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Opposition leader Donald Tusk could return as Polish Prime Minister. This emerges from two election polls after Sunday’s parliamentary election, in which the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) is ahead but does not have enough votes to govern alone or with a right-wing extremist party.
PiS and its leader Jarosław Kaczyński were expected to win 36.6 percent of the vote, with Tusk’s Civic Platform receiving 31 percent. Together with two other parties, the Civic Platform is on track to secure 248 of the 460 seats in the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament. This is according to the latest Ipsos exit poll published on Monday morning, which confirmed the same seat share for Tusk Party as the first exit poll on Sunday evening.
Tusk promised during the election campaign to put Warsaw back on a clear pro-European path, restore the independence of judges and release billions of euros in EU funds that the European Commission had withheld in a dispute with the PiS government over judicial reforms.
The vote is considered the most significant election for the EU this year and could redefine relations between Brussels and the largest member state in Central and Eastern Europe after years of dispute.
“This is the end of bad times. “This is the end of PiS rule,” Tusk said in front of cheering supporters on Sunday evening. “We really did it. Poland won, democracy won.”
At PiS headquarters, Kaczyński told his supporters that there was still a way for his party to return to power. “There are days of struggle and various tensions ahead,” the ultra-conservative leader said. “We must have hope and know that whether we are in power or in opposition, we will implement this project in different ways.”
Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the Law and Justice party, greets his supporters in Warsaw on Sunday © Czarek Sokolowski/APIf the final results match the polls, PiS will struggle to secure a third term in government as its potential coalition partner – the far-right Confederation – is expected to win just 6.4 percent of the vote, equivalent to just 14 seats.
President Andrzej Duda is expected to give PiS its first chance to form a government if results confirm it remains the largest party in parliament.
Final results of the closely contested election are not expected until late Monday or even Tuesday, as the counting was complicated by a referendum that the PiS included on the ballot to promote four issues that were central to its campaign.
The National Election Commission began releasing partial results on Monday morning showing PiS won 40.2 percent of the vote, compared to 26.6 percent for Tusk’s Civic Platform, with just over 10 percent of votes counted. But even if this preliminary lead was larger than in the election polls, it was not enough for the PiS to achieve a majority with the support of the Confederation.
The election could also ease recent tensions between Warsaw and Kiev, sparked in large part by PiS’s re-election bid. PiS has been at loggerheads with the Confederation, which claimed the government had been too generous to Ukrainian refugees and also sought to appease its agrarian constituency by imposing a unilateral ban on Ukrainian grain imports earlier this year.
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Voter turnout in the parliamentary election was on track to reach a record since Poland’s return to democracy, according to preliminary data from Ipsos. Voter turnout was almost 73 percent, 11 percentage points higher than in the last election in 2019.
Analysts warned that Poland’s fragmented and toxic politics may make election polls less reliable than in previous elections.
Similar elections in Slovakia two weeks ago predicted that the liberal opposition leader would come out on top, but the final results put populist Robert Fico and his Smer party in the lead. “We could still have a Slovak situation here,” said Marcin Duma, head of the polling institute Ibris, before Sunday’s vote.
Administration officials have also warned that pollsters may not accurately report support for their party.
“We believe we have a silent majority,” Janusz Kowalski, deputy agriculture minister, said before Sunday’s vote. “I know many voters who do not want to openly communicate that they are voting for law and justice.”
Nevertheless, according to preliminary data, only 40 percent of voters took part in the referendum, not enough to make it binding. Tusk called for a boycott of this referendum.