Warsaw, Poland – A pro-market lawmaker and Warsaw’s socially conservative mayor appeared headed for a runoff in Poland’s presidential election Sunday after neither candidate appeared to have gained the 50 percent of the vote needed, according to preliminary results and a key exit poll.
With 91.5 percent of the ballots counted, 36 percent of voters had backed Donald Tusk, a pro-business candidate committed to stimulating entrepreneurship with low taxes and deregulation, while 33 percent voted for Warsaw Mayor Lech Kaczynski, a former child actor hoping to preserve a strong safety net, according to the state electoral commission. Turnout was nearly 50 percent.
If the results hold, the two former activists with the anti- communist Solidarity movement would be forced into a runoff Oct. 23.
The race in the ex-communist country centered on the Europe-wide issue of just how far to go in sacrificing old welfare- state protections for the promise of an American-style economy with fast growth and job creation.
Final results were not expected until today, the electoral commission said, but exit polls in Poland have proved in the past to be a reliable indicator of the final vote.
“This is a victory,” a smiling Tusk proclaimed from a platform set up at the National Museum, where members of his Civic Platform party gathered. “I’m happy that millions of Poles decided it was worth going to vote, and that it was worth voting for Donald Tusk.”
The two front-runners barely discussed the outgoing government’s plan to pull Polish troops out of Iraq by early next year, though their parties suggested the force could stay longer – provided the country can renegotiate terms of the deployment with Washington. The deployment of about 1,500 troops is deeply unpopular in Poland.
While the prime minister and his government wield most executive power in Poland, the president is commander in chief of the armed forces and can veto laws and direct foreign policy by representing Poland abroad.
Tusk and Kaczynski have their political roots in the anti-communist Solidarity movement of the 1980s and have pledged to fight corruption and the continued influence in politics of former communists.
Civic Platform led opinion polls for months, but the fact that Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party pulled ahead has been seen as the result of widespread anxiety sparked by talk of dismantling the welfare state in a country with the highest official jobless rate in Europe, now nearly 18 percent. Many depend on some form of a government handout, paltry though it might be. The parties are in coalition talks to form a government, but the talks have been hampered by rivalry in the presidential race.
