Komorowski falters
POLAND’S POLL: EXIT DATA PUTS HIM BEHIND OPPOSITION’S DUDA
Loss of popularity attributed to president losing touch with voters, failing to justify his return.
Poland’s two leading daily newspapers yesterday attributed President Bronislaw Komorowski’s surprise first-round election setback to a lacklustre campaign and having lost touch with voters.
Conservative opposition challenger Andrzej Duda scored 34.5% against Komorowski’s 33.1%, with rock star and political novice Pawel Kukiz trailing at 20.5%, according to an exit poll by the Ipsos survey company.
Official results were expected to be available last night at the earliest, but that did not stop the leading Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper from running the headline: “This result was a defeat for the president.”
Gazeta Wyborcza had backed Komorowski, who is close to the ruling centrist Civic Platform (PO) and will battle it out against Duda, from the Law and Justice (PiS) conservative opposition party, in a May 24 run-off.
“Maybe it’s because his supporters had been convinced for months he was a shoo-in and that their only question was whether he would win in the first round or the second,” the newspaper said.
“The president effectively discouraged his supporters with a campaign that failed to explain why he should return to the palace. He lost touch with voters. This jovial, old-fashioned, adept communicator transformed himself into a ruler who delivered speeches surrounded by marble and uniforms.”
The daily also published a doomsday commentary by its editor-in-chief Adam Michnik, entitled “Poland’s loss”, in which he warns against the return to power of PiS, whose leader Jaroslaw is a former premier and the twin brother of Poland’s late president Lech Kaczynski.
Michnik describes the Kaczynski brothers’ 2005-2007 government as “the almighty secret services, police provocations, cameras mounted in doctors’ offices” and “a state built on suspicion and fear”. –