Donald Tusk demands swift decision on Polish election outcome

Poland’s opposition leader Donald Tusk has called for a swift handover of power after final general election results showed his Civic Coalition (KO) and two political allies with a 17-seat parliamentary majority.

After two terms in office, the outgoing Law and Justice (PiS) party finished first on 35.4 per cent but down 41 seats in the new Sejm parliament, With 194 seats, it is now 35 short of an absolute majority.

After a final round of counting, including in cities and the foreign vote, Mr Tusk’s centrist-liberal KO surged to 30.7 per cent – and 157 seats.

Mr Tusk hopes to take office with the centre-right Third Way, on 14.4 per cent and 65 seats, and possibly the left-wing Lewica, on 8.6 per cent and 26 seats. Together the three partners should be able to put together a coalition with 248 seats in the 460-seat parliament.

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Poland’s constitution obliges president Andrzej Duda, an ally of PiS, to convene a sitting of the Sejm by November 15th to elect a prime minister tasked with forming a new government. It remains unclear whether the president will hand that mandate first to PiS, as first-placed party, or to the opposition parties, many of whom refuse to negotiate with the outgoing ruling party.

“I am making a passionate appeal to the president, people are waiting for the first decisions, so we are asking the president for energetic and quick decisions,” said Mr Tusk in a statement broadcast on the social media platform X.

He was speaking after final results confirmed a record turnout of 73 per cent, up 13 points on 2019. Some 84.9 per cent of voters turned out to vote in Warsaw, where both Mr Tusk and his arch-rival and PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski were running. Mr Tusk attracted 538,000 votes, a record for a single candidate and four times the 131,000 votes attracted by Mr Kaczynski.

A senior Duda official said the situation was “complicated and requires consideration and analysis by the president” and that the president “does not rule out any option”, but declined to be drawn further.

After eight years in power, senior PiS officials appear increasingly resigned to the opposition benches. Senior PiS official Marek Suski told public television on Tuesday that “evil has prevailed in Poland, temporarily ... PiS is likely moving into a really democratic opposition”.

As the election dust settles, analysts are shifting their attention to what kind of coalition to expect from Mr Tusk, prime minister from 2007-2014 and then European Council president until 2019.

Expectations are high that he can use his EU experience to resolve a seven-year standoff with Brussels over judicial reforms and release billions of euro in Covid-era funding. But analysts suggest his broad political coalition could prove difficult to manage.

“We are dealing more with two camps: PiS and anti-PiS,” said Dr Marta Żerkowska-Balas, a sociologist and political scientist from the department of politics and public policy at SWPS University in Warsaw. “In the latter, there is a bit more diversity because it consists of four groups. Additionally, KO itself is quite diverse in the middle.”