Warsaw, June 2 (Reuters) – Nationalist opposition candidate Karol Naulocky narrowly won the Polish presidential election, with the results shaping it on Monday, taking a major blow to the centre-minded government’s efforts to solidify Warsaw’s pro-European orientation.
In a European conservative victory inspired by President Donald Trump, Nowrocky secured 50.89% of the vote, Election Commission data showed that it booked more political restraints as it is likely to use presidential veto to block Prime Minister Donald Task’s free policy agenda.
The Task government has tried to reverse judicial reforms carried out by the previous Nationalist Law and Justice (PIS) government, but the current president Andrze Dudas has thwarted that effort – Now Rocky could continue.
Nawrocki’s rival, Rafal Trzaskowski, is the liberal mayor of Warsaw, who was running for Tusk’s ruling citizens’ coalition (KO), earning 49.11%. Both candidates declared victory late Sunday shortly after the release of the exit vote, which showed the outcome was very close.
Nawrocki, a PIS-backed conservative historian and amateur boxer, presented the vote as a referendum on the government for the 18 months of the task.
“The referendum on Task Government’s firing has won,” PIS MP Jacek Sasin wrote to X.
Poland’s Blue Chip Stock Index spurred more than 2% in early trade on Monday as investors expected more political paralysis. The Zloty currency also fell against the euro.
Nawrocki, like his predecessor Duda, is expected to thwart attempts by the Tusk government to liberalize abortion or reform the judiciary. The EU has taken the previous PIS government to courts over judicial reform, claiming it undermined the rule of law and democratic standards.
“It was all on the edge of the knife,” said 32-year-old IT expert Patrick Marek. “The emotions are certainly mixed together at this moment, but how small this margin is telling us that we are almost split in half as voters.”
Euro skepticism
Sunday’s spill vote in Poland comes just two weeks after Romanian centralist Bucharest mayor Nixon Dunn hit the fierce nationalist forces of Central Europe by winning the country’s presidential contest.
Congratulations from other nationalists and eurosceptic politicians in the region. George Simion, a right-right candidate who lost the Romanian election, wrote X: “Poland won,” and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban welcomed a “great victory.”
The results could give momentum to the euroskeptical opposition leader and former prime minister Andrej Bavis, who lead the views ahead of the October election. Bavis offered X a “warm congratulations.”
European Commission’s Ursula von der Leyen said he was convinced that the EU could continue to carry out “very good cooperation” with Poland.
Krzysztof Izdebski, policy director at the Batory Foundation, said the outcome was “Trump would say more in Polish politics.”
Nawrocki, 42, was a new political figure who previously ran the National Memory Institute, and campaigned on the promise of ensuring economic and social policies that support poles for other nationalities, including refugees from neighboring Ukraine.
He vowed to protect Polish sovereignty, and as he said, it was an excessive interference in the matters of the country from Brussels.
Although Polish parliament holds most of its powers, the president was able to reject the law, and votes were monitored as closely as Ukraine in Russia, the US and the EU.
Borys Budka, a KO member of the European Parliament, said he believes Pis is “trying to overthrow the legal government.”
“This could be a huge challenge for the government. This would be blocked when it comes to good initiatives,” he told the state news channel TVP Information.
Despite controlling the last day of the presidential election in the past, Nawrocki won from questions from pensioners about acquiring apartments to admission when he participated in an orchestrated brawl.
According to the Election Commission, voter turnout was 71.31%. He said this was a record for the second round of the presidential election.
(Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, Pawel Florkiewicz, Kuba Stezycki, Anna Lubowicka, Fatos Bytyci, and Prague’s Jan Lopatka, written by Alan Charlish, written by Kate Mayberry, Gareth Jones, and William MacLean))
