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5 months ago
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Conservative opposition PiS party leads in Sunday’s local elections in Poland, according to exit polls, but Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition took most of the big cities in the first test of public support after the hotly contested national elections last October.
Contrary to what most pre-election polls suggested, the right-wing PiS party (ECR) came out on top with 33.7%, which, if confirmed, will see them ‘win’ the elections, according to the exit poll by the Ipsos pollster.
The Civic Coalition (KO, EPP/S&D/Greens), Tusk’s party, ranked second with 31.9%.
“Our ninth win should encourage us to work even harder,” PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński commented on the results, referring to the fact that they also won the October parliamentary elections, although it later failed to gain a majority in the parliament and lost power in the country to the Tusk-led coalition.
He added the next task was to “win the EU election and presidential election before we try to win the next general election.”
PiS currently rules in six regions, while the preliminary results suggest that Tusk will hold onto power in 16.
Meanwhile, only 51.5% of the population turned out to vote, 4.4 percentage points less than the previous local elections, and a big drop from the 74.4% that voted in the general elections.
Despite less than promising results, like Kaczynski, Tusk also spun the results in his favour.
“Four months ago, from this very place, we shouted with joy that we had retaken Poland from the hands of those who took away our democracy and broke our hope,” he recalled.
He added that these results, like October’s, show that removing PiS from power will not be easy.
Who and where
KO kept power in Warsaw, where the incumbent mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski, won his second term in the first round, gaining 59.8% of the votes. PiS candidate Tobiasz Bocheński ranked second, scoring 18.5%.
In Gdańsk, the incumbent mayor, KO’s Aleksandra Dulkiewicz, secured another term in the first round (62.3%) thanks to a landslide victory over PiS’ Tomasz Rakowski (12.2%).
For Tusk, the success in the cities confirmed that his party has lost none of its potential since taking power and may continue the mission of retaking Poland from PiS, which Tusk’s camp had accused of dismantling democracy in the country.
While the co-ruling Third Way alliance (Renew/EPP) was happy with the results, with parliamentary speaker Szymon Hołownia (Poland 2050, Renew) speaking of “the third force” in Polish politics, the other Tusk’s coalition partner, the New Left (S&D) was not.
Despite hopeful pre-election polls, its candidate, Magdalena Biejat, ranked third in Warsaw. However, the party managed only 6.8% of the vote, placing it fifth behind the opposition and anti-EU Confederation party.
“The local elections have always been the toughest ones for the Left,” noted the New Left co-leader Włodzimierz Czarzasty, admitting that the party “is not content with the results.”
Wake-up call
“It seemed to me that PiS was starting to weaken and that the people would part ways with it,” social studies Professor Ireneusz Krzemiński of the University of Warsaw told the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
For Krzemiński, if the initial results are confirmed, “it will mean that something is not entirely working in the government’s communication.”
“Each weak result is an indicator of the society’s assessment of the government’s functioning,” Spasimir Domaradzki, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw, told Euractiv before the elections, asked about the political consequences of the ruling coalition’s potential failure.
According to him, Although completely different rules govern the two types of vote, Sunday’s result will forecast the June European elections and show the general political tendencies.
PiS has a considerable chance to keep up the momentum and win the European voting in Poland, Bocheński said during election night.
The Polish right wing “has not yet been buried,” he said.
(Aleksandra Krzysztoszek | Euractiv.pl)
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