Counting of votes after yesterday’s parliamentary elections in Poland continues until this hour. The final results will be announced either late tonight or tomorrow Tuesday. However, no overturning of the forecasts so far pointing to the end of the monopoly of the Law and Justice (PiS) party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski is expected. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s four-year-old ruling party received 36.8% of the vote, according to post-election polls conducted by polling institute Ipsos.

Immediately after the announcement of the exit polls, the president of the ruling party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, told the assembled supporters: “The first exit polls give us the fourth victory in the history of our party. We will have to see if we can build on this success for a new government term. We don’t know at the moment. We have hope, but also the certainty that either from the position of the government or the opposition we will continue to implement our program and we will not let Poland be betrayed”.

More pro-European policy

The liberal-conservative Citizens Alliance of former prime minister and former president of the European Council Donald Tusk came second in the electoral battle with 31%. His goal is to jointly govern with the opposition parties Tritos Dromos (13.5%) and Levitsa (8.6%) and everything shows that he has a good chance of succeeding.

“I have been a politician and an athlete for many years,” Donald Tusk told his supporters: “I have never been so happy with a second place in my life. Poland won. Democracy won. We succeeded in removing the Law and Justice party from power. The count is not complete. It is possible that the election result will be even better for us. But we can already say that a bad period for our country ends today. We are living the end of the Law and Justice government”.

A change of baton in Warsaw is expected to radically change Poland’s foreign policy. The current government is in an ongoing dispute with Brussels over judicial reform in the country, while at the same time relations with Germany are strained due to the claim of 1.3 trillion euros in war reparations. The election result shows that now the majority of Poles want a more pro-European policy as well as a more conciliatory attitude towards Berlin.