WARSAW, Poland, Nov 25, (AP): Poland's conservative Law and Justice party, which is trying to regain its momentum after losing power last year, on Sunday chose historian Karol Nawrocki as its candidate for president ahead of next year's election. The decision caps a weekend during which the country's two largest parties announced their candidates for en election that will decide the successor to incumbent President Andrzej Duda, whose second and final term ends in August 2025.

Nawrocki, 41, has since 2021 led the Institute of National Remembrance, a state body that houses archives and researches the crimes of World War II and the communist era. He previously served as the director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, the city where he was born. The party bypassed seasoned politicians including former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki to tap the lesser-known Nawrocki to run for the highest office, similar to what it did in choosing Duda a decade earlier.

"The party decided to field a non-partisan, independent candidate, a candidate that many of our prominent activists, including the top ones, did not know closely," party leader Jarosław Kaczyński told those gathered at a party convention in the southern city of Krakow. Had Kaczyński tapped Morawiecki or another high-level party member who held a government role from 2015-23, it could have made the corruption scandals of that period a key focus of the campaign.

Kaczyński stated in an interview months ago that the party’s presidential candidate should be "young, tall, impressive, handsome, have a family, know English very well, and preferably two languages, and be internationally savvy.” Nawrocki, giving an acceptance speech to an audience that included his wife and three children, laid out a world view that is fully in line with the party's: patriotic, pro-Christian, pro-NATO and favorable to President-elect Donald Trump.