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On Sunday, Poland holds its presidential election, largely offering a choice between candidates from the broad right wing of the political spectrum. In the government camp is Rafał Trzaskowski, representing prime minister Donald Tusk’s neoliberal Civic Platform. Then there is Karol Nawrocki, backed by Jarosław Kaczyński’s far-right Law and Justice (PiS), which ruled the country from 2015 to 2023. Even more radical is Sławomir Mentzen of the authoritarian Confederation.
While there are also left-wing candidates — polling in single digits and not expected to reach the second round — the race has already become a dispute within the Polish right. Certainly, the president’s formal powers are limited in Poland’s parliamentary system, and yet their veto powers and symbolic role remain significant. For the ruling coalition, led by former European Council president Tusk, controlling the presidency is essential to ensure smooth legislative work.
The Left, then, will likely have little impact on the outcome. Yet even for its forces, the vote is truly existential.
Since the October 2023 general election, in which Tusk’s neoliberal coalition (also backed by parts of the center left) took power from PiS, many on the international left saw potential for some kind of progressive shift. When I visited comrades from the Spanish left-wing press shortly after the vote, even they were hopeful. After all, the momentum behind social reforms was real, and liberal forces had built their campaign partly on opposition to PiS’s near-total abortion ban — a crucial issue for the working-class electorate.
I wrote for Jacobin ahead of those elections, speaking of the economic fallout of the war in Ukraine and its effect on the vote. Since then, Poland’s political climate has become less polarized around this war between its neighbors. The focus has shifted, if only slightly, from the warfront to the home front: inflation, social services, and the everyday realities of post-pandemic, post-PiS life. Yet tellingly, openly pro-Putin figures like Wojciech Maciak have managed to enter this contest, even if not as serious candidates.
Still, if the political focus on bread-and-butter issues may seem promising for the Left, in the past months its internal divisions have only deepened. The key split came from within Razem (Left Together), the social democratic force that had once energized the broader Lewica coalition. Last October, several prominent figures — senators Magdalena Biejat and Anna Górska and MPs Daria Gosek-Popiołek, Dorota Olko, and Joanna Wicha, as well as local councilors — left the party, moving to the more liberal Lewica faction. The fracture reflected a deeper strategic divide: Razem’s Adrian Zandberg and his allies favored principled opposition to Tusk’s coalition, even at the cost of legislative isolation, while the Biejat faction advocated pragmatic engagement and policy intervention from within the government. Indeed, the Left has not managed to achieve much: so far, it’s been things like a day off on Christmas Eve or the introduction of the “widow’s pension.” These are isolated legislative changes rather than real social reforms, and ones that Razem has been loudly advocating for years — albeit more as a fairy tale than a genuine promise.
A party referendum two weeks ago endorsed the Zandberg line, leading to Razem’s exit from the parliamentary left bloc. Biejat emerged as a presidential candidate supported by a new formation of ex-Razem and more centrist figures within the broader Lewica camp — including postcommunist politician-businessmen like Włodzimierz Czarzasty and liberal personalities such as Robert Biedroń and Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus. In response, Zandberg also put himself forward as a candidate, based on his critique of Tusk’s government and coalition partners.
For her part, Biejat’s candidacy is less a product of widespread enthusiasm than of strategic vacancy — a symptom of the broader absence of credible figures on the moderate left. Yet it also reflects a calculated attempt to capitalize on the residual popularity of left-wing politics in Poland, whose support among younger voters and urban liberals has grown, even if unevenly. Biejat, whose cultural fluency and visual campaign strategy fit the post-2015 logic of Polish politics (since PiS entered government, making the political scene more polarized and killing off its technocratic hues), became the acceptable face of a new post-Razem alliance.
It remains unclear that this gamble can pay off. The Biejat camp is under no illusions about victory. As reported by centrist newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, even her campaign staff admit the run is primarily about visibility and building infrastructure the Left has long lacked. Another minor left-wing candidate, postcommunist auntie-vibe politician Joanna Senyszyn, claims she’s running to win but has little traction. Ultimately the election serves as a stress test for the Left’s capacity to institutionalize itself in a hostile landscape.
In this context, the presidency becomes more than just a ceremonial prize. With Tusk’s government showing increasing openness to US-style neoliberalism and market reforms, a more left-aligned president could serve as a bulwark against this. Knowing its real situation, the Polish left isn’t competing for the keys to the palace this time — but it may be drawing the architectural plans for a future entrance.
