So tight are the margins in Poland’s presidential election this weekend that the decisive factors may yet be a few pints of beer, a YouTube channel and a maverick libertarian.
The tense run-off vote on Sunday will determine the course not only of Europe’s rising power but also of the continent’s wider geopolitics.
Up until now Donald Tusk, the country’s centre-right prime minister, has been constrained and thwarted time and again by President Duda, an arch-rival who is aligned with the nationalist opposition and wields a veto and considerable sway over foreign policy.
A victory for Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw and a close ally of Tusk, would break this fractious stand-off and give Tusk a much freer hand to enact reforms at home and establish Poland as a heavyweight on the European stage.
Yet Trzaskowski, 53, is being pushed down to the wire by Karol Nawrocki, 42, a historian and former boxer of the nationalist Law and Justice party who would use the presidency to check the prime minister at every available opportunity.
Polls suggest the race is too close to call. After holding a substantial lead for much of the campaign, Trzaskowski finished less than two points ahead of Nawrocki in the first round. The pair have been neck and neck in recent surveys.
One figure for whom these developments have been good news is Slawomir Mentzen, a failed candidate from the radical right who came third, with nearly 15 per cent of the vote.
Mentzen’s sizeable support base is not only evident from the ballots — he won 2.9 million first-round votes — but also from his online presence, where he has 1.6 million followers on TikTok and 1.1 million on YouTube.
The anti-establishment firebrand has capitalised on the attention in recent days, transforming himself into a kingmaker and the shaper of online opinion by interviewing both Trzaskowski and Nawrocki on his YouTube show, Mentzen Grills, for 90 minutes each.
During the interview, Nawrocki backed eight “pledges” proposed by Mentzen, which include no new taxes, no Nato membership for Ukraine and no further sovereignty transfers to Brussels, while Trzaskowski signed none. The Warsaw mayor endorsed Mentzen’s economic liberalism in principle, but disagreed with his host on support for Poland’s war-torn neighbour and extending hate speech protections.
The videos drew such a vast audience — a combined total of more than nine million views — that numbers have eclipsed those of conventional formats such as the head-to-head debate on the public broadcaster TVP.
Patryk Michalski, a senior political correspondent for the Wirtualna Polska news website, said this was symptomatic of the nation’s shift away from television, and towards podcasts and video-based social networks, when choosing where and how to consume news content.
The central factor is the collapse of a collective trust in the media, both public and privately owned. Only about 40 per cent of Poles trust the media, down 17 points in the past ten years, while another 40 per cent said they did not trust any outlet.
Those seeking to influence voters on the right are well aware of the move online. An investigation by Global Witness, an international NGO, this week found that nationalist content on Polish TikTok dominated centrist posts by a ratio of four to one.
Mentzen is not the only politician to have skilfully exploited the phenomenon. The precedent was set by Krzysztof Stanowski, another presidential contender who fell by the wayside but pulled in huge viewing figures by interviewing each of the other candidates in front of his 1.9 million YouTube subscribers.
“This is the first Polish presidential campaign to play out online in a truly significant way,” Michalski said. “Mentzen sought to undermine trust in traditional media for years and avoided questions from journalists throughout his campaign. For many voters, a direct conversation between two politicians is more interesting than a traditional, predictable debate at the public broadcaster.”
Dominika Sitnicka, another political journalist who presents a YouTube programme for Oko.Press, an investigative website, said there was a clear appetite for a livelier alternative to the increasingly brief and formulaic interviews aired on television.
“We’ve seen a growing popularity of streams and political discussions that can last several hours,” she said. “The podcast culture is, to a large extent, the antithesis of television.”
The ultimate effect of the Mentzen show is tricky to predict. While his supporters might be expected to lean heavily towards Nawrocki, who has endorsed much of Mentzen’s political agenda, a poll found that almost a third of them were now drifting towards Trzaskowski.
Mentzen was coaxed by Radoslaw Sikorski, Tusk’s foreign minister, into joining him and the centrist mayor for beers at Mentzen’s pub in Toruń after the interview, drawing ire from his own party members.
Photos of the gathering went viral online and prompted anguished cries of “betrayal” from the Nawrocki camp. “Trzaskowski, Mentzen and Sikorski shared a pint at Mentzen’s pub. It’s conceivable these images will influence the election result, though in what way remains uncertain,” said Sitnicka.
Though Mentzen formally refrained from endorsing either candidate, he eventually pledged that he would not vote for Trzaskowski.
Another unknown is how Viktor Orban, Hungary’s populist prime minister, who endorsed Nawrocki on Thursday, will affect the polls. Sikorski mockingly congratulated Nawrocki, asking whether he would emulate Orban’s pro-Russian policies.
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One thing is already clear, though: in Poland’s hyper-politicised media landscape, the old-school broadcasters and in particular TVP are haemorrhaging credibility and audience numbers.
Over the past decade TVP has been purged and then packed with loyalists by the previous right-wing government led by the Law and Justice party. Since Tusk returned to power in 2023, however, the broadcaster has rallied behind him.
Blocked by Duda and his allies in the judiciary from replacing the executives at the top of the broadcaster, Tusk has instead opted to liquidate TVP in the hope of rebuilding it. That has left it in a compliant state of limbo.
Juliusz Braun, a former chairman of TVP, said: “The entire leadership was replaced, and public television became decidedly more objective and open. However, this ‘state of liquidation’, which has been maintained for a year and a half, means that TVP is now completely subordinated to the government.
“During the election campaign, TVP did only what was strictly necessary, made sure not to harm Trzaskowski, and displayed complete helplessness.”
Speaking to Mentzen, Trzaskowski declared that he supported the closure of the public broadcaster’s news channel altogether, to ensure it can never again serve as a populist weapon. Braun said: “This suggests that in his view, there is no chance for a genuine public broadcaster in Poland, as public media stripped of their informational function lose their essential purpose.”
