The winners and losers from Poland’s presidential election first round

By Daniel Tilles

With 99.78% of electoral districts counted, the results of yesterday’s presidential election first round are virtually complete.

Incumbent president Andrzej Duda – supported by the ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party – has come top, with 43.7% of the vote. That means, however, that he has not achieved the majority required to win outright.

Instead, he will meet runner-up Rafał Trzaskowski – from the liberal wing of the centrist Civic Platform (PO) – in a second-round run-off on 12 July. Trzaskowski has 30.3% of the vote.

In third place, with 13.9%, is Szymon Hołownia, a centre-right independent candidate, followed in fourth by Krzysztof Bosak (6.9%), who represents the far-right Confederation (Konfederacja) party.

The remaining two main candidates are Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz (2.4%), leader of the agrarian centre-right Polish People’s Party, and Robert Biedroń (2.2%), who was supported by The Left, a coalition of left-wing groups.

Going beyond the vote percentages, below I take a look at who have been the winners and losers of the election so far.

Winners

Andrzej Duda

Had the presidential election been held on 10 May as scheduled – and as PiS did its best to ensure before eventually admitting defeat – Duda looked set for a possible outright victory in the first round, as he was regularly polling above 50%. In that context, yesterday’s result may feel like a disappointment.

However, Duda finished well ahead of his main rival, and only 6 percentage points away from the majority he needs to win in the second round. Although polling suggests the run-off will be close, Duda remains the narrow favourite for re-election.

Duda’s result is all the more impressive given that he had a rather lacklustre and inconsistent campaign, switching between different focuses (from infrastructure, to “LGBT ideology”, to foreign policy and security) as he sought a winning formula.

The next two weeks may see him return to more radical rhetoric, as he seeks to attract the 7% of voters who chose Bosak in the first round. Already this morning he returned to the LGBT theme, declaring that “ideologised content cannot be transmitted in schools”, and again comparing the situation to the communist era.

Yet if he wants to attract the supporters of more centrist candidates, and to avoid mobilising Trzaskowski’s electorate, he also needs to offer a moderate appeal. It will be a tricky balancing act.

Rafał Trzaskowski

The entry of Trzaskowski into the presidential race last month transformed the election, helping ensure there would be no first-round victory for Duda and ending the chances of other rivals reaching the second round.

Trzaskowski appears to have learnt from the failings of his PO party over the last five years, during which it has lost five elections in a row to PiS. Rather than simply attacking Duda and the government, Trzaskowski has also been positive and conciliatory – an approach that should help him gather more votes in the second round.

Yet Trzaskowski still has much to do to win a majority. He can probably count on the support of many, perhaps most, of those who voted for Hołownia, Kosiniak-Kamysz and Biedroń.

The big question is what Bosak’s 7% of voters will do. During his post-election speech last night, Trzaskowski already reached out to some of them, saying that “we mostly have the same views when it comes to economic freedom”.

Many in Confederation strongly dislike PiS’s statist economic policies. The question will be to what extent they prioritise that sentiment, and therefore consider voting for Trzaskowski, or whether they put socio-cultural issues, such as opposition to LGBT rights, first, and therefore favour Duda. Many may simply not vote at all

Szymon Hołownia

Following last night’s exit poll, Hołownia declared that this was “the result of my dreams…When we started six months ago, no one would have thought this was possible”.

Despite the touch of hyperbole, it is hard to argue with the fact that 14% of the vote for a TV presenter who only entered politics in December represents a success. In that time, Hołownia has shown himself to be not only an “anti-candidate”, opposed to the traditional parties,  but also to have constructive ideas of his own.

Hołownia now faces two big and interlinked challenges relating to how he turns his election success into something more sustainable. The immediate question is if and how he endorses one of his rivals in the second round. This would most naturally be Trzaskowski, whose camp have already made overtures.

The longer-term question is whether and how Hołownia will turn his following – which he says includes 14,000 volunteers – into a more formal political force. Before the election, he talked of creating a “social movement”, which would then become a party (but “always be something more than a party”).

Polish politics is, however, littered with outsiders – most recently musician Paweł Kukiz and economist Ryszard Petru – who have made an initially successful entry to politics only to see themselves fade away once the hard graft of forming and maintaining a party begins.

Krzysztof Bosak

Bosak himself is undoubtedly one of the winners of the election. From polling around 3% in February, he has more than doubled that level of support since.

