The exit poll suggested an opposition victory would be built on a coalition of younger voters, highly educated urban dwellers and Poles living in the industrialised western half of the country, which has deeper historical ties to the rest of Europe.

For advocates of democracy in the EU, such a result would amount to an early Christmas gift – one fortifying the bloc’s position as a defender of the rule of law at a time when far-right parties have made substantial inroads elsewhere on the continent.

“The Polish middle class has mobilised to keep us a European democracy,” Radek Sikorski, a Polish member of the European Parliament and former foreign minister, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Huge turnout in metropolitan areas, demotivated traditionalist south-east. In these dark times forces of light need a break and it looks like Poland might provide it.”

The Ipsos Mori poll, which sampled 900 polling stations, projected that Law and Justice had won 36.8 per cent of the vote. Tusk’s opposition Civic Coalition was projected to have gotten 31.6 per cent. But, pivotally, two political forces seen as potential allies in a new “democratic” coalition collectively had garnered another 21.6 per cent. A fourth political force – the Confederation party, seen as even further to the right than Law and Justice – was polling well below expectations at 6.2 per cent.

“There is no denying . . . that we have failed,” Slawomir Mentzen, Confederation’s co-leader, told supporters. “We were supposed to overturn this table, and everything indicates that we didn’t succeed.”

The highly charged election campaign included some of the largest rallies on Warsaw’s streets since the restoration of democracy three decades ago, and the exit poll suggested a record-high turnout of 73 per cent. Some polling stations with long lines remained open into the night.

The final results are expected Monday or Tuesday and hinge on official tallies, and whether smaller parties would actually emerge as kingmakers or fail to enter parliament at all.

In the country’s complicated parliamentary system, political parties and alliances must pass a bar of 5 per cent or 8 per cent respectively to win seats in parliament. If they don’t cross that threshold, those seats are distributed among other parties, with the largest vote winner seeing the biggest gains.

In the run-up to the election, analysts said Law and Justice had tipped the odds in its favour by exerting control over the media, pushing through new electoral rules that catered to its core constituencies and tacking on a controversial referendum to stoke support.

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Among the four referendum questions, voters were asked whether “you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa”. The opposition encouraged voters to boycott the referendum.

The exit poll suggested that the referendum answers were overwhelmingly in the ruling party’s favour, but participation was only about 40 per cent, below the threshold to make the result binding.

The parliamentary election outcome is being especially watched in Washington, Brussels, Kyiv and Moscow, as Poland is central to the West’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has equipped Ukraine with German-made Leopard 2 tanks and Polish MiG-29 fighters. It has also taken in millions of Ukrainian refugees since the start of the war.

But domestic politics have clouded that support. Last month, a dispute over the impact of Ukrainian grain exports on Polish farmers escalated to the point where Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki raised the prospect of an end to Polish arms shipments.

The Washington Post