How will recent scandals affect Polish politics?

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

By Aleks Szczerbiak

Political scandals generate intense media attention and public outrage but rarely produce dramatic shifts in party support that they once did.

They are now more likely to affect electoral outcomes indirectly by demobilising softer, less committed voters and influencing turnout, particularly among supporters of the government disappointed by its apparent underperformance and broken election promises.

The hospital scandal

Two high-profile political scandals dominated the Polish news agenda for much of this summer. The first centred on irregularities at Warsaw’s Southern Hospital (Szpital Południowy) and involved a young and relatively inexperienced doctor, Dawid Kacprzyk.

In spite of his lack of a specialist qualification, Kacprzyk coordinated the hospital’s emergency department and reportedly earned a staggering 1.6 million złoty (€366,000) in the previous year alone. He also served as a Warsaw district councilor for the liberal-centrist Civic Coalition (KO) grouping, Poland’s main governing party led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

Public outrage intensified following reports that the hospital had operated a dedicated “VIP path” or special lounge where ruling-party-linked politicians and their families were allowed faster access and medical examinations without the usual queues faced by ordinary patients.

Further claims emerged, including a whistleblower surgeon alleging that supervisory failures contributed to patient deaths and of improper private business activity in the hospital morgue.

For its part, KO insisted that the scandal was the personal misconduct of one former party member rather than a general problem affecting the entire healthcare system. They noted that Kacprzyk quickly resigned his council seat and hospital role, and that party-aligned Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski had dismissed the hospital board and two of his deputy mayors overseeing the city’s health services.

KO argued that no specific names of preferential VIP patients had been publicly confirmed, any irregularities were being fully investigated by prosecutors and independent bodies, and political and legal accountability would follow if ethical breaches or crimes were proven. The government also pledged systemic reforms including measures to curb excessive pay for doctors.

Nonetheless, the scandal struck a deep chord with the Polish public, triggering massive negative media and political fallout that aligned perfectly with the right-wing opposition’s narrative painting KO as part of a “Warsaw elite” that enjoys special privileges at the expense of ordinary citizens.

The cryptocurrency scandal

The second major summer scandal centred on allegations of financial impropriety and political entanglement involving Zondacrypto, once Poland’s largest crypto trading platform, that claimed over a million users but earlier this year collapsed abruptly after thousands of retail investors were unable to access their funds.

However, what began as a major financial scandal escalated into political warfare, providing the government with powerful ammunition to attack the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS), Poland’s ruling party between 2015 and 2023 and currently the main opposition grouping, party-aligned President Karol Nawrocki, and the broader conservative political eco-system over payments and donations made by the crypto firm.

For example, Zondacrypto sponsored the 2025 Polish edition of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference attended by the then-presidential candidate Nawrocki, advertised heavily with conservative media outlets such as the TV Republika television network, and made donations to foundations linked to high-ranking PiS figures such as former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro.

The government also tried to entangle Nawrocki, who repeatedly vetoed its cryptocurrency regulation laws, into the scandal, arguing that he was protecting the shady interests of the industry and its political beneficiaries at the expense of ordinary Poles (the Tusk administration lacks the three-fifths parliamentary majority required to overturn a presidential veto).

For their part, PiS and the broader Polish right dismissed the government’s accusations as a smear campaign and sought to shift blame for the scandal onto the Tusk administration for inadequate oversight to protect investors. Figures on the right, including those connected to foundations that received money, framed these dealings as legitimate sponsorships common across the media and other organisations.

PiS rejected claims that the party or associated groups received funds from the firm and defended Nawrocki’s vetoes as necessary against flawed legislation.

Nonetheless, opinion polls found that most respondents linked the scandal to PiS and the right-wing opposition, providing the government with numerous attack lines to force them onto the defensive.

The diminishing impact of scandals

It is worth recalling how an earlier era of post-communist politics scandals possessed much greater transformative, system-altering capacity and could act as catalysts for the restructuring of the electoral landscape.

For example, at the beginning of the 2000s, the so-called “Rywin scandal” was widely seen as a decisive factor in the near-destruction as a political force of the previously powerful, and then-governing, communist-successor Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). The scandal erupted in late 2002 when film producer Lew Rywin allegedly solicited a large bribe from the Agora media group, publisher of the influential liberal-left Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, in exchange for media legislation changes while claiming to act on behalf of a “group holding power” (grupa trzymająca władzę) linked to the ruling party.

A high-profile parliamentary investigative commission, sustained media focus, and a series of follow-on scandals and accumulation of allegations of deep-seated influence peddling by post-communist networks created a powerful narrative of systemic bribery and corruption, completely discrediting the SLD as a competent governing force.

Having won a substantial victory in the 2001 parliamentary election, securing 41% of the votes, its support collapsed to only 11% at the next 2005 poll. This helped clear the way for the rise of the KO (originally Civic Platform)-PiS duopoly that has structured the Polish party system ever since, thereby establishing a precedent that scandals were electorally fatal transgressions.

The contrast with the recent hospital and cryptocurrency scandals is instructive and illustrates a broader transformation in the relationship between political misconduct and electoral politics in Poland.

Whereas in the more fluid party system of the early post-communist period a cluster of major scandals or single-event shocks could rapidly destroy dominant parties and restructure competition, now – although they still generate intense, high-octane political and media outrage – such controversies appear to slide off the main political actors with remarkably little immediate consequence.

