WARSAW, June 21 (Reuters) - Bronislaw Komorowski, the candidate of Poland's ruling pro-business Civic Platform (PO), won most votes in the first round of the presidential election but results pointed to a tight run-off vote on July 4.
Komorowski, who is speaker of parliament and also Poland’s acting president, won 41 percent of the vote against 37 percent for his main rival, right-wing opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, results from 94 percent of polling stations showed.
Investors and financial markets would prefer a Komorowski victory because he would be expected to work smoothly with Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s economically liberal government in tackling Poland’s big budget deficit and preparing the country for eventual euro adoption.
Komorowski also shares Tusk’s vision of a Poland firmly anchored in the European mainstream, working closely with Germany and other EU partners and trying to improve long troubled ties with Russia, its communist-era overlord.
The election was forced by the death of Kaczynski’s identical twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, along with 95 others, mostly senior political and military officials, in a plane crash in Russia on April 10.
VETO FEARS
Kaczynski is a combative nationalist opposed to joining the euro any time soon and distrustful of the EU, Russia and Germany. He has also urged stimulus packages to counter the economic slowdown but Tusk has followed more cautious policies.
Poland’s relations with Berlin, Moscow and Brussels nosedived during Kaczynski’s stint as prime minister in 2006-07, when his brother Lech as president reinforced Warsaw’s image in the European arena as a difficult country to work with.
Tusk fears that Kaczynski as president would continue his brother’s habit of blocking key reforms.
"Should Bronislaw Komorowski now win the second round of elections, and I assume he can, the government will no longer be able to blame the presidential veto as the main obstacle to launching fiscal consolidation," said Rafal Benecki, senior economist at ING Bank in Warsaw.
The biggest prize for both candidates will be the support of the leftist electorate after Sunday’s surprisingly strong showing by Grzegorz Napieralski, the candidate of the former communist SLD party, who won the backing of 14 percent of Poles.
"If there are to be any discussions (about my support), then they would be about values and not the position of a deputy prime minister," Napieralski said in a radio interview on Monday. "Now is the time for some deliberation."
After a subdued election campaign in the shadow of the presidential plane crash and then of floods that deluged parts of Poland last month, analysts expect both candidates to rev up their efforts in the next two weeks.
Kaczynski softened his prickly image after the death of his brother and called for cooperation across the political spectrum, but on Sunday evening after the exit polls came out he said Poland faced a stark choice in the runoff vote.
"This should be a round in which a choice will be made between two visions of politics, two visions of Poland, because there are differences… We see the country’s future differently, we see differently the path to its success," he told supporters.
