Social media as a constant campaign: The case of Poland's Sławomir Mentzen and Konfederacja
- Adrien Beauduin
- May 20
- 12 min read
Updated: May 21
Written by Adrien Beauduin
Poland had its first round of Presidential elections on May 18, 2025 to vote for a new President and its second round is set for June 1, 2025.
Despite not going to the 2nd round, Mentzen's result of almost 15% is a huge win for Konfederacija. After under-preforming at the 2023 National elections, Mentzen and his party have been campaigning non-stop and this report examines how their work online was a major factor for them winning 15% of the vote.
ECDA commissioned this report in the leadup to the presidential election. The purpose is to better understand how far-right parties—specifically Mentzen and Konfederacja—use digital tools for their political work, and what insights we can apply to our own digital organizing practices.
In the 2025 Polish presidential campaign, the candidate from the far-right Konfederacja party Sławomir Mentzen has shot up in voting intentions, becoming an unexpected contender for the second round. In this report, his success is widely attributed to his skilful use of social media, where he has been dominating his opponents. While he has been wildly successful online during the campaign, he has also been building on solid foundations, as Konfederacja and the Polish far right in general have a long-standing strong presence on social media platforms.
Background
An important element to take into account when examining the Polish far right’s digital strategy is its long-standing success with the youth and its strongly anchored position in Polish-language online spaces, two interrelated phenomena. Thus, between 1/3 and 2/3 of the Polish youth has been voting for far-right options (the Law and Justice party (PiS), Konfederacja, and other far-right projects) between 2015 and 2024, a trend that has been especially strong among young men. Contrarily to Germany or France, where far-right breakthroughs among the youth have been fairly recent, large parts of the Polish youth has been sympathetic to far-right ideas for many years. The popularity of far-right ideas among the youth has not only to do with long-term socio-cultural effects linked with the return of conservative and nationalistic ideas after 1989, coupled with a rabid anti-communist rewriting of the past, but also with the invasion of online spaces by far-right actors in the 2000s. Denouncing mainstream media as owned by foreign interests and manipulated by the government, the far right has invested time and money in building its alternative channels on the internet, constituting an entire network with its own subculture(s) and educating a whole new generation of activists and sympathisers. The PiS party drew from this youth radicalisation to return to power in 2015, further normalising far-right ideas during its eight years in government.
The Konfederacja party emerged in 2018-2019 as a coalition of groups, mostly the ultra- nationalistic Ruch Narodowy (National Movement), the paleolibertarian KORWiN party and the Catholic fundamentalist faction led by provocateur Grzegorz Braun, and it massively invested in social media. Not only did it understand its potential, but it also had no choice, since the PiS- controlled public media and the mainstream media were largely hostile to its existence. To a large extent, Konfederacja was an online project, with public figures who had built a following over years and who were often ‘digital natives’, i.e. young people who have grown up with digital tools.
Already in 2021, Konfederacja had more ‘likes’ on Facebook than the two main parties (PiS and the currently ruling centre-right PO/KO) taken together, and Konfederacja’s 2020 presidential candidate Krzysztof Bosak (born 1982) had more ‘likes’ than centre-right veteran and current Prime Minister Donald Tusk. When the TikTok application appeared, another Konfederacja leader, Sławomir Mentzen (born 1986), quickly became the first Polish politician star on the platform, a position he still holds today as he is running for president. In short, it is crucial to understand how much further ahead the Polish far right is when it comes to its online presence and how strong a position it occupies among those who overwhelmingly occupy online spaces, the youth.
Popular ↔ Professional
Konfederacja and far-right ideology in Poland is not simply popular thanks to the presence of a wide network of far-right groups online, but also thanks to the party’s professional investment in social media. Indeed, Konfederacja and its politicians stand out on the Polish political scene through their masterful use of social media, from the message to the platform. In parallel to the party developing its own online ‘brand’, several of its leaders have developed theirs, creating a powerful amplifying effect that touches several target groups and even extends beyond the core far-right electorate.
