In Poland, presidential hopefuls battle for young voters who don't like them

Boston Globe

2 days ago

In a first round of voting on May 18, voters aged 18 to 29 overwhelmingly supported antiestablishment candidates who failed to make it to the runoff. They mostly shunned the candidates competing Sunday, who represent Poland's two dominant political parties -- Civic Platform, led by Tusk; and Law and Justice, the former governing party led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
The runoff pits Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw who is backed by Tusk's party, against Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist historian and former boxer supported by Law and Justice.
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Coming only two weeks after a presidential election in Romania in which voters chose a centrist over a hard-right admirer of President Trump, Poland's vote is being closely watched in Europe and the United States as a test of right-wing populism's staying power.
'Don't let the globalists and unelected bureaucrats steal your elections, as they did in Romania,' George Simion, the defeated hard-right candidate in Romania, told a gathering in Poland this past week of the American Conservative Political Action Conference. Kristi Noem, Trump's homeland security secretary who also spoke at the event, endorsed the Law and Justice candidate.
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What American and European fans of Trump see as a climactic battle between left and right is seen by many young Polish voters as an infuriating rerun of a decades-old struggle.
'You only get angry looking at system politicians,' said Jan Stachura, 20, a student in Tychy, a town in Poland's former industrial heartland in the southwestern region of Silesia.
He said he had voted for neither of Sunday's contenders in the first round on May 18 and did not know whether he would even bother to vote in the runoff.
His brother, Wojciech, 24, an IT manager, said he did not vote in the first round and probably would not on Sunday. Given the grip of the two main parties, he said, 'I don't believe my vote can change anything.'
Tusk, 68, and Kaczynski, 75, first entered politics more than 40 years ago when Poland was still a Soviet satellite.
After Poland joined the European Union in 2004 -- 15 years after communism collapsed -- they emerged as leaders of two hostile camps: one committed to embracing the values and rules of the European Union, the other infused with nationalism and fealty to the Roman Catholic Church.
They have rotated in and out of power since, leaving Polish politics in a repetitive loop.
Kaczynski accuses Tusk of being a 'German agent' more interested in serving Berlin and Brussels than ordinary Poles. Tusk has attacked his rival as a populist reactionary intent on dismantling democracy and withdrawing Poland from the European Union.
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Trzaskowski won the first round barely ahead of Nawrocki. Whether Trzaskowski can prevail on Sunday depends heavily on how young voters who backed the far right and leftists in the first round cast their ballots.
A widespread plague-on-both-your-houses feeling among younger Poles has brought unusual volatility to politics, said Tomasz Slupik, a political-science professor at the University of Silesia.
Only 22 percent of voters under 30, according to exit poll data, cast their ballots in the first round for the two candidates competing on Sunday. Nearly 70 percent voted instead for far-right candidates and fringe leftists, with more than half of them supporting Slawomir Mentzen, a libertarian who is hostile to Ukrainian refugees, taxes, and the European Union.
'This might be the beginning of the end of Poland's party duopoly,' Slupik said. Young voters' disillusionment, he added, was partly the rebellious spirit of youth amplified by social media. But, he added, it also reflected a deeper erosion of trust across generations, despite Poland's booming economy and its emergence as a diplomatic and military player in Europe.
The Polish presidency has no say in setting policy, but its veto power over legislation passed by the government allowed the departing president, Andrzej Duda, an ally of Kaczynski, to thwart much of Tusk's agenda.
Victory for Nawrocki on Sunday would probably mean more trench warfare between the rival camps, hobbling Tusk's ability to govern and clouding his party's prospects in the next parliamentary election in 2027.
Speaking at a rally for Trzaskowski in Warsaw last weekend, Tusk warned this would bring disaster, describing Nawrocki as a 'gangster' unfit for the presidency. 'Poland, wake up! This cannot be!' he said.
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Anna Liebner, 29, a Tychy resident who manages fiber optic networks, said she voted in the first round for Adrian Zandberg, a leftist who came in sixth in the first round. Liebner liked some of his policy ideas, including higher taxes on the wealthy.
Kamil Poczta, 30, an IT worker, said he, too, had voted for Zandberg in the hope of breaking the Civic Platform-Law and Justice cycle.
Nonetheless, Poczta and Liebner both said they would vote for Trzaskowski.
More uncertain is which way Mentzen's voters, mostly young men, will jump, though a recent opinion poll indicated that around 65 percent of them would vote for Nawrocki.
If that turns out to be accurate, Nawrocki could well win.
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