So how will it be who will win the second round of elections?
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This is a difficult question to begin with. I would have to have a crystal ball.
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So isn’t it that Andrzej Duda is now sure of the July 12 victory?
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Definitely not. President Duda has a better starting position than Rafał Trzaskowski, but the second round can be really tight and no one is sure of a win. According to my calculations and other analyzes, several hundred thousand votes, or even tens of thousands of votes, can ultimately decide.
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President Andrzej Duda during Monday’s meeting.
It depends on whether the same number of people come to the second round as to the first. Turnout in the first round was very high for the presidential election, even higher than in the second round five years ago. I doubt that the participation can increase in the second round, anyone even estimates that it will be lower. Some voters can be discouraged by the two candidates and, in addition, there will be a holiday, so for that reason some people do not have to vote.
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Assume that turnout is maintained at around 60 percent, or about 19 million voters. If we take into account the distribution of voters in third to sixth place, Dud and Trzaskowski lack several hundred thousand votes to reach the limit of almost 10 million votes that is decisive for the victory. So it depends on where he tries to get them from. And they may not be able to get them at all. Who will win in that case? It hangs in the balance.
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I already heard what President Duda said on Monday morning, and it occurs to me that he counts on the support of Krzysztof Bosak, a voter from the nationalist far-right Confederation, who received almost 7 percent. On Monday, Duda talked about very conservative topics, bringing the topic of sexual minorities back into play. So is Duda mainly interested in supporting Bosak’s voters?
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It was obvious that he would choose such a tactic, but it is from both sides. Rafał Trzaskowski again mentioned their economic program and the fact that he is close to Bosak’s voters in this. But I think in both cases the candidates will be recalculated.
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Surveys to date have shown that Bosak Confederate voters are divided into three similar groups: Trzaskowski voters, Duda voters and those who do not go to the polls. Confederate voters are not a monolith. There is a wing that is more nationalistic, it would probably vote for Duda, even though it has a lot of reproach to Duda. The liberal wing, free, considers Duda to be as bad, or even worse, than Trzaskowski. They could even vote for Trzaskowski.
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Some will not be able to vote at all. In my opinion, the candidates will not be able to pull more than one third of Bosak’s voters to their side. Confederate voters are generally quite politically aware, and the primitive game of softening them that both candidates have now come up with will fail, or even confirm that they will not go to the polls. Their candidate and Confederate voters have faced many insults, and now it turns out that they are great patriots who are to vote for Duda. Given the values, the other side is also not close to Bosak’s voters. They remember Trzaskowski’s statements about the marches of nationalists. The credibility is also low here. Primitive creep does not work.
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Does Rafał Trzaskowski have some support from voters Szymon Hołowni, who finished third?
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These are voters, of whom only a very, very small part will vote for Duda, the larger part will remain at home and the largest will vote for Trzaskowski. Only 7 percent of Hołowni’s voters want to vote for Duda. Hołownia himself said on Sunday evening that he would consider Duda’s victory bad for Poland. His voters are more disciplined, they are not as individualists as Bosak’s voters, so they will obey his recommendations. Although it hasn’t arrived yet.
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About a week ago, Hołownia said that if the second round of Duda-Trzaskowski took place, he would vote for Trzaskowski.
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It was him personally, but it was not yet a challenge to his supporters. However, his constituents will certainly strengthen Trzaskowski in particular.
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Volební plakáty by Szymon Hołownia, Krzysztof Bosak, Andrzej Duda and Rafał Trzaskowské.
You said that in the second round, tens of thousands of votes can finally decide. What kind of voters will this be? The voters of the People’s Party Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz or Robert Biedron, who both received just over two percent of the vote? Or voices from abroad?
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It can be the votes of voters who did not vote in the first round at all, such cases happen. This time, however, they would not have to join the voters from the first round, but replace some. In the 2015 election, two million more voters reached the second round than in the first. This time it probably won’t be like that, because we’ve probably reached the participation ceiling.
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All surveys about the second round, including the one that was done after the first round, show a very balanced duel and a large percentage of undecided, on Sunday it was 9 percent. And there was really little difference of one percentage point between Duda and Trzaskowski. This is within the scope of a statistical error. The second round will be a real thriller.
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Where did the high turnout come from on Sunday?
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The candidates managed to return to Polish politics – to the elections – the strategy of dividing into two camps: either the one or the one. I think it’s wrong, but it’s just my opinion. The two main candidates succeeded in mobilizing and increasing the number of voters. Duda received 400,000 more votes than the Law and Justice Party in last October’s elections, and Trzaskowski received 800,000 more than his Civic Platform.
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It seems that 1,200,000 voters grabbed the tale of the war of good and evil and acknowledged that they must cast their vote in the first round. At the same time, the first round in Poland gives the opportunity to vote “for” rather than “against”.
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Publicist Łukasz Warzecha.
What is the surprise of the election? Is this a weak result for Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz? And where did the left-wing candidate Robert Biedroń go?
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I don’t know if it’s possible to talk about surprises. It has been a long-awaited fact that Robert Biedroń is failing and will have a disastrous result. For Kosiniak-Kamysz, such a weak result is a surprise, especially when we look at the preferences he had before the original May election date, which did not take place in the end. He could even endanger the then Civic Platform candidate Małgorzata Kidaw-Błońska, who was eventually replaced by Rafał Trzaskowski. Kosiniak will now have to put out the problems that await him on his own side.
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What will the 12 days of the campaign before the second round be like now? Will they be tense?
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Hard to guess, because candidates have to play it on several sides. They must frighten their own voters with the adversary in order to remain mobilized. So here he has to get involved. At the same time, he must reach for voters other than his own and choose such a more conciliatory tone for them. At the same time, therefore, the blade must be mild. This is difficult to achieve.
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I am more concerned than the brutal but interesting campaign about what Poland will look like after the elections, regardless of who wins them. The level of negative emotions is gigantic on both sides. We could see it during Andrzej Duda’s election evening, where it probably happened for the first time that when the candidate congratulated his opponent on the result, there was a very loud hum. And now imagine the frustration of the camp losing in the second round.
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Where did Jarosław Kaczyński share? Did Dud’s staff, as they say in Poland, hide him in a closet? He was not at Dud’s election night, he appeared in the campaign only once, a few days before the election. What is his role now?
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Kaczyński’s speech at the PiS Youth Forum that you mentioned already gives the answer. Jarosław Kaczyński is getting older and his speech before the elections, which was supposed to have a strong impact, had a weak response in the news, even in the government media. Kaczynski did not succeed.
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It is more and more visible that Kaczyński has less and less control over the party and this will continue. I don’t think that Kaczyński would be particularly involved now before the second round, but rather I would expect him to slowly disappear from the Polish political scene and show less and less. And at some point, all those who are waiting in PiS for the beginning of the war for his inheritance will admit that this is the moment… and that Law and Justice will be a day of judgment.
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