In what will be seen as one of Poland’s biggest electoral shocks of the past 20 years, Andrzej Duda (pictured above) has defeated Bronisław Komorowski to become President-elect of Poland.
A Member of the European Parliament for the Law and Justice party, Duda won 51.5 per cent of the vote in a closely-fought campaign. The turnout, 55.3 per cent, was one of the highest ever in a Polish presidential election.
Duda’s victory is all the more impressive given that at the start of the campaign, he was completely unknown politician to most Poles – despite having been an MEP, a deputy justice minister and a minister in the chancellery of a former president, Lech Kaczyński. Yet from an electoral position that even a month ago seemed hopeless, he managed to beat Komorowski, the centre-right incumbent, in the first and second rounds of the election.
The President-elect will probably be sworn in on 6 August, with a term lasting until the summer of 2020.
The debate of how and why this result happened will rage over the coming days and weeks. Like in the United Kingdom three weeks ago, the methodologies used by pollsters will be questioned. They completely misjudged the first round vote a fortnight ago, and even last Friday were showing Komorowski as narrowly ahead of his conservative challenger in the run-off.