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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Jon Henley European affairs correspondent

Duda's narrow lead widens in latest exit poll – as it happened

Andrzej Duda
Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president, arrives to cast his vote in Krakow. Photograph: Maja Hitij/Getty Images

This live blog is closing now – thanks for reading. Our full wrap of the day’s events can be found here.

The updated late poll by Ipsos has a margin of error of one percentage point, rather than two, which would suggest the slimmest of leads for the incumbent, Duda.

Duda extends lead

Poland’s incumbent president, Andrzej Duda, has widened his lead slightly, the latest polls has showed, taking it to the very limit of the poll’s margin of error of 2%.

Duda, an ally of the ruling nationalists Law and Justice (PiS), received 51.0% of the vote, with liberal Warsaw mayor and challenger Rafal Trzaskowski on 49.0%.

The updated late poll combines exit poll data with official results for 90% of the polling stations that took part in the exit poll.

Summary

We’re pausing this blog for a while now now. A further updated exit poll is due in a couple of hours time, with official results expected by Monday afternoon at the earliest.

An updated exit poll has put outgoing conservative president Andrzej Duda less than 2 percentage points ahead of his liberal rival, the mayor of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski, after a divisive and bitter election campaign that has presented two radically different visions of a deeply polarised country.

Here is my colleague Shaun Walker’s updated news story:

Poland’s tightly fought and intensely polarising presidential election has gone down to the wire, as a late poll on Sunday night showed the incumbent, Andrzej Duda, leading his liberal challenger, Rafał Trzaskowski, by less than two percentage points, on 50.8% to 49.2%.

The figures, released around midnight in Warsaw, were based on a wide-ranging exit poll adjusted to take into account the first few available results.

They were within the poll’s margin of error of 2%, meaning the outcome was still up in the air in the early hours of Monday. However, Duda had improved slightly on the results of the exit poll alone, which had given him 50.4%.

Both candidates gave speeches on Sunday evening suggesting they were confident of victory. A further late poll is due overnight, but the result could be so close that it may be Monday afternoon or even Tuesday before the final outcome is known.

“All the votes just need to be counted which, in truth, will make this evening a nerve-wracking one for everyone in Poland,” said Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, to supporters on Sunday evening. “But I am absolutely convinced that when we count each vote, we will be victorious and we will definitely win.”

Here is Reuters’ take on the updated exit poll:

Poland’s incumbent president Andrzej Duda was slightly ahead in Sunday’s presidential election, a late poll showed, a narrow victory which if confirmed would allow the ruling nationalists to deepen their conservative reforms.
The late poll combines exit poll data with partial official results.
Duda, an ally of the ruling nationalists Law and Justice (PiS), received 50.8% of the vote, according to the late poll.
Liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, the candidate of the largest opposition party, the centrist Civic Platform (PO), came second with 49.2%.

Late exit poll sees Duda slightly extend lead, but still within margin of error

A revised late exit poll put the incumbent president, Andrzej Duda, on 50.8% of the vote and his rival, Rafał Trzaskowski, on 49.2% - a slight widening of the margin, but still too small for pollster Ipsos to call the election.

Overseas votes are not covered by the Ipsos poll, which has a margin of error of 2%, and their ballot could prove crucial to the election outcome. Official final results may not be known until late Monday afternoon or even Tuesday morning.

Updated

An updated exit poll is expected at midnight local time, but the Polish electoral commission has said it will not be announcing partial official results.

Full official results are not expected until the afternoon, or even Tuesday morning. Because this election looks like being so tight, it seems likely the result will be some time coming.

Updated

As well as being laced with homophobic and anti-LGBT rhetoric and attacking alleged attempts by Germany to “manipulate” the election, Duda’s campaign was widely criticised as anti-semitic.

This is what Daniel Tilles of the independent news site Notes from Poland says:

The state broadcaster, TVP, repeatedly suggested that if Trzaskowski became president, he would seek to ‘fulfil Jewish demands’.

Jewish organisations want to ‘rob’ Poland of billions of zloty in restitution claims, TVP suggested. It claimed that Trzaskowski was open to discussing these demands (editing out a section of a clip in which he said he was not) and that only Duda would protect Poland’s interests.

TVP’s news reports also portrayed Trzaskowski as working on behalf of a “powerful foreign lobby” linked to George Soros and the Bilderberg group, which was responsible for bringing Muslim immigrants to Europe.

