Poland's President Andrzej Duda last night nominated Mateusz Morawiecki, the current prime minister from the ruling nationalist-populist Law and Justice party, to form the country's new government.
Mr Duda’s nomination comes three weeks after a high-stakes parliamentary election which resulted in a bloc of centrist and left-wing opposition parties winning a majority of seats in parliament.
Speaking on public broadcaster TVP and flanked by Polish, EU and NATO flags, Mr Duda said that he had decided to continue Poland's parliamentary tradition of first asking the "winning party" to form a government.
Law and Justice won 194 seats, the largest number of any party but fell 37 seats short of a majority in the 460-seat Polish parliament.
The opposition bloc, which includes the centrist Civic Coalition, the centre-right Third Way and the Left, won 248 seats, giving it a majority of 17 seats.
The leaders of Third Way and the Left have backed Donald Tusk, the leader of Civic Coalition, as their candidate for prime minister.
Mr Tusk was previously Poland's prime minister from 2007 to 2014 and President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019.
After the president's televised speech, Mr Tusk addressed Mr Morawiecki on X, the social media platform, telling him that the opposition had a "full set of ministers".
Mr Morawiecki also commented on X. He said forming a new government would be a challenge and called for cooperation. However, his party lacks allies in parliament after eight divisive years in government.
Poland’s parliament will assemble on 13 November and Law and Justice will have 14 days to win a vote of confidence in favour of Mr Morawiecki’s nomination as prime minister.
That motion is set to be defeated.
The opposition bloc will oppose Mr Morawiecki’s nomination and subsequently propose Mr Tusk as their candidate to form a government.
The far-right Confederation party, which won 18 seats, declared during the latter stages of the campaign that it would not back a Law and Justice government and is expected to vote against Mr Morawiecki’s nomination too.
The most likely scenario is that Mr Duda will then ask Mr Tusk, as the leader of the opposition, to form a government.
It may be early December before the opposition gets its chance to approve Mr Tusk’s nomination.
Mr Duda, a former Law and Justice MP and MEP before winning a first presidential election in 2015, is widely viewed as an ally of the ruling party.
Early in his first term, he signed into law proposals by Law and Justice to restructure the way the country's highest constitutional court, the Constitutional Tribunal, operated and backed the ruling party's nominations for new judges on the Tribunal rather than swear in judges elected by the previous parliament.
However, Mr Duda has, on occasions, shown an independent streak.
In 2017, he vetoed a Law and Justice proposal which would have allowed the government to appoint Supreme Court judges.
Mr Duda has two years of his second term as president remaining and could use his veto to block legislation proposed by the opposition - it lacks a three-fifths majority in parliament required to undo the president's veto.
The president has generally taken a more cautious approach to reviewing new laws during his second term and last June, following criticism by the EU, amended a controversial law which would have banned public officials from office for allegedly succumbing to so-called Russian influence.
At stake is the prospect of unlocking billions of EU cohesion and recovery funds frozen due to Law and Justice's changes to the judiciary, which Mr Tusk has said is a priority for the opposition.
74% of eligible voters cast their ballots on 15 October, a record turnout in any Polish election since 1989 when the country’s former Communist rulers were defeated in free elections which led to the creation of the Polish Third Republic.
