Donald Tusk, former EU president, declares victory in Poland election

Rome: Poland’s political opposition ecstatically declared victory in the country’s most pivotal election since the fall of the Berlin Wall, after an exit poll suggested that while the ruling hard-right party had placed first, the opposition had a far clearer path to forming a governing coalition.

“We did it! Really! . . . Poland has won, democracy has won. We have removed them from power!” opposition leader Donald Tusk – a former prime minister and head of the European Council – told his supporters late on Sunday (Monday AEDT).

Donald Tusk, former president of the European Union (EU) and leader of the Civic Coalition, speaks during an election night rally at the party headquarters in Warsaw, Poland.Credit: Bloomberg

An opposition victory would mean a dramatic shift for Poland, where the ruling Law and Justice party has held power for the past eight years, making it one of the most successful populist parties in Europe and a model of the rollback of democratic norms. The Polish government exerted control over the courts and the media, backed severe restrictions on abortion, targeted LBGTQ+ rights, and undermined the bonds of the European Union.

If the exit poll holds true, observers say, the election result would have major implications for Polish democracy, European unity and the West’s effort to confront Russian aggression.

But exit polls, while generally considered reliable in Poland, can also be flawed, as recently seen in neighbouring Slovakia.

Law and Justice also claimed victory on Sunday, and its allies could delay any transfer of power or try to thwart it by attempting to form a minority government.

People wait in line to cast their ballot during parliamentary elections in Warsaw, Poland, on Sunday evening.Credit: AP

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party’s leader and the country’s deputy prime minister, seemed to acknowledge a tough road to forming a new government. “The question is whether this success will be able to be turned into another term of office,” he told supporters.

“Whether we are in power or in the opposition, we will continue implementing our project and will not allow Poland to be betrayed,” he said.

The exit poll suggested an opposition victory would be built on a coalition of younger voters, highly educated urban dwellers and Poles living in the industrialised western half of the country, which has deeper historical ties to the rest of Europe.

For advocates of democracy in the EU, such a result would amount to an early Christmas gift – one fortifying the bloc’s position as a defender of the rule of law at a time when far-right parties have made substantial inroads elsewhere on the continent.

“The Polish middle class has mobilised to keep us a European democracy,” Radek Sikorski, a Polish member of the European Parliament and former foreign minister, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Huge turnout in metropolitan areas, demotivated traditionalist south-east. In these dark times forces of light need a break and it looks like Poland might provide it.”

A woman prepares her ballot on Sunday. Poland held an election on Sunday that many see as its most important one since the 1989 vote that toppled communism. Credit: AP

The Ipsos Mori poll, which sampled 900 polling stations, projected that Law and Justice had won 36.8 per cent of the vote. Tusk’s opposition Civic Coalition was projected to have gotten 31.6 per cent. But, pivotally, two political forces seen as potential allies in a new “democratic” coalition collectively had garnered another 21.6 per cent. A fourth political force – the Confederation party, seen as even further to the right than Law and Justice – was polling well below expectations at 6.2 per cent.

“There is no denying . . . that we have failed,” Slawomir Mentzen, Confederation’s co-leader, told supporters. “We were supposed to overturn this table, and everything indicates that we didn’t succeed.”

The highly charged election campaign included some of the largest rallies on Warsaw’s streets since the restoration of democracy three decades ago, and the exit poll suggested a record-high turnout of 73 per cent. Some polling stations with long lines remained open into the night.

The final results are expected Monday or Tuesday and hinge on official tallies, and whether smaller parties would actually emerge as kingmakers or fail to enter parliament at all.

Poland’s conservative ruling Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski gets in a car after casting his ballot in Warsaw.Credit: AP

In the country’s complicated parliamentary system, political parties and alliances must pass a bar of 5 per cent or 8 per cent respectively to win seats in parliament. If they don’t cross that threshold, those seats are distributed among other parties, with the largest vote winner seeing the biggest gains.

In the run-up to the election, analysts said Law and Justice had tipped the odds in its favour by exerting control over the media, pushing through new electoral rules that catered to its core constituencies and tacking on a controversial referendum to stoke support.

Among the four referendum questions, voters were asked whether “you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa”. The opposition encouraged voters to boycott the referendum.

The exit poll suggested that the referendum answers were overwhelmingly in the ruling party’s favour, but participation was only about 40 per cent, below the threshold to make the result binding.

The parliamentary election outcome is being especially watched in Washington, Brussels, Kyiv and Moscow, as Poland is central to the West’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has equipped Ukraine with German-made Leopard 2 tanks and Polish MiG-29 fighters. It has also taken in millions of Ukrainian refugees since the start of the war.

But domestic politics have clouded that support. Last month, a dispute over the impact of Ukrainian grain exports on Polish farmers escalated to the point where Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki raised the prospect of an end to Polish arms shipments.

The Washington Post