Polling a total of around 12 percent, the Polish left may appear to be enjoying a modest revival. Biejat and Zandberg each register around five percent, while Senyszyn, whose reach into TikTok and meme culture grants her a peculiar visibility, hovers around one percent. But numbers here are misleading. What they reflect is not a coherent political resurgence but a strategic impasse — and the solidification of a structural split that has long undermined the Polish left’s ability to speak with one voice.
On the more left-liberal wing is Biejat. Her campaign, curated by staff led by Górska (and helped by staffers such as Łukasz Michnik and Wiktoria Grelewicz, coming from Czarzasty’s part of the party but representing a more socialist stance), is styled as a friendly, technocratic social democracy for the Instagram generation. Its aesthetic grammar borrows from global liberal figures like Kamala Harris and cultural references like Charlie XCX, and politically it prioritizes social protection while avoiding any rhetorical rupture with the governing coalition. The visual language is polished, the messaging soft — a left-liberalism in high resolution, designed to be swiped past rather than contested.
On the other is Zandberg, who remains with the left-wing Razem after its departure from the broader Lewica bloc. Here the strategy is almost the inverse: harder edges, a moralizing tone, and a principled — at times alienating — refusal to engage in the transactional logic of liberal coalition politics. Razem is not trying to win the center. It is attempting to create something that has never existed in post-1989 Poland: a class-conscious left operating independently of both authoritarian statism and neoliberal moderation. In short, it is a bid for a left-wing third way in a system structurally designed to exclude precisely that possibility.
And the structure matters. It has long been functionally impossible to conduct class-based politics in Poland, as I have argued in Kapitál noviny. As sociological data — including from now-PiS-aligned scholars like Henryk Domański — shows, in the Polish political landscape, class identity derives not from one’s relation to production but from lifestyle, consumption, and cultural cues. In this semiperipheral capitalism, class signals are fragmented, and the worker votes right. Not accidentally, but structurally. The only meaningful material link between the working class and the state has come not from trade union militancy but from PiS-era redistributive programs: family benefits, pensions, and symbolic gestures toward national identity. In such a context, it was only logical that PiS would capture the working-class vote — it was the only party that bothered to ask for it.
For example, an analysis of voting preferences recently presented by two Polish sociologists from Warsaw’s SWPS, Mikołaj Cześnik and Oliwia Szczupska, shows that social class significantly influences the differential support for Tusk’s broad-tent Civic Coalition (KO) and the Left, as compared to right-populist PiS. Belonging to the middle or upper class increases the likelihood of supporting KO and the Left, with the upper class showing a particularly strong preference for KO, even considering control variables. Both the middle and upper classes consistently express stable support for left-wing forces. This leads to a paradox, already described in previous research, that the lower classes around Central and Eastern Europe tend to vote for the far right, despising leftist proposals.
Polish politics, then, is not driven by class positions but by the performance of representation. Even in the heyday of Solidarność or during the transition period, the Left was given voice not by workers but by intellectuals and urban professionals speaking in their name. This has not changed. Left-wing forces today — both Biejat’s and Zandberg’s — are still coalitions of the educated, the managerial, and the downwardly mobile middle class. The difference is how they choose to manage that contradiction.
Biejat’s project seems more institutionalist. It sees the Left as a coalition partner within liberal democracy, capable of moderating Tusk’s platform on rule of law and social issues but never confronting it. Her team is staffed by competent experts, her messaging is pro-European, and her ideological stance is calibrated for coalition — not conflict. But this same strategic moderation leads to silence on issues like the systematic human rights violations on the Polish-Belarusian border. In this tense situation, Poland enforces strict border controls and has suspended the right to apply for asylum for migrants entering from Belarus, citing security concerns and accusing Minsk of using migration as a form of hybrid warfare. Nevertheless, migrants are dying as Polish armed forces carry out pushbacks against them.
Zandberg’s Razem, in contrast, often replaces Biejat’s approach with a moralism that reads more like activism than politics. Its spokespeople — increasingly resembling some weird and secular mutation of the clergy — are unforgiving in their critiques, uncompromising in their tone, and often uninterested in mass persuasion. Yet what they offer is real opposition — and in an increasingly cynical polity, that matters. Their refusal to bend may cost them popularity, but it grants them coherence.
