Rival Victory Claims as Poland’s Presidential Election Goes Down to Wire
Poland — A pivotal presidential election in Poland was too close to call Sunday night, with exit polls showing the two contenders nearly neck and neck and each candidate claiming victory a day before the official ballot count was to be announced.
Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, declared victory Sunday evening after the release of early exit poll data that showed him with a tiny lead over his right-wing rival. But an updated set of survey data released later flipped the results and gave Trzaskowki’s opponent, Karol Nawrocki, a narrow lead. Nawrocki, a nationalist historian backed by Poland’s right-wing former governing party, Law and Justice, told supporters in Warsaw that the official count, to be released on Monday, would show him to be the victor. “I believe that we will all wake up tomorrow morning with President Nawrocki putting the broken Poland back together,” he said Sunday night.
Quoting a passage from the Bible, he said that God would “heal the land” of those who “turn away from wicked ways.” Exit polling data, which in the past has been highly accurate in Poland, initially gave Trzaskowski 50.3%, but was later revised to give Nawrocki 50.7%. Confident that the official count would confirm the initial exit polling data, Trzaskowski celebrated Sunday evening in Warsaw with supporters, telling them: “We won. I think that the term ‘razor-thin victory’ will forever enter the Polish language and politics.” The election featured the two top candidates from a first round of voting that included 13 candidates on May 18. The vote has been widely viewed as a test of whether populist nationalism is a rising or receding force in Europe and beyond. The hard-fought campaign drew in supporters and foes of President Donald Trump on both sides of the Atlantic. Nationalist forces in Europe and the United States had been rooting for Nawrocki.
Trump endorsed him, as did Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and George Simion, a right-wing politician in Romania who recently lost a presidential election there. Poland’s centrist prime minister, Donald Tusk, campaigned hard for Trzaskowki, hoping that he would prevail and remove a major obstacle to his government. Tusk’s legislative agenda has been repeatedly blocked by the departing president, Andrzej Duda, an ally of Law and Justice.
The president has a largely ceremonial role but can veto laws passed by parliament or send them for review by a constitutional court stacked with Law and Justice loyalists. Trzaskowski has promised to cooperate with Tusk and end more than a year of trench warfare between the presidency and the government. “This is not just about the presidency — that is peanuts,” Jan Brykczynski, 62, a Warsaw psychologist, said after casting his vote for Trzaskowski. “The stakes are much higher.” Poland, he said, is “on the edge” and needs to prevent right-wing nationalists from taking back control. The election hinged on the question of whether Polish voters want a president who can work with the sitting government of the prime minister, Tusk, or one who opposes it.
The closeness of the race highlighted Poland’s polarization between right-wing nationalist forces opposed to Tusk and centrists who support him. With preelection opinion polls showing a very close race, Nawrocki’s MAGA-aligned American and European supporters laid the groundwork for a possible Trump-style “stop the steal” movement in the event of a victory for Trzaskowski.
In letter this week to the European Union’s executive arm, eight Republican members of the U.S. Congress claimed that “the Globalist Left are trying to rig Poland’s presidential election.” Simion, the defeated Romanian presidential candidate and a fervent fan of Trump, made the same warning at a speech Tuesday at gathering in Poland of the Conservative Political Action Conference, an American organization pushing to take Trump’s message global. Simion said that “globalists” intended to steal the Polish election as, he claimed without evidence, they had done in Romania.
In his remarks to supporters Sunday, Nawrocki said his opponents had used state institutions against him and “lied, lied, lied and lied.” Whatever the final outcome, he said: “We managed to unite the entire patriotic camp in Poland. The entire camp of people who want a normal Poland, want a Poland without illegal immigrants, a safe Poland.” The turnout Sunday in Poland was more than 70%, the highest in a Polish presidential election since the first free and direct vote for the presidency in 1990, when Lech Walesa, the Solidarity trade union leader, won after the collapse of communism. Walesa, a vocal critic of Law and Justice, and Europe’s mainstream political forces supported Trzaskowski, the multilingual son of a prominent Polish jazz musician. While Nawrocki has sided with Orban of Hungary in criticizing the European Union and demanding that decision-making powers be returned to individual states, Trzaskowski has voiced strong support for the European bloc and vowed to keep Poland from following the path toward “illiberal democracy” taken by Hungary under Orban.
The election of Trzaskowski, who was backed by Tusk’s party, Civic Platform, would end a long period of political deadlock that began when Law and Justice lost its majority in Parliament in a 2023 election but retained control of the separately elected presidency. A win for Nawrocki would continue and even harden this deadlock — and cloud the prospects of Tusk’s party in the next parliamentary election in 2027.
Source. miami herald