Poland presidential election 2025: From migration to EU, what’s at stake?

May 16, 2025
radmin

The two main contenders for Poland’s presidential election on Sunday locked horns over Europe and traded personal barbs this week as they each made final bids for the support of floating voters.

The winner will take over from current President Andrzej Duda, of the nationalist conservative Law and Justice party, at a crucial point when neighbouring Ukraine is battling Russia, and when cooperation between the government and the president is vital to push through reforms.

Looking visibly tired at his rally on Tuesday, Rafal Trzaskowski of the ruling centre-right Civic Platform, stood on a platform at Krakow’s central Market Square amid a large crowd cheering his name, blue European flags fluttering beside the white-and-red Polish ones.

“I didn’t think it would be necessary to remind all of us, especially my main competitor, that honesty is the most important thing, human decency is the most important thing, and selflessness is the most important thing,” said Trzaskowski, referring to a recent news story about his competitor Karol Nawrocki, an independent candidate supported by the opposition Law and Justice party, which ruled Poland between 2015 and 2023.

Nawrocki allegedly purchased a flat in Gdansk belonging to an elderly man in exchange for a promise to provide him with care. According to the man’s family, the promise was not fulfilled, and he was placed in a state nursing home.

In response, Nawrocki has said he will donate the flat to charity and pointed out that under Trzaskowski’s mayorship, families had been evicted from state accommodation in Warsaw.

Nawrocki’s rally in Zabrze took a different tone – and featured a special guest. Alongside George Simion, the ultranationalist winner of the first round of Romania’s presidential election on May 4, Nawrocki took aim at the EU.

“Together with Romania, when George Simion wins and when we win on May 18, we will build a Europe of Homelands, in which we will not allow the European Union to centralise and turn Poland and Romania into its provinces,” Nawrocki said.

Simion, together with the crowd, chanted “Donald Trump!” and called the United States president “a symbol of the fight for freedom which will transform the whole Europe”. Earlier this month, Nawrocki, who argues that Poland should focus on an alliance with the US rather than the EU, met with Trump in the White House and allegedly received his backing.

Embracing anti-migrant rhetoric – on all sides

In the race for floating votes, both candidates have eased up on some of their parties’ more traditional positions. Nawrocki has abandoned Law and Justice’s commitment to a welfare state in exchange for a message of free market liberalism.

The more liberal Trzaskowski, for his part, has kept relatively quiet about women’s and LGBTQ rights, and embraced a harder line on security and immigration by promising to cut benefits for unemployed Ukrainians who have taken refuge in Poland from the war with Russia and endorsing his government’s suspension of asylum rights last year over what Poland sees as Belarus facilitating migrants to cross their shared border.

Security and anti-migrant rhetoric have been a key feature in this election, as both main candidates lean closer to the views of the populist Slawomir Mentzen, a tax adviser turned leader of the ultranationalist, conservative Confederation party. He has called for migrants crossing from Belarus to be fired upon, is opposed to welfare payments for Ukrainians and is likely to emerge as third in the presidential race.

“In public opinion polls and focus groups, among all voters, including voters of the new left, there has been a visible anti-Ukrainian trend, which has social and economic rather than cultural roots,” said Bartosz Rydlinski, a political scientist from Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw.

“Poles are not angry at Ukrainians for living separately or not speaking Polish. [But] in a country with highly limited access to public services, there is an irrational sense of injustice. There is a sense that Ukrainians do not work, but use healthcare. Which is nonsense, because most Ukrainians work and pay taxes.”

Trzaskowski rally — Anna Szol, 48, an entrepreneur, attends Trzaskowski’s presidential rally in Krakow on May 13 with her daughter [Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska/Al Jazeera]

‘I want to live in a normal country’

At the Krakow meeting, amid the sea of Polish and European flags, the crowd rallied for value-based politics – and change.

“I want to live in a normal country, I want my daughter to grow up in a normal country, in a country with a positive attitude, without any negative emotions. Poland deserves to develop, to be respected in the world and that is why I came here today,” Anna Szol, a 48-year-old entrepreneur, who joined Trzaskowski’s rally with her daughter, told Al Jazeera.

When asked about the situation at the Polish-Belarusian border – where, since 2021, thousands of migrants to Europe have crossed – and the suspension of asylum rights, Szol, just like her candidate, said she agrees that the move is justified.

“This is the result of Putin’s and Lukashenko’s actions to send to the border poor people who are not aware of what’s going on. Human traffickers are often involved. This is a NATO border and it simply has to be extra secure,” Szol said.

However, Rydlinski said such a suspension of human rights would embolden the far-right agenda in the longer term and weaken liberal parties.

“The difference between liberal and populist parties should be that liberal parties treat human rights seriously,” Rydlinski says. “Research shows that when liberal and left-wing parties accommodate far-right issues, they do not win populist voters, but lose their own.”

Pushing through reforms

The winner of this presidential election will be crucial for the current government, which has been hamstrung from carrying out reforms by the current president, who has used his power of veto to block them.

This includes the reversal of controversial judicial reforms introduced by the Law and Justice government during its eight-year rule. The European Court of Justice deemed several Law and Justice judicial reforms as contradicting EU law, especially regarding the independence of the judiciary, and imposed penalties on Poland beginning in 2021.