Bosak’s calm, measured performances during the campaign have won him praise, and helped to distract from the fact that he represents a party with leaders who have called for homosexuality to be criminalised, said that women should not be allowed to vote because they are less intelligent than men, and claimed that Israel and the US are plotting to turn Poland into a “Jewish state”.

However, it should be noted that, despite his campaign momentum, Bosak has not necessarily made any advances for Confederation, which also got 7% in October’s parliamentary election. But he has shown that they remain a potent force, and that they and their voters may hold the balance of power in both this presidential election and possibly in parliament in the near future.

The democratic process

Sunday saw the second highest turnout of any election – presidential, parliamentary, local or European – in Poland since 1989. Given that turnout has always risen in the second round of presidential elections, 12 July could potentially beat the record of 68.2% set in the 1995 presidential contest between Lech Wałęsa and Aleksander Kwaśniewski.

There are many reasons to be concerned about the state of democracy in Poland generally, and in relation to these elections in particular (more on that below). But higher engagement in the process is to be welcomed, especially in a country where turnout is traditionally low. It also follows a pattern since PiS’s return to power in 2015. In that time there has been record turnout for local and European elections, while last year saw the highest turnout at parliamentary elections since 1989.

Losers

Robert Biedroń

Biedroń was undoubtedly the election’s biggest underperformer. Whereas the alliance he represents, The Left, achieved 12.5% in October’s parliamentary election, Biedroń managed only around 2% on Sunday, despite being the only serious left-wing candidate in the race.

There were no major gaffes or other failings in his campaign, yet Biedroń also failed to find a message that resonated with his own base, let alone beyond it. Among those who voted for The Left in October’s parliamentary election, only 20% chose Biedroń on Sunday, according to the exit poll, whereas 44% of them voted for Trzaskowski.

Some may blame the entry of Trzaskowski – a more liberal figure than PO’s previous candidate – for Biedroń’s failings. Yet polling shows that his support had already collapsed before Trzaskowski arrived in the race.

A more likely explanation is Biedroń’s lack of personal appeal. Since launching his own political party just 14 months ago with grand ambitions, he has gone back on promises to stand in October’s parliamentary election (instead keeping his comfortable seat in the European Parliament) and not to ally with other parties.

This election was therefore probably more of a personal failure for Biedroń than a political one for The Left as a whole.

Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz

Kosiniak-Kamysz has had an even more spectacular fall during the election campaign than Biedroń. In mid-April, polling averages had him in second place, with around 13% in the first round and a decent shot at beating Duda in a potential second round. But the rise of Hołownia and the entry of Trzaskowski saw his support collapse.

As with Biedroń, it is hard to identify a specific reason for Kosiniak-Kamysz’s decline. But, like Biedroń, he struggled to craft an appealing message and to make himself heard in a field with strong rivals occupying the same centrist/centre-right ground as himself.

The PSL party that Kosiniak-Kamysz leads has been the perennial survivor in Polish politics, always doing just enough to remain in parliament. However, it tends to fare much worse in presidential elections: in 2015, its candidate got 1.6%; in 2010, 1.75%; and in 2005, 1.8%.

In that light, Kosiniak-Kamysz’s result does not look as bad. Yesterday evening, he pledged not to resign as leader. But questions may now be asked about whether the direction Kosiniak-Kamysz has taken the party in is the right one.

The democratic process

These were elections that should not have taken place at this time and in this form. The decision to simply not open polling stations on the 10 May – rather than officially postpone the election through a state of emergency due to the coronavirus pandemic – was legally questionable in itself.

When a new election was called, last-minute changes to the electoral code appear to violate a ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal. The disadvantages Trzaskowski faced as a new candidate meant that the election was not equal, as the constitution requires. The fact that some overseas voters were unable to cast their ballots draws into question whether the election meets the constitutional requirement of universality.

Some of these problems were the direct results of the pandemic, and many will argue that, even if the vote was imperfect, it was the best that could be done in the circumstances. Yet the problems also stem from the ruling party’s political interest in having the elections as soon as possible, rather than risking a later date when the economic impact of the virus may decrease support for Duda.

Likewise, PiS’s use of publicly funded state media to campaign on behalf of Duda undermines the fairness of the vote. The government also employed other tricks, such as offering free fire trucks to small communities (which are more likely to vote for Duda) that had the highest turnout.

This will all call into question the legitimacy of whomever wins the second round. It also opens the way for a losing candidate or his supporters to seek to have the result overturned in court. And it sets a dangerous precedent for future elections.

Main image credit: Marcin Stepien / Agencja Gazeta

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.