Looking for a fresh face
Trzaskowski, currently the mayor of the capital, was announced as the candidate of the largest opposition force, the center-right Civic Coalition, in May, after elections were postponed to June due to the coronavirus pandemic.
A complicated compromise meant that while elections were not formally postponed, the term was allowed to pass without anyone actually voting.
The delay gave the Civic Coalition the chance to replace its previous, much weaker, candidate, Malgorzata Kidawa-Blonska.
The Warsaw mayor blasted onto the stage, rapidly collecting 1.6 million signatures to support his candidacy, instead of the 100,000 required, in a matter of days.
“The authorities decided to hinder us and gave us only a few days to collect signatures,” Trzaskowski told supporters while registering his candidacy. “They have released an incredible energy, an incredible wave of support that is carrying us,” he added.
Trzaskowski’s candidature sent a signal to opposition voters that the Civic Coalition is ready for a real fight. Its earlier candidate, Kidawa-Blonska, had seen her ratings plummet by spring, in part because of mixed messaging on the election: the Civic Coalition confusingly said it wanted to win the election – but also that it should not take place because of the pandemic.
The Civic Coalition seemed more scared of the prospect of losing the election than of the pandemic itself; at the time, polls indicated Duda would win in the first round easily, if the elections were held in May.
Ben Stanley, the political scientist from SWPS, told BIRN that poll ratings for Duda were strong in April and early May because opposition supporters were less likely to vote by post.
“Now that nobody seems to care that much anymore about the conditions under which the elections are being held, the opposition candidates have recovered their pre-COVID positions [in the ratings],” Stanley noted.
He added that Trzaskowski had run a more impressive and dynamic campaign than did Kidawa-Blonska, while Duda, at the same time, “clearly started to run out of ideas”.
The 48-year-old mayor is an appealing option for the Civic Coalition’s mainly urban, middle-class voters: a political scientist by training, after stints at Oxford and Paris universities, Trzaskowski was a European Parliamentarian, a minister of digitalisation and a secretary of state in charge of EU affairs before being elected mayor of Warsaw.
More charismatic than the previous Civic Coalition candidate, he draws heavily on his personal life to campaign, seeking emotional closeness with voters.
While Trzaskowski claims he will overcome the pro-anti PiS divide that has dominated Polish public life for 15 years, he has also shown he is up for a fight with the government: he has sued the state television TVP, widely considered a propaganda machine of the government, for defamation. He has also promised to have former PiS Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz put on trial for weakening Poland’s defence capacity.
“The president should be a partner of the government, not its instrument,” Trzaskowski said at a campaign event in Poznan in late May, in a stab at Duda, who has been accused of rubber-stamping PiS laws.
But he added: “I will not be a president of the total opposition. The president must cooperate with the government, if the government wants to strengthen Poland.”
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