Updated

Piotr Buras and Pawel Zerka, of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), say in an instructive post-election note that Duda did not secure a clear victory despite “two weeks of a campaign in which he received massive support from the public media and launched brutal attacks against his contender”.

Trzaskowski, on the other hand, gained about 2 million voters compared to his result in the first round, they pointed out. The final result may depend on the votes cast by the Poles living abroad, who are not covered by exit polls, the analysts said, with the majority expected to support Trzaskowski.

Nonetheless, Buras and Zerka said the exit poll “still make Duda the favourite”, partly because the first round exit poll underestimated his final result by considerably more than it did Trzaskowski’s.

Further, they say, Poland’s lack of experience with postal voting on such a scale “could give plenty of room for manipulation on the one hand, and for conspiracy theories on the other hand. Irregularities during the postal voting might prove decisive”.

All this favours Duda, they feel, not just because he is slightly in the lead, but because:

Most of the country’s institutions have, over the past five years, become highly politicised and subordinated to the ruling party. This includes the Supreme Court, which will announce the final result of the election.

If the final results confirm Andrzej Duda winning by a very narrow margin, it is hard to imagine that PiS would let the power slip out of their hands. Electoral protests by Trzaskowski and his candidates may either be ignored or considered insufficient to impact the final result.

In turn, if it’s Trzaskowski who turns out to win by a very narrow margin, we can be sure that PiS will invest all its means to avoid Duda’s defeat: with electoral protests, recount of the vote, up to a nuclear option of repeating the election.

Updated

Here is the the Reuters news agency’s take on the evening so far:

Incumbent Andrzej Duda was marginally ahead in Poland’s presidential election on Sunday, an exit poll found, in a result seen as likely to have profound implications for Warsaw’s relations with the rest of the European Union.

The re-election of Duda, an ally of the ruling nationalists Law and Justice (PiS), is crucial if the government is to implement in full its conservative agenda, including judicial reforms that the European Union says are undemocratic.

Duda’s challenger, liberal Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, has pledged to repair Poland’s relations with Europe and use the presidential veto power to hold back any legislation that would subvert the rule of law.

The exit poll by Ipsos showed Duda winning 50.4% of the vote, while Trzaskowski, the preferred candidate of the main opposition party, the centrist Civic Platform (PO), had 49.6%. Ipsos said it was too early to call a winner.

“All we need is to count the votes. The night will be tense but I am certain that when the votes are counted, we will win,” Trzaskowski told supporters in a park just outside Warsaw’s historic Old Town.

Partial official results are expected on Monday.

Updated

Not everyone has finished voting. Holidaymakers in Split, Croatia, a popular destination for Poles, are still waiting to cast their ballots outside the consulate. Some have reportedly been queueing for five or six hours.

Updated

The Guardian’s Christian Davies warns that a result that is apparently this close could cause problems if it is contested:

Updated

More evidence that this is going to be a very, very close run election: overseas voter counts are starting to come in, led by the US whose Polish voters generally break heavily for conservative candidates. This time, however, it was rather tighter:

Updated

The Guardian’s Christian Davies wrote a fascinating piece this week profiling the two rival candidates, noting how - despite a few striking biographical similarities - each represents the face of a very different Poland:

Both aged 48, they were born just four months apart. Both went to prestigious high schools in major cities, and each has a doctorate from one of Poland’s two leading universities. Both have also represented the same parliamentary constituency of Duda’s hometown, the historic southern city of Kraków.

Their backgrounds, however, are markedly different – illustrating the fissures of class, culture and geography that perpetuate the country’s political polarisation, and lending an element of psychodrama to Sunday’s proceedings.

“Simply put, Duda and Trzaskowski are the faces of the two Polands,” said Adam Szostkiewicz, a veteran political commentator for Polityka, a political weekly.

Trzaskowski, the son of a famous jazz musician, grew up in Warsaw and spent a year at an American high school in Michigan in the early 1990s. A specialist in international relations with a degree in English philology, he studied at the College of Europe in Warsaw and was awarded scholarships by Oxford University and the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris before entering politics.

Duda, who studied and later taught law at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, is the son of lecturers at Kraków’s former mining university and received a much more traditional – and by some accounts, severe – upbringing steeped in Catholicism and conservative values. As a youth, he was a member of the Polish scouting movement, a pillar of the country’s patriotic tradition.

“Trzaskowski is identified with a cosmopolitan Polish tradition that is liberal, internationalist and pro-European, whereas Duda represents a Poland that is provincial, conservative and Polonocentric,” said Szostkiewicz. “This is what separates us, it is what has always separated us, and we are all guilty of it.”

