Three pro-European opposition political parties in Poland – the Civic Coalition, the Third Way, and Levica – won enough votes in the parliamentary elections on October 15, 2023, to form a government.
This was announced by Polish opposition leader Donald Tusk after the vote, promising to draw a line under the 8-year rule of Jaroslaw Kaczynski's nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party.
"This is the end of the bad times, this is the end of PiS rule, we have removed them from power," Donald Tusk said in a speech to a rally of his supporters in Warsaw on Sunday.
According to the results of processing 92% of the ballots, Donald Tusk's liberal-conservative Civic Coalition gained 29.8% of the vote and will be able to form a coalition with the ideologically close Christian-conservative Third Way (14.5%) and the left-wing Levica alliance (8.4%).
Jaroslaw Kaczynski's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party received 36.3% of the vote and with this result will not be able to form a majority in the 460th local parliament, even if it unites with the far-right Confederation of Freedom and Independence, which advocates for the termination of aid to Kyiv. "The Confederation, the only anti-Ukrainian political party in Poland's parliament, garners only 7.2% of the vote.
The importance of the choice between Tusk and Kaczynski for Poland's 38 million people was underscored by the record 72.9% turnout at the polls on October 15. It was significantly higher than the previous maximum set in 1989, when Poles voted to end the communist system.
Analysts assumed that PiS would agree to form a coalition with the anti-Ukrainian Confederation after the election and further damage relations with Kyiv. However, the failure of the far-right in the elections made such a negative scenario for Ukraine impossible.
In contrast to the cold statements of Morawiecki, who last month suggested that the supply of weapons to Ukraine would be halted due to the need to arm themselves, Tusk called Ukraine an "absolutely key partner" in local media and called Kyiv's support a matter of existential importance for Europe.
In 2019, Donald Tusk proudly said that in Brussels he was called a "pro-Ukrainian maniac" for his desire to accelerate Ukraine's integration with the rest of Europe.
Read more about the implications of the Polish elections for Ukraine in Mind's article "The Opposition Won the Polish Elections: How It Will Affect Ukraine".