Polish President Veers Further Right as Campaign Tightens

(Bloomberg) -- Polish President Andrzej Duda is tilting further to the right in pursuit of ultra-conservative voters he needs to win Sunday’s runoff election.

Opinion polls show the incumbent has lost his lead over Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski and is in a dead heat just five days before the vote. The ballot is set to determine the fate of the east European nation’s nativist makeover after Duda and his allies in the ruling Law & Justice party upended Poland’s reputation as a model democracy.

As moderates flock to the challenger, the president is trying to tap voters who backed a nationalist candidate in the election’s first round more than a week ago. To brush up his ultra-conservative credentials, Duda proposed outlawing adoption by gay couples, criticized mandatory vaccinations and bashed Germany.

“Voters from the center are likely beyond Duda’s reach, so he’s turning sharply to the right,” said Anna Materska-Sosnowska, a political scientist at Warsaw University. “Radical polarization always mobilizes supporters.”

Separate ‘Debates’

The campaign has become so bitter that the candidates couldn’t agree on rules for a debate after public television was criticized for its pro-Duda questions during a discussion between 11 candidates before the June 28 first round.

In a surreal development on Monday evening, Duda and Trzaskowski held two, wholly separate debates some 400 km (250 miles) apart, complete with empty podiums for their absent counterpart.

The Warsaw mayor took questions from 20 news outlets, including public television and pro-government publications, while Duda presided over a town-hall meeting, where he replied to pre-recorded questions from local residents, some of whom had links to the ruling party.

When asked about a potential vaccine for the coronavirus, Duda said he was “absolutely against any mandatory vaccinations.” He later tweeted that his words were being manipulated and that he didn’t have in mind compulsory shots for diseases such as polio and tuberculosis.

‘Absolute Lie’

Duda’s radicalized campaign earned a sharp rebuke from the U.S. envoy in Warsaw on Monday after a senior Law & Justice legislator alleged links between the founders of a now U.S.-owned television channel in Poland and the country’s pre-1989 communist military spy network.

“Shame on you for perpetuating what you know is an absolute lie,” Ambassador Georgette Mosbacher, an appointee of President Donald Trump, said on Twitter regarding the allegation. “This is beneath a representative of the Polish people.”

The reprimand undermined Duda’s international credibility, which he’s largely built on his relationship with Trump and promises of more American troops to be stationed on Polish soil. Duda visited the White House days before the first round, earning rave reviews from public broadcasters.

Duda has also hit out at Germany, his country’s biggest trading partner, for alleged interference in the election after Poland’s best-selling tabloid, owned by a Swiss-German media group, printed a critical article about the president’s pardon of a convicted child molester.

Dead Heat

An average of the last five opinion polls show Duda with 48.1% and Trzaskowski with 47.7% support. The president won 43.5% of the vote in the first round on June 28, followed by the mayor with 30.5%.

The far-right candidate advocating a total ban on abortion and an exit from the EU was fourth with 6.8% -- meaning that jointly with his electorate, Duda could get the 50% he needs to win the runoff. But the often rebellious fringe voters may be hard to reach for Duda, who’s campaigning as the candidate of continuity, Materska-Sosnowska said.

Duda’s child-adoption initiative is largely symbolic since Article 18 of Poland’s constitution defines marriage as a “union of a man and a woman,” and married couples are preferred foster parents over single adults. While there’s no explicit ban on gays adopting children in Poland, such decisions are practically unheard of.

“Children must be safe and protected from adoption by same-sex couples,” Duda said. Trzaskowski replied that he’s also against adoption by gay couples, but called the topic a non-existent issue.

Much like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Duda and Law & Justice have positioned themselves as the defenders of traditional family values against sinister and often foreign forces seeking to undermine them, including the LGBT movement.

Much of public media’s election coverage has sought to paint Trzaskowski, the son of a famous jazz pianist who speaks five languages, as out of touch with regular voters. Law & Justice deputy chief Joachim Brudzinski called the Warsaw mayor’s supporters “elitist boors” who mistakenly claim that they’re “real Europeans.”

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