Duda strongest in east, with older voters; Trzaskowski in west, among younger ones

Notes from Poland, the independent Polish news site, has more details from the exit poll.

Geographically, it says voting followed the traditional Polish pattern, with the conservative east of the country plumping mainly for Duda and the more liberal west largely backing Trzaskowski.

Duda also did best among voters with a lower level of education and with older voters; Trzaskowski with younger and better-educated voters.

Updated

Here is Agence France-Presse’s first take on the wafer-thin lead the exit poll gives Duda:

President Andrzej Duda was ahead by a tiny margin in Poland’s presidential election against his europhile rival but the result is too close to call, an exit poll on Sunday showed, keeping the country in suspense into the night.

Duda, a right-wing populist and close ally of US President Donald Trump, was on 50.4 percent in the poll by Ipsos published just after polls closed at 1900 GMT.

Duda’s rival, liberal Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, who has promised to heal ties with Brussels by rolling back a controversial reform of the judiciary, was shown just behind on 49.6 percent.

The result of the vote will be decisive for the governing party, which is accused by critics of eroding hard-won democratic freedoms just three decades after the end of communist rule.

At the Trzaskowski campaign’s post-election event, supporters of the liberal Warsaw mayor plainly feel their candidate is in with a chance, reports the Economist correspondent Annabelle Chapman.

Trzaskowski himself says he still believes he can win: “We will wake up tomorrow in a completely new Poland,” he tells the crowd.

Ben Stanley, an associate professor of politics at the SWPS University in Poland, reckons - with some justification - that it’s going to be a very long night.

Both candidates have cause for cautious optimism, he points out:

Updated

The Guardian’s Christian Davies says the thing that struck him most forcefully outside polling stations was the influence of the conservative Duda’s anti-LGBT campaign - laced with homophobic rhetoric, it made the fight against so-called “LGBT ideology” one of the incumbent president’s main talking points:

Updated

Stanley Bill, a senior lecturer at Cambridge university and expert observer of Polish culture and politics, confirms turnout was at a historic high for an election that could shape Poland’s future for many years to come:

With the race so close, the votes of Poles abroad could be crucial to deciding the outcome. Over 180,000 Poles in the UK registered for postal voting, and more than 150,000 of them had returned their ballots by Saturday.

In the first round, Poles in Britain voted 48.4% for Trzaskowski and just 15.5% for Duda, meaning if the race is as close as we expect, the strong support for Trzaskowski among Poles in Britain and elsewhere could prove decisive.

Rafał Trzaskowski
Rafał Trzaskowski casts his ballot during the second round of Poland’s elections Photograph: Omar Marques/Getty Images

While in some countries, voting in person at consulates is possible, in Britain, only postal votes or voters delivered to the embassy by registered couriers were accepted

In the first round, there were reports of up to 15,000 voters not receiving their ballot packs in time to vote, and similar problems have been reported this time round. Given the potential tight margin of the vote, one group of Poles set up the impromptu citizen courier service to collect ballots from people who did not have time to post them, and courier them to the embassy on Sunday.

They hoped to have picked up 1,000 ballots by the end of the day.

Updated

The UK-based Polish journalist Jakub Krupa notes that with a margin this narrow, fewer than 150,000 votes separate the two candidates - meaning the final result could come down to the votes cast by the 180,000-plus Poles living in Britain ...

Duda ahead by less than one percentage point: exit poll

Poland’s conservative president, Andrzej Duda, holds a lead of less than one percentage point over his challenger, the liberal mayor of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski, in the run-off round of the country’s presidential elections, according to an official exit poll.

The poll gave Duda, allied to the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), 50.4% of the vote, compared to 49.6% for Trzaskowski, of the opposition Civic Platform (PO).

The final result is too close to call.

Updated

There Ipsos exit poll, expected in less than 10 minutes, is carried out for all three major Polish broadcasters: TVP, TVN and Polsat.

An updated late poll should follow at some tie between 11pm and midnight local time.

Here is Christian’s dispatch from earlier this afternoon from Otwock, a town of 35,000 inhabitants outside Warsaw where Duda won a plurality of votes in the first round.

Opinions reflected the yawning divide in Polish society, with Duda’s supporters emphasising the importance of what they described as traditional moral values and supporters of Trzaskowski voicing their concerns about the state of Polish democracy.

