Poland's conservative opposition party taps historian as presidential candidate

WARSAW, Poland -- Poland's conservative Law and Justice party, which is trying to regain its momentum after losing power last year, on Sunday chose historian Karol Nawrocki as its candidate for president ahead of next year's election.

The decision caps a weekend in which the country's two largest parties announced their candidates in next May's election that will decide the successor to incumbent President Andrzej Duda, whose second and final term ends in August 2025.

Nawrocki, 41, has since 2021 led the Institute of National Remembrance, a state body that houses archives and researches the crimes of World War II and the communist era. He previously served as the director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, the city where he was born.

The party bypassed seasoned politicians including former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to tap the lesser-known Nawrocki to run for the highest office, similar to what it did in choosing Duda a decade earlier.

“The party decided to field a non-partisan, independent candidate, a candidate that many of our prominent activists, including the top ones, did not know closely," party leader Jarosław Kaczyński told those gathered at a party convention in the southern city of Krakow.

Kaczyński had stated in an interview months ago that the party’s presidential candidate must be “young, tall, impressive, handsome, have a family, know English very well, and preferably two languages, and be internationally savvy.”

The announcement in Krakow came a day after the main governing party, Civic Coalition of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, announced that it was fielding progressive Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski as its candidate.

Even though other parties will have candidates, the race is expected to be mostly dominated by Nawrocki and Trzaskowski.

Law and Justice, in power for eight years from 2015-23, is expected to face headwinds at the polls due to a loss of state funding. The state electoral authority determined earlier this year that the party violated campaign funding rules in the 2023 parliamentary vote, and imposed a penalty worth millions of dollars that would undercut the party’s resources.

The constitutional calendar dictates that the first round of the presidential election be held on a Sunday in May 2025, though the date has not been set yet. If no candidate receives at least 50% of the vote in the first round, a runoff between the top two vote-getters will be held two weeks later.

Other candidates who have announced plans to run include the parliament speaker, Szymon Hołownia, leader of the Poland 2050 party, while the far-right Confederation party has said that its candidate will be Sławomir Mentzen.