WARSAW—President of Poland and Trump ally Andrzej Duda has won a second term in office in a closely fought election that saw him defeat challenger Rafal Trzaskowski.
Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, who is affiliated with Poland’s main opposition Civic Platform (PO) party, received 48.88 percent of the vote.
Duda won five more years in power on a deeply conservative platform after a closely fought election that saw a near-record turnout of more than 68 percent.
“It will be a different term of office because Poland is different,” Duda said at the campaign event. “The question is between the past and the future. I pick the future.”
Duda ran a campaign in which he accused Trzaskowski of putting foreign interests ahead of Poland’s and blasted his challenger for seeking to subvert the country’s traditional, Catholic values.
Trzaskowski vowed in his campaign to make Poland more tolerant and said he would strengthen the rights of minorities. He sparked controversy among conservative voters by pledging to introduce education about LGBT rights in Warsaw schools.
Economic policy was a central theme of the campaign, with Duda portraying himself as a guardian of generous PiS welfare programs, while painting Trzaskowski as someone who sought to cut benefits that have transformed the lives of many poorer Poles.
Duda’s victory also gives the government a new mandate to pursue controversial reforms of the judiciary, which have been criticized by the European Union’s executive body for undermining the separation of powers. Leaders of the ruling PiS party insist the changes are necessary to purge any remaining vestiges of the country’s communist past from Poland’s courts.
With the next general election scheduled for 2023, PiS now faces the prospect of three more years of uninterrupted rule in which to press ahead with its bold reform agenda that it calls “dobra zmiana,” which roughly translates to “a change for the better.”