Poles trickled out to vote yesterday from before sunrise, for a general election widely expected to see a center-right coalition sweep the corruption-tainted left from power.
An hour after polls opened, an AFP correspondent reported a slow start to voting in Warsaw's southern Sadyba district, while another reported seeing "not a soul" in a polling station in the capital's suburb of Wawer.
In overwhelmingly Catholic Poland, the rush of voting was expected after morning mass. Poles had until 8pm to cast their ballots.
Some 30 million Poles are eligible to elect 460 members of the Sejm lower house and 100 senators for a four-year mandate.
Key issues at stake are unemployment -- 17.8 percent of Poland's workforce is out of a job, the highest percentage in the EU, which the central European country joined last year -- and reforms to the economy and administration.
Leading up to the polls, surveys put the center-right economically liberal Civic Platform (PO), which is proposing a 15-percent, across-the-board flat tax, or the more conservative Catholic Law and Justice (PiS) party in the lead.
PiS has slammed PO's flat tax proposal, calling it a good way to scare off voters, and campaigned on a socialist manifesto at odds with its traditional conservativism -- calling for state aid and tax breaks for the underprivileged, and government intervention in the economy.
Also an issue in the election is corruption, the main reason the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) is set to be booted out of office.
Some pre-election polls did not even give SLD the five percent necessary to get into parliament, showing it outpaced by far-right parties Samoobrona (Self-Defense) and the Polish League of Families.
But no one is expected to rain on the parade of PO and PiS, who between them are expected to garner a majority of up to three-quarters in the 460-seat parliament.
Despite friction developing between them in the last week of campaigning, opinion polls have continued to show the two parties with a healthy, collective lead in the election, in which 10,665 candidates are vying for seats in the lower house Sejm and 623 in the Senate.
The party that emerges with the most votes will name Poland's next prime minister. PiS is likely to choose 56-year-old party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski -- whose twin brother Lech is contesting the presidential election next month -- while PO's choice is Jan Rokita, 46, a political activist since the days of the Solidarity trade union.
One of Solidarity's founders and leaders, Lech Walesa, who went on to become Poland's first freely elected president, cast his ballot in Washington DC.
"The situation in Poland is still unbalanced after the old regime," he said after casting his ballot at the Polish embassy.
"The new system still doesn't work the way it should. In a few years, the situation will be great, everything will be clear, but today a lot of people are put off politics because they don't understand why things are the way they are and not different," said Walesa, whose youngest son Jaroslaw is running for parliament on PO's ticket.
Voting was also held in Iraq, where some 1,400 Polish soldiers are serving, at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and in some 90 other countries around the world.
Officials are expecting a record turnout among expatriates due largely to the increase in numbers of Poles living abroad since EU accession last year. At home, participation is expected to barely scrape past the 40 percent mark, because Poles have "a general feeling of disgust with politics," Polish sociologist Malgorzata Melchior said.
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