All Politics Are Local

July 12: Poland Presidential Election

On Sunday, Poles will vote for their new president. The first round of voting on June 28th had the incumbent president Andrzej Duda, who is backed by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, in first place with 44 percent of the vote—shy of the 50 percent majority he needed to win outright. He now faces the toughest battle of his political career in a runoff on July 12th against the mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, put forth by the centrist Civic Coalition (KO). The final stretch of the race is too close to call. 

Nowhere is this fight starker than in the town of Cisna, a rare center of opposition in a region of government support. In this small town in the Subcarpathian foothills, many believe that change is within arm’s reach. There is a sense that a potential Trzaskowski victory would deal a blow to the monopoly on power of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government, which has ruled since 2015. With the president on its side, the opposition could veto much of what the PiS government is planning to do in the three years it has left of its term in parliament. 

A Trzaskowski presidency would mark a decisive shift from the current situation under Duda: As PiS passed new legislation severely limiting the independence of Poland’s judiciary, Duda, a self-professed independent candidate, signed these bills into law, rarely exercising his presidential veto powers over what many see as constitutional violations. The government’s resulting makeover of the courts system has provoked mass protests in Poland over the past five years.

Cisna is located in the Subcarpathian region of Poland, one of the European Union’s poorest; it is also a stronghold for PiS and for Duda. In the first round of the elections, an overwhelming 62% of its residents voted for Duda to stay on as Poland’s president. But against this wall of support, Cisna has long been the loose brick. Duda won only 26% of Cisna’s votes.  

“In neighboring villages, the communities are sedentary, settled since their grandparents and great-grandparents. [Cisna] has a migrant population, from all corners,” the village’s mayor Renata Szczepańska told a local paper. “In the 1960s and 70s, there was a wave of rebellious newcomers. Then in the 1980s [a time of communist government crackdowns in Poland] came those who had lost their jobs or were politically persecuted. Those who are coming now, usually from big cities, can afford to buy land to open guesthouses and restaurants.” 

Another reason that Cisna stands demographically apart from the areas around it is the seasonal influx of younger tourists coming to hike in the Bieszczady mountains in which Cisna is nestled.  Right after the first round of voting in June, I talked with locals about what set it apart and what they foresaw for the second round of elections.

Henryk Ślimak, a PiS supporter who also heads the local voting commission, is convinced that tourists are to blame for the opposition’s impressive results in the village. “There is quite a queue once they all come down from their hikes to vote,” he told me.

The vacationers may also have changed Cisna in other ways: “We talk with tourists who come from all corners of Poland and Europe, and ideas rub off,” Elżbieta Łukacijewska, who previously served as the village’s mayor, and is now the only opposition member of European Parliament elected in the region, said.

On the village’s main arteries, several locals’ fences are adorned with banners supporting Trzaskowski. The owner of one such flyer, Aleksy Wójcik, a 59-year-old local restauranteur, offered a glimpse into that support.

“The current president is obviously a puppet,” he began, citing perhaps the most common criticism leveled against the incumbent, who many criticize for moving in lockstep with PiS despite the constitutional requirement that Poland’s president remain independent.

“That’s just plainly destroying our foreign policy, which really annoys me,” Wójcik said, referring to frayed relations with the European Union. The bloc has in recent years, spurred on by legislation abetted by Duda, triggered its nuclear “Article 7” option for the first time ever, citing concerns about judicial independence and breaches to the rule of law in Poland.

The president is also seen as the guarantor of the PiS government’s generous welfare programs, which have included several cash bonuses and a pledge to double the minimum wage over four years. The programs have not been popular with the more business-minded voters: “I am a businessman, and when I see all these handouts, which I know will be paid for out of my taxes, it drives me crazy,” Wójcik said.

Yet while these programs are a sticking point for Wójcik, they are the winning formula to others, especially people in Duda’s main support base of oft-neglected provincial Poland. As president, Duda has made frequent visits to the country’s poor and traditionally-minded regions, many of which had never been visited by a head of state before. In doing so, he has secured the support of voters who had until now felt neglected by Warsaw.

