Initial exit polls for the Polish presidential election put the race at a dead heat, with the neo-liberal establishment candidate leading his conservative upstart opponent by a fraction of a percentage point.
UPDATE 2200: While the race is still too close to call, the votes from the Polish diaspora community in the United States have been fully counted. According to Gazeta Wyborcza, PiS conservative candidate Karol Nawrocki won 28,070 votes in America, or 56.65 per cent, compared to 21,479 votes, or 43.35 per cent, for liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski.
The original story continues as follows…
Polish voters went to the polls on Sunday for the second and final round of the presidential elections, which will decide the successor of Andrzej Duda, who has held the position since 2015 and was term-limited from running again.
The presidential race was whittled down from over a dozen candidates in the first round of voting last month to two challengers, historian and former chairman of the Institute of National Remembrance Karol Nawrocki, supported by the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), and Mayor of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s neo-liberal Civic Platform party.
The race’s outcome will be pivotal for Poland and the broader European Union, given that Duda has acted as a check to the power of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a former top Eurocrat who returned to Polish politics to become PM in 2023. Crucially, the Polish president is endowed with powers such as vetoing legislation, which would be key in preventing Tusk from further aligning the traditionally conservative country with Brussels.
According to exit polls from ISPSOS on Sunday evening, Mayor Trzaskowski held a slight advantage of just 0.6 per cent over Nawrocki by a margin of 50.3 per cent to 49.7 per cent, Gazeta Wyborcza reports. While Trzaskowski attempted to claim victory off the exit polls, the race is too close to call at the time of this reporting.
The progressive Warsaw mayor and former presidential candidate opened the race with a strong lead over his relatively unknown challenger. However, Nawrocki has climbed in the polls in recent weeks, with a final survey before the second round of voting showing that he had closed the gap to just one percentage point.
Nawrocki has campaigned as a Trumpian-style populist and a Christian traditionalist, differentiating himself from his liberal opponent on issues such as LGBTQ+ ideology, sensationally placing a rainbow flag on Trzaskowski’s podium during a nationally televised debate.
Nawrocki has also cast himself to the right of the previous PiS government, criticising its record on mass migration and declaring that “receiving Islamic immigrants is always wrong.” He has also come out firmly against the European Union’s Green New Deal, saying that it must “be rejected”.
However, it has not been all smooth sailing for the political neophyte, as he has faced a series of scandals over reporting from left-wing media outlets. This has included anonymous allegations that he was previously involved in prostitution while working as a security guard for a hotel in Sopot.
Nawrocki has also been accused, again anonymously, of having participated in an underground fighting ring with links to organised crime in 2009.
PiS Party leader Jarosław Kaczyński said that while he disapproved of such fighting rings, he noted: “If we look at the current state of Poland, or more precisely the state around Poland… we need brave men, not people who, when the first shots are fired, will rush to escape.”
This story is developing, more to come…
