Four European results

Romania

Yesterday’s most important election was in Romania, and it was a big win for the pro-Europeans. Liberal-reformist mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan, was elected president in the second round, defeating the far right’s George Simion. Simion had originally claimed victory, despite trailing badly in the exit polls, but later conceded defeat and congratulated Dan.

In the first round Simion over-performed expectations, taking 41.0% of the vote when the polls had put him in the low 30s, but that didn’t carry through to the runoff. The polls that gave Dan the edge were right: he scored a clear victory with 53.6%, a margin of about 830,000 votes. Turnout was well up, to 64.7%, compared to 54.9% last time and 53.2% in the first round.

Dan will now try to put together a majority coalition uniting both reformist and establishment forces, following the resignation earlier this month of establishment prime minister Marcel Ciolacu.

Portugal

In Portugal, however, the far-right party, Chega, did much better than the polls had suggested. It’s still in third place, but less than a point behind the opposition Socialist Party, 22.6% to 23.4%. With only the overseas votes outstanding, the governing centre-right has a big lead on 32.1%, but that’s a long way short of what it needs for a majority.

Of the 226 decided so far (the four overseas seats are still to come), the centre-right has 89 seats (up ten), centre-left and far right 58 each (down 19 and up ten respectively), Liberals nine (up one), Greens six (up two), far left four (down five) and two others. That will mean that the small parties again will be mathematically irrelevant; centre-right prime minister Luís Montenegro will have to somehow rely on either the Socialists or Chega.

But with the Socialists having been punished severely for forcing an early election this time, it’s likely that no-one will be in a hurry to go back to the polls.

Poland

Poland was voting in the first round of its presidential election, with the runoff to be held two weeks later. There’s no doubt that it’ll be required – none of the 13 candidates was anywhere near 50% of the vote. And there was little suspense about who the two leading candidates would be: Rafał Trzaskowski from the governing coalition and Karol Nawrocki from the right-wing opposition Law & Justice.

Opinion polls had given Trzaskowski a healthy lead, of the order of eight points, but the exit poll suggested a tighter race, putting him on 31.1% to Nawrocki’s 29.1%. Counting is not yet finished, with 80 polling places (out of about 32,000) still outstanding, and because the electoral commission only reports results from completed provinces it’s difficult to get full figures, but the exit poll is looking pretty good: on what I can compile Trzaskowski is leading 30.8% to 29.9%, and that will improve slightly when the last three provinces come in.

That’s going to make the second round a tight contest. The far right’s Sławomir Mentzen is in third place with 15.2%, and his votes will tend to favor Nawrocki, but if Romania is any guide the electorate may rally against the hard right. First round turnout is sitting at 65.3%, up slightly from the 64.5% recorded in 2020.

France

I didn’t preview the election in France because it was just an internal party affair, but nonetheless an important one. The centre-right party, the Republicans, were choosing a new party president; they have had an interim collective leadership since the middle of last year, when former president Éric Ciotti was forced out after attempting to take the party into an alliance with the far-right National Rally.

For once, the election wasn’t close. Bruno Retailleau, currently interior minister and runner-up to Ciotti in the last leadership election, defeated former party president Laurent Wauquiez by almost three to one, 74.3% to 24.7%. Both are basically conservatives, but not from the hard right that Ciotti represented; although Retailleau is a hardliner on immigration he is open to co-operation with the centre, as his presence in a Macronist government demonstrates.

The result is good news for prime minister François Bayrou, who hasn’t had much of that lately. But the more consequential vote will probably be the one next month, when the Socialist Party’s leader, Olivier Faure, is seeking re-election. Having scored a wafer-thin victory last time on a platform of maintaining the broad left alliance, the New Popular Front, he is again being challenged by those determined on a break with the far left.

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UPDATE, same evening: Final figures in Poland show Trzaskowski leading with 31.4% to Nawrocki’s 29.5%, a gap of about 357,000 votes and pretty much what the exit poll said. Mentzen is third on 14.8%, followed by another far-right candidate, Grzegorz Braun, on 6.3% and centrist Szymon Hołownia on 5.0%. Turnout was also higher in the late-reporting provinces, bringing the overall total up to 67.3%.