Early on, the party has understood social media and has not only created content, but also developed a particular visual identity alike to that of a brand. It has skilfully used lettering, fonts and colours to attract users’ attention and become a recognisable online presence. For example, it has used its frame with its logo, its dark blue backgrounds with white, black and yellow text, to create powerful social media posts. To this date, its social media posts are instantly recognisable and easy to ‘consume’, as a recent collection of screenshot posts testifies (see Figure 1).
The party has also excelled at keeping up to date with algorithms and platform developments. For example, its impressive rise on Facebook (see Figure 2) can be traced back to its skillful exploitation of the algorithm’s preference for short videos, as the party pushed forward short, hard-hitting clips with its political leaders harshly attacking political opponents. Konfederacja has understood the ‘brutalised’ environment of Polish politics marked by the PO-PiS rivalry dominating Polish politics, and it has mastered its language, using social media to frame itself as rejecting both parties, and the whole political establishment. Thus, Konfederacja has fit its message to the platforms by staging itself and its representatives as uncompromising challengers standing up to mainstream parties in short videos.
Konfederacja’s success on social media is largely due to its successful staging of politics as a kind of sports, teams and fans, and matches with winners and losers. According to this vision of politics, there are no breaks between elections and campaigning must be constant. In this contest, the party widely draws from popular culture and social media trends to ‘entertain’ the public, create a bond with its fan base and enlarge it to an ever-growing circle of people. An example of this ‘politainment’ performed by Konfederacja was Sławomir Mentzen and ten other Konfederacja politicians taking part in an online rap contest (Hot16Challenge) to raise money for charity in 2020, creating viral content with 9 million views, often with violent attacks against political opponents.
The party’s communication strategy seems to be based on this content creation that triggers reactions and interactions, something boosted by social media algorithms. Thus, its political interventions in parliament or in the media seem to be tailored to produce viral online content. A good example is the first speech in the European Parliament by freshly elected Ewa Zajączkowska- Hernik in 2024, where she strongly attacked EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, dramatically tearing up sheets of paper with the words ‘Green Deal’ and ‘Migration Pact’. This kind of theatre became viral on social media platforms, even being spread in other languages by the wider European far-right network.
To better perform in the media, Konfederacja seems to not only train its representatives, but also to divide tasks, with those better at debating, like Krzysztof Bosak, more frequently sent to face other parties’ representatives or unsympathetic journalists, while Sławomir Mentzen focuses on short monologues spread in channels like TikTok, or in longer podcast-style formats like YouTube.
Mentzen’s ability to talk directly to his audience and to appear frank and authentic has made him an instant TikTok star, long before other Polish politicians understood the platform’s appeal. He has cultivated an image as both an ‘expert’, as a successful entrepreneur specialised in fiscal issues, and as a ‘regular guy’ who cultivates a certain distance from the seriousness of his message and uses self-irony to ‘keep it real’. By focusing overwhelmingly on economic issues, Mentzen has built an audience around one particular topic, just like most online influencers do, and has become a ‘celebrity’ in a certain sense, as someone successful in a certain area who inspires others.
His ability to create short, entertaining videos with clear messages has been crucial in dominating a platform like TikTok. With his 1.6 million followers and 42.7 million ‘likes’, Mentzen is way ahead of other leading politicians like Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his half million followers. Mentzen is not restricted to this format, though, and he is also very strong on YouTube, where he has over 800,000 subscribers and where his half-hour long ‘Mentzen grills’ monologues regularly attract 300,000 viewers. Mentzen exemplifies how an understanding of platforms leads to adequate content and, ultimately, to successfully building an audience.
The Mentzen Campaign
With his leading position on social media backed by a strong party online presence and a sympathetic far-right online eco-system, Sławomir Mentzen entered the presidential race with good tools to pursue his party’s normalisation, out from the political margins and into the mainstream, and to outdo the party’s 12% result at the 2024 EU elections. Moreover, Mentzen was the first to officially launch his campaign, as early as September 2024, a full eight months and a half before the first round of voting.