Indeed, neither of these recent scandals produced the dramatic shift in headline polling numbers that some observers, drawing on historical precedent, might have anticipated given the intensity of the media coverage.

Scandal-neutralising structural shifts

This change stems from three interlocking shifts in the structural dynamics of Poland’s political system. Taken together, they have substantially diminished the capacity of scandals to move headline poll numbers and trigger the kind of large-scale systemic realignments seen in an earlier era of post-communist politics.

Firstly, the sheer velocity of modern political communication prevents single-issue-based scandals from sustaining public focus. In the early 2000s, a major corruption scandal could dominate the news headlines for months through concentrated media attention. The Rywin scandal unfolded through prolonged televised parliamentary commission hearings, keeping the story alive and allowing public outrage to build into a sustained narrative that slowly drained the ruling party’s legitimacy.

Today, digital algorithms and the 24-hour news cycle ensure that a major story, whether about healthcare management or cryptocurrency, moves at a breathtaking pace and is overtaken rapidly as public attention moves onto the next domestic controversy, international development, or strategic counter-narrative.

This hyper-accelerated news cycle means that even a high-profile case that generates intense short-term media coverage does not remain the dominant story for long enough to produce cumulative, system-level damage by limiting the time window in which a scandal can convert temporary disapproval into lasting shifts in voting intentions. Scandals thereby become a form of ambient “background noise” in Polish public life rather than a singular focal point for popular outrage.

Secondly, and perhaps most formidably, the protective shield of deep polarisation and socio-political division renders large segments of the electorate relatively impervious to allegations against “their” side. After 2005, the Polish party system crystallised around a durable “post-transition” socio-economic divide reinforced by cultural and geopolitical fault lines.

In this deeply fractured and highly polarised landscape, with large segments of the electorate embedded within hostile camps, when a scandal like the hospital crisis or cryptocurrency controversy breaks, voters interpret allegations levelled against “their” party through a tribal filter as a politically motivated hit job or the work of hostile media.

So even severe scandals are shaped by, and largely confirm, existing political loyalties and rarely trigger cross-camp voter defections. This is a sharp contrast with the early 2000s, when the party system was still fluid and electoral volatility high.

Thirdly, the parties themselves have become far more professional at message discipline and crisis management. Today’s parties are centralised media machines staffed by sophisticated public relations strategists who view a scandal not as a moral crisis but a communication problem requiring aggressive damage containment.

Rather than allowing a controversy to fester, they immediately launch counterattacks, accusing their opponents of far greater historical or concurrent corruption, and ruthlessly enforce internal party discipline and message conformity.

They also deploy well-rehearsed crisis management playbooks including: personnel sanctions; framing the problem as local or individual responsibility, or residual rather than systemic failure; ordering visible audits, investigations, or reforms to demonstrate “taking action”; and co-ordinated messaging that seeks to close the story quickly and shift the focus back onto the other side’s weaknesses or broader policy issues.

Differential mobilisation, not voter persuasion

Yet while polarisation and professional crisis management allow parties to survive the immediate news cycle, this does not mean that scandals have become irrelevant. Rather, their effects are more subtle and delayed through the “slow-burn” mechanism of differential turnout by selectively demobilising specific voter segments.

Although in a highly polarised polity the most committed hard-core partisans are relatively immune to negative information about “their” side, soft or conditional supporters may become disillusioned, or simply less motivated, when repeated scandals reinforce a narrative of self-interest or incompetence.

The net result is a gradual, cumulative, asymmetric demobilisation of one camp that does not fully register in standard inter-election voting intention surveys, which generally show expressed party preferences among those willing to answer but not necessarily the intensity of that preference or the probability that a respondent will actually turn out to vote.

In Poland’s deeply polarised political landscape, the next parliamentary election, scheduled for autumn 2027, is unlikely to be determined by persuading voters to cross the ideological divide. Rather differential levels of electoral turnout and mobilisation are likely to be the key, specifically: whichever side’s core base is more motivated to – and peripheral, less ideologically committed “softer” supporters are demotivated from – showing up on polling day.

And in a context where the election is likely to be closely fought, and relatively small differences in participation rates could prove decisive, although they may not produce dramatic changes in headline party polling preferences, scandals can still play a significant role. However, we are only likely to see the full impact of any such scandals when voters eventually go to the polls and actual turnout patterns are revealed.

Given the general disillusionment with the current government and growing narrative of its underperformance and failure to deliver on its electoral promises, scandals are more likely to contribute to the demobilisation of the governing camp. It is anyway inherently more difficult for incumbent parties to mobilise their disillusioned supporters to turn out and vote than it is for motivated oppositions to rally their base to oust them.

Indeed, revealed voter preferences in the summer 2025 presidential election – when Nawrocki won an unexpected victory over Trzaskowski, the ruling party-backed favourite – and more recently the severe setback for KO in the Kraków mayoral by-election, suggest that government supporters are already showing greater reluctance to vote.

So, while their effects are routinely neutralised by fast-moving news, tribal shielding and professional spin, scandals still matter in Polish politics, although the battleground has shifted from voter persuasion to differential mobilisation.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Marek Borawski/KPRP

Aleks Szczerbiak is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex. The original version of this article appeared here.