section_path: Campaign/First round
section_name: First round
paragraph_text: First round
  
  Sławomir Mentzen of the Confederation alliance was the first candidate to begin an electoral campaign on 31 August 2024, drawing criticism and accusations of illegality from politicians of other parties for its early start. Marshal of the Sejm Szymon Hołownia from the Poland 2050 party declared his candidacy on 13 November. The Civic Coalition (KO) selected its candidate in a presidential primary on 22 November after Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski challenged presumptive nominee, Mayor of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski, who was KO's 2020 presidential candidate. Following the KO primary, Institute of National Remembrance chairman Karol Nawrocki was endorsed by the Law and Justice party on 24 November as an officially independent candidate, as he never belonged to any political party. Other groups also ran their own candidates. Parties of the left, the New Left and Razem, selected Magdalena Biejat and Adrian Zandberg respectively. On the right, the Free Republicans group endorsed Marek Jakubiak, and the Confederation of the Polish Crown ran Grzegorz Braun after splitting off from Mentzen's Confederation. Other candidates, not representing parties in parliament, also appeared: Artur Bartoszewicz (independent), Maciej Maciak (Prosperity and Peace Movement), Joanna Senyszyn (Democratic Left Association), Krzysztof Stanowski (independent) and Marek Woch (Bezpartyjni Samorządowcy). In total, the first round of the election had 13 candidates on the ballot, the largest amount of candidates tied with the 1995 presidential election.
  
  Speculation swiftly began on whether PiS would replace Nawrocki when it was revealed that he had contact with a future criminal as part of his time as a boxer two decades prior, for which he was attacked by opposing politicians. Polling showed, however, that the vast plurality of people did not expect Nawrocki to be replaced. Nawrocki would continue being PiS' presidential candidate going into the first round and would face further controversies about his private life.
  
  Nawrocki accused the ruling coalition of sexualizing children, demonstratively throwing a copy of Gender Queer: A Memoir into a paper shredder. At the party conference on 2 March, Nawrocki declared the election a "referendum on rejecting Tusk", which would remain a theme throughout the campaign. On 13 February 2025, Nawrocki was endorsed by Solidarity, Poland's largest trade union, pledging not to raise the age of retirement and to defend the minimum wage. Following the first round, on 20 May, Rural Solidarity also endorsed Nawrocki. At Nawrocki's electoral convention in Łódź on 26 April, he earned the endorsement of outgoing president Andrzej Duda, who previously refrained from issuing endorsements or supporting any of the candidates.
  
  During the campaign, some considered Trzaskowski to have taken a "turn to the right "; Trzaskowski put forward the idea to limit welfare programs for non-working Ukrainian refugees which was proposed in the Sejm by Law and Justice on 20 January to "check" the genuinity of Trzaskowski's proposal. While being a supporter of LGBT rights, he was not outspoken about it. During the first TVP debate in Końskie, after being given an LGBT flag by Nawrocki, Trzaskowski first hid and then gave away the flag to his opponent, Magdalena Biejat. Despite being a supporter of same-sex civil unions, he spoke out against same-sex adoption.
  
  Mentzen and Braun, who would come third and fourth in the election, campaigned along right-wing social and economic lines. Mentzen, who polled best among the youth, and eventually won the demographic, visited the largest amount of powiats out of all the other candidates. Some commentators believed Mentzen had a chance to enter the second round, and by March, Mentzen was rising in opinion polling, in some of them even slightly coming ahead of Nawrocki. However, he began declining afterwards.
  
  In March, a controversy erupted over an abortion conducted in the 36th week of pregnancy of a fetus with a birth defect in a hospital in Oleśnica. Right-wing politicians criticized the abortion. President Duda called the act barbaric, Nawrocki called it murder and stated that the state should help children with disabilities, Braun came to notoriety regarding the incident when on 16 April, he, along with others, stormed into the hospital and constrained the gynecologist who conducted the abortion for several minutes, claiming to be doing a poseł's intervention for which, alongside other incidents, he lost his europarliamentary immunity. On 27 March, Mentzen held an interview with candidate Krzysztof Stanowski, during which his assertion expressing unconditional opposition to abortion and describing pregnancy resulting from rape as "unpleasant" sparked significant backlash, with some commentators attributing his decline in polling by late March to this statement.
  
  An important election issue was the matter of the health insurance contribution (Polish: składka zdrowotna), with the country's poor healthcare being amongst the most important problems. In April, the center and center-right parties in the coalition government narrowly voted to decrease the health insurance contribution for entrepreneurs, which sparked protests from the left, especially MPs from Razem, accusing the government of attempting to undermine and then privatize public healthcare. On 11 April, Razem's leader, Adrian Zandberg, missed the first TVP debate to have an audience with President Andrzej Duda about the health contribution, which he did on 6 May. Following Duda's veto of the decrease, Trzaskowski defended his party's health insurance contribution proposal, stating it would lead to increase the amount of money in the healthcare system, with Hołownia also approving of the proposal. Meanwhile, Nawrocki and Biejat disagreed, speaking of the already poor state of Poland's healthcare.
  
  During the course of the campaign, public criticism emerged over Nawrocki's acquisition of a second apartment from an elderly man in pre-trial detention. As Nawrocki had declared to own just one apartment during a debate, Onet publicized information about him owning a second one. The candidate proceeded to declare that he had acquired the second apartment from the elderly man for pledging lifelong care in exchange, however it was revealed the man was placed in a state care facility without Nawrocki's involvement. Amid accusations of exploitation, Nawrocki defended the deal's legality and promised to donate the property to charity.