the Tribunal, delaying implementation by months. But he has pledged to sign the judicial repairs and to use the office's moral authority to pressure the Tribunal. Nawrocki, by contrast, has defended PiS's judicial model as a necessary correction to a "post-communist" judiciary. His advisers suggest he would pardon PiS officials convicted of abuse of office, a power the president holds exclusively.