The first round of the presidential election will be held in Poland on May 18, Szymon Holownia, the speaker of the Polish lower house of parliament (Sejm), announced on Wednesday. A second round will be held on June 1, if none of the candidates gets more than fifty percent of the votes in the first, said Holownia.
After the announcement of the election date, the Speaker of the House will formally order the presidential election next Wednesday, which will officially begin the election campaign.
The head of state, Andrzej Duda, who has been in office since 2015, is not running for the position, because according to the Polish constitution, the incumbent president can only be re-elected once.
The main Polish ruling force, the Civic Coalition (KO) party alliance, is putting forward the mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, as a candidate. The candidate of the main opposition force, Law and Justice (PiS), is non-party historian Karol Nawrocki, president of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance.
In the election, Holownia herself is running as a candidate of the coalition party called Poland 2050, and the New Left, also in the coalition, is running for Senate Vice President Magdalena Biejat.
Among the opposition parties, the Confederation of small parties and the Free Republicans put forward candidates in the form of Slawomir Mentzen and Marek Jakubiak.
On Wednesday, the Sejm will put the Poland 2050 draft on its agenda, according to which the results of the presidential election would not be approved by the supreme court chamber that has been responsible for this until now, but by three other chambers of the supreme court. The solution would only apply to this year’s presidential election.
This is related to the fact that the government coalition doubts the status of the chamber responsible for electoral matters, because its members were appointed during the PiS government.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the president of PiS, called the changes affecting the chamber responsible for election matters unnecessary to journalists on Wednesday. The draft of Holownia’s party was also criticized by the left-wing deputy speaker of the Lower House, Wlodzimierz Czarzasty.
Cover image: Illustration (Photo: AFP)
Source: magyarnemzet.hu
