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Exit poll: Right-wing party wins Poland’s parliamentary vote

Conservative Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Justice candidate for the Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, left, deliver speeches at the party’s headquarters in Warsaw, Poland, on Sunday. (Czarek Sokolowski / Associated Press)
Conservative Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Justice candidate for the Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, left, deliver speeches at the party’s headquarters in Warsaw, Poland, on Sunday. (Czarek Sokolowski / Associated Press)
Associated Press

WARSAW, Poland – Poland took a decisive turn to the right in its parliamentary election Sunday, tossing out the centrist party that had governed for eight years for a socially conservative and euroskeptic party that wants to keep migrants out and spend more on Poland’s own poor.

An exit poll showed the conservative Law and Justice party winning 39 percent of the vote, enough to govern alone without forming a coalition.

The ruling pro-European Civic Platform party received 23 percent of the vote, according to the exit poll that prompted Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz of Civic Platform to concede.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Law and Justice, promised his party would govern fairly.

“We will exert law but there will be no taking of revenge. There will be no squaring of personal accounts,” he said. “There will be no kicking of those who have fallen of their own fault and very rightly so.”

Kaczynski credited his late brother, former Polish President Lech Kaczynski, with the party’s strong showing. His brother was killed in the 2010 air crash in Russia that claimed the lives of the president and many of Poland’s top leaders.

If the exit poll results are confirmed, Law and Justice will take 242 seats in the 460-seat lower house of parliament and 58-year-old lawmaker Beata Szydlo will become Poland’s next prime minister. Civic Platform will get 133 seats and only three other parties will make it into parliament – two of them for the first time.

Law and Justice is strongly pro-NATO but also more skeptical of the 28-nation European Union, of which Poland is a member. The party opposes adopting the euro currency and is strongly anti-migrant.