Liberal candidate and Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski took a narrow lead in the first round of Poland’s presidential election on Sunday, setting the stage for a high-stakes run-off on 1 June.

Exit polls released on Sunday evening put Rafał Trzaskowski (from Civic Platform/PO) ahead, with 30.8% of votes, outrunning conservative challenger Karol Nawrocki (Law and Justice/PiS) on 29.1%, well within the polling margin of error.

The liberal side of the aisle expects to take the votes from lower-ranking candidates. Fifth place went to Szymon Hołownia, who performed worse than the polls predicted with only 4.99% of the vote. This is a big failure for the speaker of the Polish parliament, given that in the 2020 presidential election he managed to secure 13.9%. 

Next is Adrian Zandberg, an anti-government leftist who gained significant support in recent weeks, and managed to win 4.86%. After Zandberg came another leftist candidate, Magdalena Biejat, who won 4.23%. The last two candidates to obtain more than 1% of the vote were Krzysztof Stanowski and Joanna Senyszyn, who won 1.24% and 1.09%, respectively.

Voter turnout was 67.31%, which is higher than in any first round of the Polish presidential election (in 2020, it was 64.51%). Turnout is expected to be even higher in the second round (in 2020, turnout in the second round was 3.5 percentage points higher than in the first round). 

Polls indicate that turnout is not equally distributed across age groups: the highest attendance was in the 50–59 age group (74.5%), followed by those aged 18–29 (72.8%), while less than 60% of those aged 60 and over voted. 

Poland’s two-stage election procedure requires one of the candidates to win a majority of the vote. Had one candidate won the first round with more than 50% of the vote, the second round would not be necessary (this has happened only once, in 2000).

Given that both of them received around 30% of the votes in the first round, the final two weeks of campaigning will be extremely intense, with candidates focused on how to navigate the complexities of attracting support from eliminated candidates and also the largest possible share of their electorates. 

The primary focus will be far-right to extreme-right voters, since the combined support for Sławomir Mentzen and Grzegorz Braun exceeds 20%. Mentzen has already announced that in the following days he will advise his electorate on how to vote in the second round.

President vs prime minister

In Poland, the president serves for five years and can be re-elected only once, in elections that must be direct (the candidate is chosen by the voter directly), universal (every adult citizen is allowed to vote), equal (each vote carries the same weight) and secret (meaning each vote stays private). 

On the international stage, Rafał Trzaskowski is a strong advocate for deeper integration with the European Union, and his election would probably improve Poland’s standing within the EU. Nawrocki’s PiS party highlights the need to maintain national identity and sovereignty within Europe; he has also said that he is sceptical of Ukraine joining NATO or the EU.

Although both candidates acknowledge the strong economic ties between Poland and the United States and highlight the need to maintain such strong relations, Nawrocki’s political grouping is closer to the Republican President Trump.

The results of the first round provide insight into the current political landscape of Poland, as this round allows non-strategic voting. Trzaskowski’s victory, albeit narrow, shows that Tusk, despite the fractured political coalition behind him, still retains a degree of trust since Poles have given the lead to his party’s candidate.

PiS has a robust political base in eastern Poland, rural areas and among older, traditional Catholic electorate. However, high support for the ultra-right candidates suggests PiS is being attacked from the right. Despite attracting 29.5%, and having a strong chance of winning the election, Nawrocki is nowhere near as successful as Duda, who came first in round one in 2015 with almost 35% of the vote against then-incumbent Bronislaw Komorowski.

The situation of Poland’s fractured left wing is even more complicated. The vote reveals that the left is struggling to gain traction in Poland’s increasingly conservative environment, but this year’s results for Andrian Zandberg, Magdalena Biejat and Joanna Senyszyn (10.6% combined) can be perceived as an improvement compared to the 2.2% for left-winger Robert Biedroń in 2020, and suggest that the left might slowly be coming back in Poland.