Ślimak is one of the few local inhabitants I talked with who is vocal about his support for PiS. “Families have many children in these areas, and are generally poor, so if they receive support, then why would they not vote for it,” he said, referring to the government’s flagship child benefits handout of 500 zloty ($126) per child each month. “Then there are those who take the money, but do not give their vote,” he added disapprovingly.

Poorer regions like the Subcarpathian area have palpably felt the national exodus of millions of Poles, first to the United States, and then, since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, across the bloc. “The Bieszczady mountains are aging,” Ślimak said. 

The resulting rift between generations and world-views in Cisna runs deep. When a four-meter banner promoting Duda was rolled out on a pick-up truck on Cisna’s main square in early June, the truck’s tires were slashed at night, a Hitler mustache was sprayed onto Duda’s face, and his name was graffitied over with unflattering wordplay. 

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One of Duda’s primary strengths is the strong support he has from Poland’s state television station, TVP, a primary source of news for most Poles, especially older ones.

Over the past five years since PiS took power, public broadcasters have been co-opted to support government narratives and launch attacks on its opponents.

Especially during campaigning, airtime has disproportionately been awarded to the ruling party and its allies. Just days ahead of the first-round vote, a five-minute long campaign advertisement for Duda aired on the country’s state broadcaster’s prime time news hour with the headline “pre-electoral mobilization.” Of the 227 segments about the presidential candidates that appeared on the news hour between 3 and 16 June, 97 percent of those devoted to Duda were favorable, while 87 percent of those about his main rival were critical.

In recent weeks, despite the broadcaster’s statutory obligation to provide unbiased coverage, headlines on the main edition of the evening news ran “We've had enough of the hypocrisy of Trzaskowski” and “whose interests is Trzaskowski serving?”

In a sign of this polarized atmosphere, on July 6 the presidential rivals held two separate “debates” after failing to agree on who should organize the main spectacle. On Monday evening the state broadcaster aired Duda speaking center-stage in the town of Końskie, taking questions from a vetted audience, with an empty “Rafał Trzaskowski” lectern in the background. A channel-change away, Trzaskowski took open questions from representatives of 20 different media outlets while also standing next to an empty pulpit labelled “Andrzej Duda.”

But the outcome of the second round of elections will largely hinge on turnout of voters whose first-round candidates had been defeated. In what looked like an effort to drive up participation in the rural regions where PiS is most popular, a week before the vote Poland’s ministry of the interior promised brand new firetrucks to small villages around the country that achieved high voter turnout. (Cisna’s new firetruck is the talk of the town. “It was just a dream,” village’s mayor has told a local paper.)

In an effort to boost his profile, Duda also met with American President Donald Trump on June 24th. He was the first foreign politician to set foot in the White House since the outbreak of the pandemic. Yet aside from Trump’s full-throttled endorsement of Duda’s presidential re-run, few concrete announcements came of the photo opportunity. At the same time Trzaskowski released a campaign video of European mayors sending their messages of support.

Whoever wins will indeed set the tone for Poland’s foreign policy, and importantly will determine how much further PiS can go in passing radical legislation that tests Poland’s relationships with its neighbors. (PiS does not currently have the three-fifths parliamentary majority to overturn a presidential veto.)

Building on that, a Trzaskowski win would represent a change of direction, ushering in hope for turnaround in coming years. If he loses, a fifth electoral loss of the opposition over five years would provoke soul-searching about how to offer a vision for a pluralistic Poland and use the momentum it has amassed.

In Cisna, one idea that voters continually voiced is that the country simply need to dial back the toxic political atmosphere that has resulted from PiS’s most radical policies. Ryszard “Bury” Denisiuk, a husky-voiced retired mountain rescuer, said his main worry is that Poles are increasingly divided. “If someone was drowning, I wouldn’t ask them if they voted for the ruling party or the opposition,” he said.