Trzaskowski, party member of Tusk, has a slight lead in first election results

The first round of the presidential election in Poland has Rafal Trzaskowski, the current mayor of Warsaw and candidate of Prime Minister Donald Tusk (KO), a slight lead on the rest: according to the ExitPoll, he gets 30.8 percent of the votes. Karol Nawrocki, the candidate of the Conservative Nationalist Party Pis (in power in Poland from 2015 to 2023), gets an estimated 29.1 percent.

If the exit poll is correct, Trzaskowski and Nawrocki compete against each other in the second round, which takes place on 1 June.

The first election round is a test for the policy of the Donald Tusk coalition, which consists of three parties. They promised the restoration of the independent constitutional state, relaxation of the de facto abortion ban and more climate measures. But so far, many reforms have come across the coalition or the president’s veto. The current president, Andrzej Duda, a piss-loyalist, stands in the way of plans. Trzaskowski would support his policy.

But with this result it will be difficult for the current coalition of Donald Tusk, which consists of three games, to win a majority in the second round of the presidential election. The four candidates who participated in the first round on behalf of this coalition together received less than 45 percent of the votes.

Striking about the Polish result is the high number of votes for extreme right -wing candidates. The anti-establishment candidate Slawomir Mentzen of the radical-right Konfederacja received 15 percent of the votes. His former party colleague Grzegorz Braun, who is openly anti-Semitic, anti-European and anti-LHBTI, was the big surprise of the evening by more than 6 percent of the votes. The voters of Mentzen and Braun are expected to vote for Nawrocki earlier in the second round. According to this exit poll, that means that PIS candidate Nawocki can count on a narrow majority of votes.

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