Entering the race, Mentzen has pursued the same Konfederacja narrative as before, framing the political class dominated by PO/KO and PiS as corrupt and incompetent, and vowing to ‘overturn the table’ (referring to the 1989 Round-Table agreements between the communist regime and the opposition), i.e. shake up the political system. He has used his young age (38) to frame himself (and his fellow, overwhelmingly young Konfederacja colleagues) as a new generation of Polish politicians who will tackle contemporary challenges. Mentzen has kept the emphasis on his promise of low and simple taxes, his refusal of migration and his rejection of environmental measures like the EU Green Deal, wrapping them in a discourse of national sovereignty. He has put less emphasis on ‘cultural’ matters, but has nevertheless not shied away from reiterating his opposition to abortion and voicing his strongly conservative values.
To spread his message, Mentzen has continuously used and developed his online presence, largely making up for his more modest presence in traditional media with intense social media communication. This has helped him remain on top, and even overhaul the leading candidates Rafał Trzaskowski (PO) and Karol Nawrocki (endorsed by PiS) in media exposure, as Figure 3 shows. On that particular week, Mentzen accepted an invitation to the online media Kanał Zero, generating millions of views. In contrast, leading candidate Rafał Trzaskowski initially turned down an appearance on Kanał Zero before accepting.
The Powerful Online-Offline Feedback Loop
Starting his campaign already in the Fall of 2024, Mentzen has adopted an interesting offline-online strategy to create a powerful feedback loop between offline and online campaigning. Indeed, he has put the emphasis on a high number of appearances all over the country, covering more than two hundred small localities, sometimes up to seven in a day, where he has been met by large crowds. Using his social media platforms, the party’s online presence and a sympathetic far-right digital network, he has highlighted his popularity in the streets, creating a momentum for his campaign. This street mobilisation has been widely framed in Mentzen’s and Konfederacja’s channels as the proof that he is a serious candidate who could make it to the second round.
In addition to the numerous online posts made by fans attending those events, an important aspect of the meetings is the time Mentzen takes to pose for a selfie with his fans, something that increases is online presence in an organic and authentic way, with each supporter acting as a diffusion channel. Moreover, Mentzen has widely used these selfie session to break up the image of the misogynistic candidate of masculinity, with pictures overwhelmingly focusing on younger and older female supporters (see Figure 4). As women increasingly come out in his support, they also act as ‘stereotype-breakers’ and ‘taboo-breakers’. On TikTok, there was a trend of young women coming out in support of Mentzen, posting videos about why they wanted to vote for him. Even if the trend was also recuperated by women opposing Mentzen, it did contribute greatly to the candidate’s dominant presence in online discussions. In fact, Mentzen’s following grew so much that he also became the most popular Polish politician on Instagram, even if the platform was deemed to be more ‘female’ and ‘progressive’ in the Polish context.
Several videos with crowds of loud supporters or with fans chanting Mentzen’s name have been seen by millions of people and have constituted the core of his campaign in the last weeks leading to the vote, coming to incarnate the idea that he is the anti-system outsider who could break the PO-PiS duopoly. He has skilfully used the crowds to create viral online posts, as in the evening when he turned down participation in a debate, attacking the ‘establishment’ for wanting to restrain the debate to the two main candidates and and staging himself instead with ‘the people’, posting videos on social media which garnered millions of views.
With his early start in the campaign and his frequent meetings, Mentzen completely dominated social media in January, February and March. For example, over four weeks in January and February, Mentzen generated close to 58% of all interactions on presidential candidates’ social media pages. During several weeks in February and March, Mentzen continued his domination, generating around 40% of all interactions and leading all other candidates in gaining followers. Taking the last week of February, up to 88% of all new ‘fans’ gained by presidential candidates were new Mentzen followers.
Presidential, yet Relatable
As Figures 4 and 5 illustrate above, Mentzen has crushed all other candidates when it comes to gaining new followers and triggering interactions. Impressively, he has done so on all five major social media platforms, showing how good he is at creating content that fits the platform. He has also somewhat adjusted his image, dressing up in a more formal way and being somewhat more serious.
