Polish opposition party chooses historian Karol Nawrocki as presidential candidate

Poland's conservative Law and Justice party, which is trying to regain momentum after losing power last year, has chosen historian Karol Nawrocki as its candidate for next year's presidential election.

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

41-year-old Nawrocki has led the Institute of National Remembrance since 2021, 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.

"I am ready to become your president. I am ready because I have been with you all my life. I am next to you, I know Poles and I understand your needs. Yes, I am one of you. I want to become your president because I know and understand that Poland, in order to be, must be great, because we have to defend Poland," he told supporters in Krakow.

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 the way it chose 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 the same event in Krakow.

Had Kaczyński tapped Morawiecki or another high-level party member who held a government role from 2015-23, it could have made the corruption scandals of that period a key focus of the campaign.

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

Nawrocki, giving an acceptance speech to an audience that included his wife and three children, laid out a world view that is fully in line with the party's: patriotic, pro-Christian, pro-NATO and favourable to US President-elect Donald Trump.

The announcement in Krakow came a day after the main governing party, the 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 to 2023, is expected to face headwinds at the polls due to a loss of state funding after the state electoral authority determined earlier this year that the party violated campaign funding rules in the 2023 parliamentary vote.

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.