“I voted for Duda because he supports families”, said Kamila, 37, a mother-of-one who said she had not taken any interest in politics before the birth of her young son. “It’s not about finances, it’s about family values, I am not one of these rainbow flag people and I don’t want our children to be forced to learn about ‘genderism’ and these strange kinds of things.”

But Barbara, an elegantly dressed woman in her 80s, said she had voted for Trzaskowski because she was sick of five years of PiS rule. “We want to have peace, to be governed by cultured people, not by the boorish thieves that we have now, people who debase others and are constantly stirring things up. This rabble will never sober up.”

In the smaller nearby town of Karczew, where the congregation of the local church had just left their mid-morning mass and were on their way to the polling stations, opinions were divided along similar lines.

“My candidate is the current president,” said Marcin, 39, the church organist. “He represents certain values that I share, above all the religion of Christianity, which is the bedrock of our culture and that of all of Europe. I’m against the promotion of homosexual unions and these kinds of things because family is the bedrock of this country.”

But Ewa, 67, a pensioner who had also just been to Mass, said that although she did not identify as a liberal, she would be voting for Trzaskowski out of concern about the ruling party’s dramatic accumulation of power since it was first elected in 2015.

The Guardian’s Christian Davies has been out and about at polling stations since they opened this morning.

He reports there was controversy after the country’s national emergency alert system, used to send text messages to everyone with a mobile phone registered in Poland, sent out a message encouraging older people to vote.

Child and woman vote
A child helps a woman to cast her ballot at a polling station in Warsaw. Photograph: Aleksandra Szmigiel/Reuters

Observers and former election officials described the message as an attempt by the rulig PiS party to use state resources to get out its vote. Older voters, especially in small towns and rural areas, make up a large proportion of the party’s voter base and party officials had been concerned fear of the coronavirus may suppress turnout of its core vote.

“These alerts are not supposed to be used for sending this kind of information, but for warning people of approaching cataclysms,” Wojciech Hermeliński, a judge and former head of Poland’s electoral commission told liberal broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza.

“The government sent this alert because they are trying to encourage a particular group to vote.”

Updated

Turnout in this neck-and-neck run-off looks like being very high - possibly the highest in any post-1989 election - which doubtless reflects strong feelings on both sides of the country’s deep political divide.

By 5pm local time 52.10% of registered voters had cast their ballots, well above the 47.89% at the same time during the first round on 28 June.

In the 2015 election, turnout at the same time was 40.51%.

Voting continues until 9pm local time and as expected, the race is nail-bitingly close. The only indication of a possible result we will have will be the exit poll, carried out by respected pollster Ipsos.

However, the poll’s margin of error is 2% - meaning a narrow margin of victory for either candidate could easily change as the night wears on.

In an interview published today by the Polish portal OKO.press, Paweł Predko of Ipsos admitted he was nervous about the close margins at play in today’s vote. He said he was particularly worried that the exit poll showing a narrow win for either candidate would lead people to assume the election was over, when actually things could change as the real votes are counted.

Although the exit poll has a large sample size of around 50,000, and is weighted to take multiple factors into account, around 10% of people generally refuse to say who they voted for, requiring the poll to be weighted for the assumption that fewer Duda than Trzaskowski voters are willing to speak to pollsters.

It also does not take into account votes by Poles abroad. However, Predko said he was confident that the poll would be accurate within the 2% margin of error.

Updated

A cliffhanger vote

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of Poland’s presidential election runoff, a knife-edge contest whose outcome will determine the country’s trajectory for the foreseeable future.

It pits the incumbent, Andrzej Duda, allied to the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), against liberal Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski of the opposition Civic Platform (PO) - and most polls have the two separated by less than a percentage point.

Duda has has led a polarising campaign, promoting “family values” and attacking LGBT rights while promising to defend popular social welfare payments. A win for him would allow PiS to pursue controversial judicial and other reforms seen by many in the EU as eroding the rule of law and democratic backsliding.

While the role of president holds few executive powers, victory for Trzaskowski, who supports same-sex civil partnerships, could begin to loosen the PiS’s grip on Polish politics. He has promised to roll back the government’s legal reforms and would present a more liberal, pro-EU Polish face to the outside world.

While final official results are not expected until Monday morning, usually reliable exit polls should be released soon after polls close at 9pm local time.

We’ll be bringing you all the latest news as it happens, along with comment from the Guardian’s Christian Davies in Warsaw and central and eastern Europe correspondent Shaun Walker.

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