Second round of voting: what next?

The exit polls look like this: 45.7% Bronisław Komorowski (Civic Platform - PO), 33.2% Jarosław Kaczyński (Law and Justice - PiS), 13.4% Grzegorz Napieralski (ex-communists - SLD). Turnout was 52.3%. As no candidate secured more than half of the votes cast, there will be a second round of the presidential elections, in two weeks time, on 4 July.

What will happen? Let's look back at the last presidential election.

In 2005, Donald Tusk (Civic Platform) beat Lech Kaczyński (Law and Justice) in the first round by 36.3% to 33.1% on a 49.7% turnout. In the second round, Kaczyński beat Tusk by 54% t0 46% on a 51% turnout.

So what next? The margin of Komorowski's victory over Jarosław Kaczyński (12.5 percentage points - and remember, these are only exit polls) is far more convincing than Tusk's first round margin over Lech Kaczyński (3.2 percentage points).

Jarosław Kaczyński will be angling for that juicy ex-communist vote, Napieralski's useful 13.4% support, by pushing PiS's redistributive economic agenda (e.g. no private sector involvement in healthcare) and hiding the differences (abortion, gay rights, in vitro fertilisation, Euroscepticism). In this, he will have an easier task than Komorowski, who will find it harder, as a natural social conservative, to talk convincingly like a social liberal. My guess is that more of Napieralski's electorate will vote for Kaczyński than for Komorowski, for purely economic reasons. If you an ex-communist boss with a guilty conscience, however, you will not be voting for Kaczyński.

Neither candidate can count on much support from those who didn't bother voting this time round. At the last presidential elections, turnout for the second round of voting was only 1.1% higher than in the first.

My prediction is that Bronisław Komorowski will beat Jarosław Kaczyński on 4 July. Komorowski is more appealing to the older, more conservative (socially) voter than Donald Tusk was; he has a higher margin in the first round; Jarosław is (slightly) less sympathetic a character than his late twin. And in 2005, two other candidates gained significant votes in the first round - populist Andrzej Lepper (15.1%) and ex-communist Marek Borowski (10.3%). In other words, in 2005 there was a pool of over 25% of first-round voters with a redistributionist bent for whom the idea of Kaczyński was preferable to the more free-market oriented Tusk.

It will be tight. My message to those who want Poland to move ahead in a reformist way towards normality is to go and vote on 4 July - do not take anything for granted. Worth looking at my simple map of Polish politics, here.