The polling stations of the 2025 presidential election will open on Sunday 18 May. If none of the candidates secure more than 50% of the popular vote – and polls indicate that this will not be the case – the second and final round will take place on 1 June.

As of now, 32 possible candidates have signed up, but only a handful will be able to secure the 100,000 signatures required to be included on the ballot.

In Poland, there are nearly 29 million eligible voters, who will decide who will move into the Belweder, the historic residence of the president of Poland. The second and last term of current president Andrzej Duda is set to expire in August.

Duda, who has held the office since 2015, is from the right-wing, populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, which was in power until 2023, when Donald Tusk of the centrist Civic Coalition (KO) was elected prime minister. That resulted with a phenomenon called ‘cohabitation’, when the prime minister and the president are at odds. Since November 2023, Duda has largely strived to undermine Tusk’s government and its policies.

Effectively, if a politician with views similar to Duda gets elected president, they are likely to continue the obstruction of Tusk’s agenda, while a candidate from the KO will enable the current government to pursue its goals. Given Poland’s pivotal role in European geopolitics, this election will also impact the EU, NATO and Western strategy towards Ukraine.

Poland is a parliamentary democracy where the president, officially the head of state, primarily has a representative and procedural role, and most of the political authority lies with the government and the prime minister. The office of the president, however, is equipped with some executive and legislative powers, some of which allow the president to significantly influence politics.

Arguably, the most important of those is the ‘veto’. The Polish Constitution, enacted in 1997, requires all laws voted through by Parliament (Sejm and Senate) to be approved by the president before being published in the Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland, which is the final stage of the legislative process.

The Sejm can reject the presidential veto, but it requires a qualified majority of 276 votes in a 460-seat house – the coalition supporting the current government, with 248 MPs, is far below that threshold. In addition, the president has the right to initiate legislation, including amendments to the constitution.

The first time citizens of Poland were allowed to elect their president was in 1990. In that first election – direct, equal, free, universal and secret – 60.6% of the electorate cast their ballot. By 2020, the turnout had grown to 64.5%, which is not impressive by European standards, but presidential elections in Poland attract a larger turnout than general, European and local elections.

The office of president was established in 1918, after Poland regained independence. Members of Parliament, not the electorate, chose the president until 1952, when the communist regime abandoned the office.

Back in 1918, and again in the 1990s, lawmakers in Poland had to decide whether to create a system inspired by the United States or Germany. In the US, the president is the head of state but also has real executive power as the head of government (examples are executive orders, and directing domestic and foreign policy).

Germany is a prime example of a system where the president’s role is solely ceremonial. The president is the head of state, but does not influence the government, cannot veto laws for political reasons, and is elected by the Bundestag (parliament) and representatives of federal states. Political power lies is in the hands of the chancellor, as the government leader is called.

Because the president of Poland is elected directly by citizens, the risk is a creation of two competing centres of power. Yet, it will be difficult to introduce the necessary reforms. “Poles are attached to direct presidential elections, which are more popular than parliamentary ones, even though the government chosen by the parliament holds the real power in Poland. It seems that, for the sake of consistency, either the president’s powers or the method of election should be reformed,” Zemła explained.