In the second round of the Polish presidential election on June 1, the pro-European candidate, Warsaw Mayor Rafal Tchaskowski, and the candidate of the opposition conservatives, Director of the Institute of National Remembrance Karol Nawrocki, are entering with a minimum margin of 1,5 percent.
This morning, after counting votes from 99 percent of polling stations in Poland and all polling stations in the diaspora, the ruling center-right coalition's candidate Tchaskowski won 31,2 percent of the vote, winning in 10 out of 16 voivodeships, and leading in all major cities and in the diaspora.
Coming in second out of 13 candidates in Sunday's election, Karol Nawrocki, backed by the opposition Law and Justice party, won 29,7 percent of the vote, a slight improvement over exit polls for Polish television immediately after the polls closed.
The first polls of the results of the second round of elections have been published, for the private television station TVN, and according to them, Tšaskovski would win, but very narrowly, with 46 percent of the vote, while Navrocki has the support of 44 percent.
The diaspora, where interest in the elections was high this time, put Tšaskovski in first place with 36,82 percent of the vote.
However, in the second round, according to those votes, about half a million Poles in the diaspora would have gone to the young radical right candidate Slavomir Mencen with 16,58 percent of the vote, who is only in third place in the country with over 15 percent of the vote.
The outcome of the second round and whether the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk will be able to continue to dismantle authoritarian elements such as those of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who introduced reforms to the judiciary, primarily but also to other institutions, by the previous government of conservative nationalists from Law and Justice.
The question is whether Poland will strengthen European alliances or blindly follow the administration of US President Donald Trump, and this will depend to a large extent on whether Menzen and the radical right will support any of the candidates.
Analysts estimate that voters of the ruling broad coalition of liberals, Christian Democrats and the left, especially young people, gave Tsaskowski a yellow card in the first round on Sunday, dissatisfied with how Prime Minister Tusk's government is fulfilling election promises from the fall of 2023, in particular the restoration of an independent judiciary, the promise for Polish women of a revision of the restrictive abortion law and a crackdown on the corruption of the previous government.
It was women and young voters who carried the burden of protests on the streets for all eight years of the Polish conservative right-wing government until the fall of 2023, and they stayed home on Sunday, and the turnout was significantly lower than the record in the parliamentary elections, yesterday's 66,8 percent.
"The diverse offer of candidates on the right-wing side has drawn those who are dissatisfied with the government to the polls, and they have found various ways to show the government a yellow card," analyst Ana Vojćuk told today's Gazeta Viborča.
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