That both wings are gaining traction simultaneously should not be read as a contradiction. In a society as atomized and ideologically exhausted as Poland’s, only two strategies remain viable for the Left: becoming either a reformist auxiliary to liberalism or a principled minority force channeling discontent from below. Biejat and Zandberg are not adversaries so much as mirror images — responses to the same deadlock.
Neither model is complete. Biejat’s social democracy risks losing its ethical spine in pursuit of access to power. Zandberg’s principled socialism risks isolation through rhetorical overreach. But in the best-case scenario, each project amplifies the other: Biejat normalizes the Left within institutions; Zandberg keeps it honest by refusing to do so. Whether this dynamic can translate into actual power remains an open question — but at least left-wing politics has become audible again.
Nevertheless, if we try to use a class perspective here, the material base of these forces is telling of their limited reach. According to one of the latest CBOS surveys, support for Lewica and Razem differs significantly, though with important points of convergence — especially in terms of education.
Both Lewica and Razem attract similarly high vote shares among Poles with higher education (7 percent each). However, Razem’s vote is more heavily concentrated in this group — only 3 percent of people with secondary education support it (compared to 5 percent for Lewica), and near-zero support is found among voters with only primary or vocational education (Razem takes, respectively, 0 and 8 percent of these categories; only 3 percent of voters with vocational education back Lewica). Nevertheless, Razem also performs strongest among higher-income voters. Among those earning over 9,000 zł (around $2,380) monthly, 6 percent declared support for Razem. It also performs relatively well among voters earning 7,000–8,999 zł (4 percent). Lewica’s support is more evenly distributed across income groups, but strongest among those earning 4,000–4,999 zł (8 percent, 7 percent for Razem), and weaker among those on 3,000–3,999 zł (3 percent). Razem’s electorate is also clearly urban: it scores 13 percent among voters in Poland’s largest cities (500,000-plus), and 5 percent in cities of 100,000–499,000 residents. Support falls sharply in smaller towns and rural areas (just 1–2 percent). Lewica also performs best in urban areas, especially in medium-size cities, but retains some rural presence (4 percent in villages, 9 percent in small towns), unlike Razem. Their competition is fierce, and these electorates often overlap with one another.
Hence Razem is a party of the metropolitan, highly educated, and economically secure middle and upper-middle class, while Lewica retains a broader — though fragmented — base that includes segments of the working class and lower-income urban dwellers. Ahead of this presidential contest, Zandberg and Biejat both attract relatively small but distinct voter bases. Their support is strongest among younger voters, particularly those aged eighteen to twenty-four (Zandberg 17 percent, Biejat 6 percent) and twenty-five to thirty-four (Zandberg 10 percent, Biejat 7 percent), indicating generational alignment with progressive politics. Zandberg performs best in large urban areas: he scores 12 percent in cities over 500,000 (Biejat — only 3 percent, she performs hence in the smaller cities), while their support drops in rural areas (Biejat 1 percent, Zandberg 3 percent). In terms of education, Biejat attracts 6 percent of voters with higher education compared to Zandberg’s 7 percent, though both perform poorly among those with only primary or vocational education (there Biejat gets a slightly better outcome; people with primary education tend to vote for the far-right parties, like PiS or Confederation). Both receive higher support among people earning over 9,000 zł monthly (Biejat 4 percent, Zandberg 7 percent), suggesting appeal among affluent, progressive professionals. Politically both are rooted in the left — Biejat secures 11 percent and Zandberg 14 percent among self-identified left-wing voters, but Biejat also gathers more support among those who self-identify as on the “right” (2 percent vs. 0 percent).
Absurd as it may seem, leftist language is only just beginning to gain traction in Poland, for now primarily among the upper classes. Such language remains embedded in a progressive-minded lifestyle associated with the Left, often linked to the way of life of the elites in the core states of the capitalist world-system.
Regardless of who wins the election, we can expect the situation to remain rather bleak. Parliament is currently debating new deregulatory proposals put forward by Tusk’s new ally, one of Poland’s richest men, multimillionaire Rafał Brzoska. Tusk has openly stated that the laws currently being blocked by Kaczyński’s man, incumbent president Andrzej Duda, will go through as soon as his own ally Trzaskowski takes office. Tusk and Brzoska may look like a parody of Trump and Musk, but they will pose a serious threat in one of Eastern Europe’s major countries. The working-class left must be strong — but also capable of acting effectively. The question remains: Who will be able to carry its banner?
Great Job Krzysztof Katkowski & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
