dpa
Warsaw
Members of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO) party have chosen Warsaw Mayor Rafat Trzaskowski as their candidate for the Polish presidential election in May 2025, Tusk announced on Saturday.
The liberal-conservative party’s members voted 74.75% in favour of the 52-year-old Trzaskowski.
Polish Foreign Minister Radostaw Sikorski finished a distant second in the primary election with 25.25% of the vote.
"I have received a very strong mandate,” Trzaskowski said after his victory.
Trzaskowski previously ran in the Polish presidential election in 2020, when he narrowly fell short of defeating Andrzej Duda in a run-off.
On Saturday, he said the support of party members gives him energy, determination and courage to win the presidential election, where his main rival will be the candidate from the nationalist conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Sikorski offered his support for Trzaskowski following the announcement of the results: "You hit the bull’s eye with your idea of the primaries. We have mobilized our party with it.” The exact date of the presidential election has not yet been set.
PiS plans to announce the choice of its candidate at a meeting in Kraków on Sunday.
Incumbent Duda, a member of PiS, is term-limited after having served as the country’s president since 2015. The youthful-looking Trzaskowski has been the mayor of Warsaw since 2018. Before that, the political scientist, who studied at Oxford and speaks five foreign languages, was a member of the European Parliament.