“What is at stake in the election is whether the current government is going to be able to carry out its programme in full. One of the key things that has been characteristic of the political scene over the last 18 months is that the government has been essentially blocked in a number of things that it has committed to do,” said Ben Stanley, a sociologist and political scientist at the SWPS University in Warsaw.

“If Nawrocki wins, it 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 will affect both the rule of law issues and also many of the elements on the government’s legislative agenda,” Stanley said.

“It will also send a signal to voters that Law and Justice is capable of winning the next election and that if it does win the next elections [in November 2027], it will have its president in place.”

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Bryan, Parole Board and Fountain Valley Participants Ask Court for Summary Judgment

Parties locked in an ongoing dispute over the legality of the V.I. Parole Board and the enforcement of the territory’s medical and geriatric parole law each asked a Superior Court judge this week to issue a summary judgment in their favor.
The filings came more than a month after Judge Alphonso Andrews Jr. granted a temporary restraining order to the government, which argued that the board has lacked a quorum for two and a half years. The Justice Department filed an emergency motion on behalf of Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. in May to halt parole proceedings after three men convicted for participating in the so-called Fountain Valley killings and another convicted of aggravated rape applied for parole under a new law establishing parole eligibility on medical or geriatric grounds. Bryan signed the measure into law as Act 8791 last January.
During the hearing in June, Assistant Attorney General Christopher Timmons said the board is supposed to have seven members but has only had three since December 2022. The board’s current members are Dennis Howell, Chesley Roebuck and Bentley Thomas, and Attorney General Gordon Rhea also sits on the board as a nonvoting member. Timmons argued that the board’s lack of a quorum prevents it from taking any action.
The government further argued that Act 8791, applied retroactively, “unconstitutionally violates the separation of powers, and is therefore invalid under the Revised Organic Act.”
Andrews granted the government’s request for a TRO (temporary restraining order) after agreeing with the quorum issue, effectively putting all parole decisions made over the past two and a half years in limbo.
Andrews indicated that the question of Act 8791’s constitutionality could be dealt with later.
The government argued in its most recent filing that statutes “are presumed to be applied prospectively, and not retroactively” and that “retroactive application of the geriatric parole statute would impair the rights of the People because eligibility for parole is part of the prosecution of a case and is to be determined at the time of sentencing.”
“To the extent that the geriatric parole statute gives eligibility to prisoners who would otherwise never become eligible for parole… retroactive application would impair the sentencing right of the judge who sentenced them; it would impair the rights of the prosecutors who determined which charges to bring and which penalties to seek; and it would impair the rights of the general public who prior enactment [sic] of the geriatric parole law could rest assured that these violent and notorious criminals never walk the streets again,” Timmons wrote.
For their part in the Fountain Valley killings, which left eight people dead and at least eight more wounded, Warren Ballantine, 76, Beaumont Gereau, 68, and Meral Smith, 74, were sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences in prison. At the time of their sentencing, Virgin Islands law required them to serve a minimum of 10 years for each life sentence in order to be eligible for parole. Timmons argued that 80 years’ imprisonment was “for all intents and purposes longer than their anticipated lifespans.”
“It was clearly the Court’s intent that they are not eligible for parole ever,” he wrote. “To in essence overturn the Court’s determination that Defendants Ballentine [sic], Gereau, and Smith never see the outside of a prison clearly invades the power and authority of the judiciary in a way that cannot be compensated monetarily.”
Timmons later argued that Tydel John, 74, has only served a decade of his 50-year sentence and wouldn’t be eligible for parole for another five years, unless approved by two thirds of the Parole Board.
An attorney for Ballantine, Gereau, Smith and John said in a filing of their own that the statute at the time of their sentencing gave the Parole Board discretion to grant parole earlier.
“In other words,” attorney Vincent Colianni II wrote, the trial court knew “that they could be paroled literally at any time if the parole board, with the approval of the governor, determined that early parole was warranted.”
The government also argued that retroactively applying Act 8791 harmed Bryan, who previously “had control” over parole eligibility.
“He has been stripped of this authority and control in a way that cannot be compensated,” Timmons wrote.
An attorney representing members of the Parole Board, who asked the judge to either dismiss the case or declare summary judgment in their favor, fiercely rejected any suggestion of harm to Bryan.
“First,” attorney Pedro Williams wrote in an 18-page memorandum of law, “if the injunction is removed, there is no certainty that the Board of Parole will approve Parole applications for the applications in question. Secondly, even if the Board of Parole does approve the applicants’ parole applications, Plaintiff/Governor still retains the option to appropriately challenge the Board of Parole’s decision at that time.”
Williams repeatedly noted that Bryan himself signed the measure into law and called the government’s argument about the board’s lack of a quorum “simply wrong,” arguing that the board only has fewer than four members because Bryan failed to appoint more.
“There have been vacancies on the Board of Parole for many years,” he wrote. “Thus, Plaintiff/Governor cannot be heard to complain about a situation that he created or because he failed to fulfill his statutory duties.”
Williams also cited statute and a section of the board’s bylaws which states that the “affirmative votes of three… members of the Board shall be necessary to authorize any action of the Board.” The government has repeatedly argued that the board still needs a four-member quorum for any vote to be legitimate.
The next hearing on the matter is scheduled for Sept. 8 on St. Croix.

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