This does not mean that Mentzen has turned to a more conventional, ‘boring’ political style, on the contrary, but rather that he has seemed to strive to embody the presidential style more closely. Despite this ‘presidential’ style, Mentzen has continued to present the same ‘authentic’ face to his audience. On YouTube, he followed the trend of many influencers by wearing a body-cam for the whole day and presenting long one hour and a half videos showing ‘one day in his life’, garnering 1,8 million views for the first video, and several hundreds of thousands for the next ones.
On TikTok, he has not been afraid to continue to post humoristic content, like a five-second clip joking with a Christmas tree (garnering 7 million views). Mentzen is able to link his casual everyday image to his politics, as in a longer TikTok clip discussing mayonnaise prices in a shop, something that was seen 5,4 million times. He followed up when he received a batch of free mayonnaise, going to give it away at a food bank (over 800,000 views). He has also gone ‘on the field’ to create content, like a longer clip making fun of an empty airport built with government funds (1,9 million views) or doing simpler, ‘entertaining’ things, like blowing up balloons bearing the names of ‘useless’ public institutions that he would liquidate (1,4 million views).
Conclusion
By campaigning earlier and stronger than most other candidates, by building on an already strong social media presence and by offering a compelling narrative of radical change, both generational and political, Sławomir Mentzen has become a serious contender for the second roun. For Mentzen and Konfederacja, social media is not a tool to use during six to eight weeks every election cycle, but rather a daily part of political activism, and even an intrinsic part of their lives. They know why they are on each platform and what they need to do on each of them to win people over. They act as influencers cultivating a close relationship with their followers and maintaining that relationship on a daily basis. During the campaign, this following has been acting as a powerful amplifier of the message, helping the party and its candidates double and even triple its reach in a largely organic way.
However, Mentzen seems to have repeated the same mistake as his party’s early surge during the 2023 parliamentary elections, with an early rise and a later fall in surveys, and a disappointing result. By starting early, Mentzen succeeded in dominating social media and in establishing himself as a serious political option, but he was less successful at dealing with the increasing attention, as journalists and opponents challenged him. For example, while the aforementioned appearance on the YouTube channel Kanał Zero triggered a lot of attention, his ideas about abortion or paid higher education also undermined his popularity. Mentzen’s slump in surveys can also be traced to the successful campaign of his former party colleague and more extremist opponent Grzegorz Braun, who might be siphoning off votes from Konfederacja’s voter base. Finally, Mentzen might be himself the victim of algorithms, as he does not seem to have anything new to present in the campaign’s last stretch.
While Mentzen’s domination of online spaces and his increasing popularity might be seen as inevitable consequences of socio-political tendencies, and especially the ruling parties’ and the main opposition’s (PiS) lack of popularity, the fact that Konfederacja’s candidate is the one benefiting from dissatisfaction was far from ineluctable. Thus, in April, left-wing candidates have also shown that it is possible to do strong online campaigning without far-right extremism. Thus, Magdalena Biejat and Adrian Zandberg have successfully mobilised online and offline, gaining more and more attention and following. Even if Mentzen remained the most ‘interactive’ candidate on social media, Biejat and Zandberg overhauled him in getting new followers over the month of April. By framing herself as the ‘anti-Mentzen’ and proudly owning up to her pro-LGBT+ and feminist views, Biejat has shot up in online spaces, remindful of Heidi Reichinnek’s (Die Linke) successful last stretch in the last German elections, as the anti-AfD voice of the youth.
While all candidates have invested online spaces in the last weeks, most of them had largely neglected social media in the preceding months. Thus, while attempts to ramp up online campaigning in the last stretch do help, it is very difficult to compete with a candidate and a party that have never stopped campaigning. Mentzen and his Konfederacja party are many steps ahead when it comes to understanding and using platforms, and other political parties would need to invest both time and money to catch up in online spaces.
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