Right-wing Polish presidential candidate Sławomir Mentzen is surging in popularity, resulting in his rattled opponents adopting his policy positions on immigration.
Mentzen, from the Confederation Party, overtook his conservative rival Karol Nawrocki for the first time last week, and highlighted Britain’s Pakistani child rape gangs during an election rally warning about the dangers of mass migration.
“In Rotherham, a city of 70,000, for years Muslim gangs sexually abused young girls, 1,400 young British girls were victims,” he said in a speech in the city of Bełchatów last month.
“You know what is the worst? Local politicians and police knew about it, and they did nothing about it, they covered it up for the perpetrators, they wouldn’t accept reports about it. Because they were afraid to be called racist, intolerant, xenophobic.
They preferred for hundreds of girls to suffer than imprison the perpetrators, because the perpetrators were another nationality, another religion. This is where leftist open borders ideology leads.”
Polish Presidential Candidate Sławomir Mentzen:
“Poland will never allow mass migration”🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/0qv66otj1n
— Wojciech Pawelczyk (@WojPawelczyk) March 4, 2025
Friday’s SW Research survey put Mentzen on 18.9%, ahead of Nawrocki from the Law and Justice (PiS) party on 16.5%, but behind centrist Civic Coalition candidate Rafał Trzaskowski’s 33.6%.
And although Mentzen still trails Nawrocki in weekly polling averages, he is the only candidate with upwards momentum ahead of the May 18 election, causing his main rivals to shift to the right, Notes From Poland reported.
Last week Nawrocki used rhetoric usually associated with Mentzen’s party in saying that Ukrainians should not be “living better than Poles in Poland” and in comments expressing scepticism about vaccinations.
At the same time Trzaskowski has echoed Mentzen’s views on immigration, unveiling a “zero tolerance” policy on foreign criminals and saying Ukrainians who are not working and paying taxes should not get social benefits.
The Confederation responded by accusing Trzaskowski of copying their longstanding policies in order to win votes without intending to implement them.
“Mentzen is the original, and Trzaskowski is just imitating his views…Unfortunately (for him [Trzaskowski]), fewer and fewer Poles are deluded that there will be even a trace of these temporarily adopted views after the presidential race is over,” Confederation constituent group National Movement said on Facebook last week.
Mentzen, an anti-EU 38-year-old economic libertarian with a doctorate in economics, has a 20-point election program including “sealed borders”, “low taxes”, “stopping leftist ideology”, “defending freedom of speech” and “no Polish troops in Ukraine”.
In 2019 he mocked a PiS five-point plan by presenting his own unofficial version for the Confederation, saying: “We don’t want Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes, and the European Union.”
In January the Confederation expelled one of its leaders, Grzegorz Braun, for making his own independent run for the presidency.
Braun, who famously used a fire extinguisher to douse candles in a Hanukkah display in Poland’s parliament in 2023, is polling at a weekly average of 1.8%.
Header image: Sławomir Mentzen at a rally on Saturday (Facebook).
