Poles have voted in an election that is set to require a runoff between the top two candidates as Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski seeks another five years in office with promises of a steady hand amid increased security threats.
Polling stations opened yesterday at 7am in Warsaw and closed at 9pm. If no candidate wins at least 50 percent of the vote, a runoff is to be held on May 24.
Komorowski, the ruling Civic Platform party’s candidate, had a lead of as much as 12 percentage points over Andrzej Duda of the opposition Law and Justice party, but surveys suggest that the incumbent polled under the 50 percent needed for an outright win.
“The result of the first round is largely a foregone conclusion,” said Kazimierz Kik, a political scientist at the Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce. “It will be interesting to see if it confirms the trend we could observe in the polls ... showing the support for Komorowski has crumbled so much that the runoff may become too close to call.”
The EU’s largest eastern economy is picking a president in a vote that is to set the stage for parliamentary elections this fall, with Law and Justice looking to end the Civic Platform’s eight-year rule. Komorowski, who polls show is the most trusted politician in the nation of 38 million, has struggled to match his rivals’ energy on campaign issues ranging from euro adoption to relations with Russia against the backdrop of the conflict in neighboring Ukraine.
The 62-year-old president’s popularity has crumbled months after he was poised to win another term by a landslide. He is expected to get between 35 percent and 41 percent of the vote, while Duda is supported by 27 percent to 31 percent, according to six polls published before a blackout began at midnight on Friday.
Poland’s president can veto legislation, act as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and has say in foreign policy, while the separately elected parliament passes laws and elects a government. Whoever wins also gets to appoint two members of the central bank’s rate-setting panel in the first quarter and its governor in June next year.
While Komorowski made security the centerpiece of his re-election bid, Duda, 20 years his junior, countered by putting the spotlight on economic issues.
With his youthful appearance and rapid delivery, Duda has railed against the government’s decision to increase the retirement age to 67, pledging to offset the bigger budget outlays with new revenues from big business, including banks and foreign supermarket chains.
Voters have also flocked to Pawel Kukiz, a former punk band frontman running as an independent, who has relied on voluntary donations to fund his campaign. With his plan to introduce single-member constituencies to break up the existing system dominated by the two main parties he can count on 13 percent to 15 percent support, according to polls.
Sporting casual attire that has changed little since his music days, Kukiz has appealed to Poles’ sense of national pride, calling emigration by young people to Ireland and the UK in search of jobs “an extermination spread over time.”
Despite Komorowski’s slide, polls indicate that he is still likely to carry the day in the runoff. He would beat Duda head-to-head with a result of 54 percent to 41 percent, according to a poll conducted on Wednesday and Thursday last week of 3,016 adults by Millward Brown for TVN television.
“The second round is probably where his appeal to known quantity, safety and security will be more important,” said Benjamin Stanley, a research fellow at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.
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