FINAL RESULTS of Poland’s presidential election first round suggest winner Bronislaw Komorowski will face a serious battle in a run-off with challenger Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
After some exit polls gave Mr Komorowski of the liberal Civic Platform (PO) a lead of nearly 10 points on Sunday night, final results from the regions brought his result down to 41.2 per cent.
Meanwhile Mr Kaczynski, head of the national conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party finished the evening with 36.7 per cent of the vote – higher than exit polls predicted.
Two months after his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, was killed in a plane crash, Jaroslaw Kaczynski is confident he can close a gap of just 4.5 points to win the July 4th run-off.
With his surprisingly strong result, Mr Kaczynski was seen by many political observers in Poland yesterday as the biggest winner of this election. With a turnout of 55 per cent, results showed a traditional east-west geographical split in voter preferences.
Mr Komorowski, the 58- year-old parliamentary speaker and acting head of state, won in northern and western Poland while Mr Kaczynski polled most strongly in poorer, more traditional central and eastern regions.
Meanwhile, campaigners on both sides said the run-off would be won by whoever could win over most of the votes of left-wing candidate Grzegorz Napieralski, who came third.
“Mr Komorowski should be worried about two things,” said Jaroslaw Zbieranek of Warsaw’s Institute of Public Affairs (ISP). “Firstly, that Napieralski’s electorate will stay at home (on July 4th) and that his own electorate will go on holiday.”
In the 2005 presidential election, current prime minister Donald Tusk led the first round but lost the run-off after a low turn-out of PO voters. Kaczynski voters, generally older and rural-based, are viewed as more solid and easier to mobilise.
Mr Tusk has worked closely with Mr Komorowski to promise voters co-operation on economic and health reforms, and to expedite Poland’s entry to the euro zone.
Financial analysts have made clear they would welcome a Komorowski victory to clear a reform backlog that built up during the unhappy cohabitation of the PO government and President Lech Kaczynski. They are concerned that a victory for Mr Kaczynski would recall the worst days of his unstable prime ministership from 2005-2007.
“We could get more of the same arguments over policy and prevarication when Poland needs to tackle its fiscal deficit and welfare reforms,” said Nigel Rendell, senior emerging market strategist at RBC Capital Markets in London.
But Mr Rendell warned that analysts were not “overconfident” about Mr Komorowski. “The political case against him is that he’s too run-of-the-mill and not that dynamic,” he said. “Things have been going slowly with the PO government but markets have given them the benefit of the doubt.”
Mr Kaczynski sought to soften his prickly image after the death of his brother and called for co-operation across the political spectrum, but on Sunday evening he told his supporters Poland now faced a stark choice in the run-off vote.
“This should be a round in which a choice will be made between two visions of politics, two visions of Poland, because there are differences,” he said. We see the country’s future differently, we see differently the path to its success.”
A Komorowski win would entrench the dominance of Polish politics by Mr Tusk and PO.
– (Additional reporting: Reuters)