Has apartment scandal ended hopes of opposition presidential candidate Nawrocki?

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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 Daniel Tilles

Just one week ago, I was writing on these pages about how Karol Nawrocki, the presidential candidate supported by the conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, had dramatically closed the polling gap on frontrunner Rafał Trzaskowski, who represents the centrist Civic Platform (PO), Poland’s main ruling group.

However, a scandal that emerged this week over a second apartment owned by Nawrocki, and about the elderly, disabled man, Jerzy Żywicki, who lived there, has now engulfed his campaign – and potentially ended his chances of victory.

As well as the accusations that Nawrocki faces personally – that he lied when declaring he only owned one apartment and that he not only failed in his declared duty to care for Żywicki but may have exploited him for financial gain – the response by his campaign and PiS has often been amateurish and contradictory.

The episode also raises questions about how well PiS vetted Nawrocki – a political novice who has never previously stood for elected office – before declaring their support for him.

We have already reported on the case in detail here and here, but it is worth quickly recapping. At a televised debate last week, Nawrocki expressed opposition to a proposed property tax, saying that he was “speaking on behalf of ordinary Poles, like me, who have one apartment”.

That quickly turned out to be a false statement, with news website Onet discovering that Nawrocki in fact owned a second apartment.

The candidate and his campaign team responded by saying that, while Nawrocki did own the second apartment, that was because it had been part of an arrangement for him to provide support to an elderly, disabled acquaintance, Żywicki, who lived at the property.

However, further reporting by Onet found further holes in this story, including that Żywicki in fact now lives in a state care home, not the apartment.

Żywicki’s former in-home carer and his children also rejected Nawrocki’s claim that he had cared for the man. They also suggested that Nawrocki had exploited Żywicki to take ownership of the apartment, which was now worth much more than Nawrocki paid for it.

PiS and Nawrocki have struggled to keep up with the constant stream of emerging information, and have often ended up sending out conflicting messages in response.

In an early statement, for example, the Nawrocki campaign’s spokeswoman, Emilia Wierzbicki, said that Nawrocki had been unable to locate Żywicki for the past six months after realising he was no longer living at the property.

But if Nawrocki was truly the sole person responsible for Żywicki’s care, as he had claimed, why had he not reported Żywicki missing to the authorities?

Meanwhile, Nawrocki’s team released a copy of his asset declaration to show he had properly reported ownership of the second apartment. However, that had never been in question.

What concerned people was why Nawrocki had made a false statement during the debate and whether he had properly cared for Żywicki as claimed. Even worse, the asset declaration also revealed that Nawrocki had declared owning half of a third apartment.

With Nawrocki’s campaign floundering, PiS itself started to try to take control of the narrative. But this resulted in more confusion.

For example, on Tuesday this week, three PiS MPs gave a conference at which they presented evidence purporting to show that Nawrocki had paid Żywicki 120,000 zloty for the apartment (rather than a reduced price of 12,000 zloty that some media had suggested was possible).

However, the very same day, Nawrocki gave an interview in which he said that he had not paid 120,000 zloty at that time, because giving so much money at once to someone in Żywicki’s position would have posed a threat to him. He said he had instead paid it in instalments over 14 years.

Yet that claim appeared to contradict what was presented in the notarial deed shown by PiS MPs. So it appeared either that the notarised document contained a falsehood or that what Nawrocki was now saying was false.

The fact that Żywicki himself purchased the property by using his right as a resident to buy social housing for 10% of its value, but did so with money provided to him by Nawrocki, has also led to suggestions that Nawrocki exploited the situation to obtain the property on the cheap.

The whole situation has raised serious ethical and legal questions around Nawrocki less than two weeks before the first round of the presidential election on 18 May.

The issue is even more damaging for a candidate who has sought to present himself as a man of the people, in contrast to the elitist Trzaskowski, and for a party, PiS, that has always sought to present itself as a defender of the weak, and in particular the elderly.

Just as damaging has been the complete communications and PR failure the scandal has elicited from Nawrocki, his team and PiS, suggesting incompetence that will not endear him to voters when they are choosing a new head of state.

The episode also raises questions about how well PiS vetted Nawrocki before making the rather left-field decision to support his candidacy last year. Backing a political novice who had never been a member of PiS (or any other political party) should surely have prompted an even higher level of scrutiny than normal.

If PiS was aware of Nawrocki’s property ownership and the circumstances around it, why was his campaign not prepared to respond to the information becoming public? If they were not aware, why not?

Too few polls have been published yet to have a sense of what impact this affair has had on support for Nawrocki. In any case, most polling relates to the first round of the election, in which 13 candidates are standing and each will generally receive the votes of their core electorates.

PiS supporters will likely continue to back their party’s man. Many of them will sympathise with Nawrocki and PiS’s claims that the entire apartment scandal has been engineered by the security services, leaking sensitive information to bolster Trzaskowski’s campaign.

The real question is what will happen in the second-round run-off on 1 June, when the top two candidates from the first round will face off. The winner will have to obtain votes from outside their traditional base. For Nawrocki, that means winning over some combination of centrist voters and supporters of the far-right Confederation (Konfederacja) party.

However, many such voters are likely to have been put off by the recent revelations and Nawrocki’s confused response. A poll this week found that 43% of Poles take a negative view of Nawrocki’s behaviour towards Żywicki while only 15% have a positive one.

Confederation’s presidential candidate, Sławomir Mentzen, has so far generally avoided criticism of Nawrocki during the campaign, instead focusing on Trzaskowski. But this week he attacked his conservative rival over the apartment scandal.

“Nawrocki did something absolutely disgusting” because “he took over an apartment from an elderly and sick person without paying for it”, said Mentzen. And, “on top of that, he lied to the notary that he had paid [and] also forced the seller of the apartment to lie”.

While it remains unlikely that Nawrocki will lose enough support to prevent him from finishing in the top two during the first round, it now looks like Trzaskowski – who was already the favourite for victory despite his recent troubles – seems even more likely to win in the decisive run-off.

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: Magdalena Basińska (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.