A poll taken by the United Surveys agency for portal Wp.pl on support for potential candidates in the Polish presidential election due in the spring of 2025 has found that the mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, who in 2020 lost narrowly to the incumbent Andrzej Duda, is currently running in third place.
Trzaskowski trails both Szymon Hołownia, the speaker of parliament and leader of the centrist Poland 2050 party, which is currently in an alliance with the center-right Polish People’s Party (PSL), as well as Mateusz Morawiecki, the former prime minister in the last Law and Justice (PiS) government.
The poll shows that 24.8 percent of the sample backed Hołownia, 24.3 percent opted for Morawiecki, and only 22.2 percent supported Trzaskowski. Of those figures, Trzaskowski, who is regarded as the most likely candidate for Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO) in the presidential election, would fail to make it into the decisive second round of voting.
There are no officially declared candidates for president as yet. However, Szymon Hołownia has clearly signaled he intends to run and Trzaskowski, who is seeking re-election in local government elections to be held on April 7 of this year, is the front-runner for the KO nomination, providing that Tusk himself does not decide to stand.
The situation is less clear as far as PiS is concerned. Morawiecki seems to have the strongest potential support in the poll, with the former Prime Minister Beata Szydło trailing him at just 9 percent. However, the party leader Jarosław Kaczyński is reported to be considering fielding a “fresh face” in the presidential election next year.
The “fresh face” strategy of choosing a young candidate appears to be risky to Marcin Mastalerek, chief of staff to the incumbent Andrzej Duda. If the gamble does not pay off, it could lead to the PiS candidate failing to make the second round and the final runoff being between two candidates from the present ruling coalition.
The current liberal government is made up of KO, the Third Way and the Left party, but it is unlikely that they would agree to run a joint candidate in the presidential election, as all parties view it as a key to upholding their identity.
The Left has no obvious candidate, and as far as the opposition right-wing Confederation party is concerned, their choice of candidate is between deputy speaker Krzysztof Bosak. Bosak ran in 2020 and got a respectable 9 percent, but was backed by less than 2 percent of those surveyed in the United Surveys poll. Meanwhile, libertarian MP Sławomir Mentzen stood at 6.5 percent.
