The majority of voters in Poland’s general election supported opposition parties that promised to repair the nation’s constitutional order and its relationship with allies, including the EU and Ukraine, according to projections yesterday.
After a bitter and emotional campaign, voters turned out in droves on Sunday to make their voice known. Turnout was at the highest level in the country’s 34 years of democracy, surpassing the 63 percent who turned out in the historic 1989 vote that toppled communism.
The final result was not expected for many hours, but a so-called late exit poll by Ipsos suggested that voters had finally grown tired of the ruling nationalist party, Law and Justice, after eight years of divisive policies that led to frequent street protests, bitter divisions even within families and billions of US dollars in funding held up by the EU over rule of law violations.
Photo: Reuters
The poll showed that three centrist opposition parties that campaigned on a promise to reverse the illiberal drift of the government had together secured about 248 seats in the 460-seat lower house of parliament, or Sejm — a clear majority.
“I am really overjoyed now,” Magdalena Chmieluk, a 43-year-old accountant, said yesterday morning. The opposition “will form a government and we will finally be able to live in a normal country, for real.”
Still, Poles yesterday were facing weeks of political uncertainty. Law and Justice won more votes than any single party and said it would try to keep governing.
“No matter how you look at it, we won,” Law and Justice campaign manager Joachim Brudzinski said yesterday morning in an interview on the RMF FM radio broadcaster.
He said that his party would try to build a government led by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
Polish President Andrzej Duda, an ally of Law and Justice, must call the first session of the new parliament within 30 days of the election and designate a prime minister to try to build a government. In the meantime, the current government is to remain in a caretaker role.
The tradition in the democratic era has been for the president to first tap someone from the party with the most votes, but he is not required to do so.
It was not clear how Law and Justice could realistically hold onto power, unless it managed to win over some lawmakers from opposition parties, something it did in the past to maintain the thin parliamentary majority it held for eight years. However, that seemed unlikely given the large number it would be required to change allegiances.
The Ipsos poll showed Law and Justice with 36.6 percent of the votes cast; the opposition Civic Coalition, led by former European Council president Donald Tusk, with 31 percent; the centrist Third Way coalition with 13.5 percent; the Left party with 8.6 percent; and the far-right Confederation with 6.4 percent.
The electoral commission said it expected to report the final result early today.
Tusk on Sunday evening said that it was the end of Law and Justice rule and that a new era had begun for Poland.
Some Polish media were more cautious yesterday, only reporting that the opposition could take power.
Cezary Tomczyk, vice chairman of Tusk’s party, said the governing party would do everything to try to maintain power.
He called on it to accept the election result, saying it was the will of the people to hand over power to the opposition.
“The nation spoke,” Tomczyk said.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS