Presidential Palace

As the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) choose someone from the older generation as their candidate for president, Polish Peasant’s Party (PSL) MP Eugeniusz Kłopotek has “a dream. We will give a woman a chance.”

Parties are beginning to announce candidates for the presidential elections next year in Poland, scheduled for sometime before October. The Democratic Left Alliance announced on Saturday that the 57 year-old former defence minister Jerzy Szmajdziński will be their candidate.

"We are ready to go to the elections and win them,” Szmajdziński told delegates at the SLD congress on Saturday. “Poles are not being condemned to only having the choice between two right-wing politicians.”

The selection is a change of strategy for SLD, a party which has been trying to renew its image in the last few years by electing a younger generation of politicians to lead them. By choosing Szmajdziński they are reverting back to relying on a former member of the communist PZPR party from the 1970s. He was defence minister in the SLD-led government 2001-05 and is currently a deputy speaker of the lower house of parliament, the Sejm.

Former president Aleksander Kwasniewski, who will lead the campaign, and echoing the words of Martin Luther King, said at Saturday’s congress that he “has a dream that the Left wins the presidential election. I have a dream that we have a candidate who perfectly fits that role - Jerzy Szmajdziński."

PSL’s Eugeniusz Kłopotek said on a TVN 24 program, Sunday that he too has a dream - that a woman would lead their election bid. “Let‘s give a woman a chance,” he said, noting that females make up 50 percent of the electorate and that his party had traditionally been seen as being male dominated.

When pressed on who this woman might maybe, Kłopotek refused to be drawn on the likely candidate and another current deputy speaker of the Sejm, and PSL’s most prominent female politician, Ewa Kierzkowska.

PSL will officially name a candidate for the elections in “the first quarter of next year,” PSL‘s Stanislaw Żelichowski told the PAP news agency.

It is widely expected Civic Platform will chose Prime Minister Donald Tusk as their candidate and Law and Justice will have the incumbent Lech Kaczynski as their name on the ballot box - or if ill health, or political fatigue, sets in, former minister of justice, Zbigniew Ziobro.