Polish election results confirm the victory of the coalition led by Donald Tusk

Open Editor’s Digest for free

Rula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Polish opposition leader Donald Tusk and his Civic Platform party, along with two junior partners, won 248 of the 460 seats in the next parliament, according to the country’s final election results, giving him the path to forming a coalition government.

The ruling right-wing Law and Justice party led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski remains the largest party in parliament’s lower house, or lower house, with 194 seats, according to results released Tuesday. But the alliance with the far-right Confederation Party, which won 18 seats, will not be enough to obtain a majority.

President Andrzej Duda is expected to give PiS, as the largest party, the first opportunity to form a government when Parliament convenes in the next 30 days. But if PiS fails to muster enough support, the baton is set to be handed to Tusk, who may be able to persuade parliament to vote his government into power in December.

Tusk, who served as prime minister from 2007 to 2014, is preparing for a stunning return to power, having regained control of his party in 2021 after five years in Brussels as president of the European Council.

The opposition presented Sunday’s elections as a last chance to save democracy in the European Union’s largest member state in central and eastern Europe and halt the slide toward authoritarianism and the erosion of the rule of law.

However, PiS claimed that Poland faces a struggle to maintain national sovereignty as Tusk acts as a tool of Brussels, Berlin and even Moscow. But Tusk claimed that Kaczynski, with whom he had been at loggerheads for two decades, was modeling a future regime on the model of the Kremlin.

Tusk, 66, promised to put Warsaw back on a pro-European path, restore the independence of judges and release billions of euros in EU funding that the European Commission has withheld in a dispute with the PiS-led government over judicial reforms.

Voters responded by flocking to the polls, and the 74.4 percent turnout was the largest since Poland’s return to democracy.

The government transition should be “smooth and relatively problem-free, but not too fast,” said Wojciech Šački, head of the Politburo at think tank Politika Insight.

“There may be quarrels and fights” during the coalition talks, “but I don’t think anything can change the outcome of this process and I think we will see a new Donald Tusk government before the end of the year,” Zaki said.

Tusk is expected to share power with two parties that performed better than expected, especially the Third Way Alliance, which includes the centrist and agricultural parties, which won 65 seats. The left-wing Luika party, which will be the junior partner in the coalition, won 26 seats.

The combined seats won by the opposition group exactly matched expectations in the exit poll released on Sunday, when Tusk actually declared victory, saying “this is the end of bad times, this is the end of PiS rule.”

The three opposition parties will also control parliament’s upper chamber, the Senate, which has 65 of the 100 seats.