Official results are due on Tuesday.
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Law and Justice is strongly pro-NATO but also more skeptical of the 28-nation European Union, of which Poland is a member.
“We are very pro-European”, she said. “We must always remember that we are serving”.
Voter turnout was estimated at 51.6%.
Its rival, the center-right Civic Platform party, won 23.4% of the vote and 133 seats, the poll showed.
An energetic professional who used to work at the World Bank, Petru appealed to young urban Poles. Among his proposals is a lower flat tax of 16 percent on personal income, corporations and as a sales tax.
Kaczynski also called upon other parties to build a far-reaching red-white (colours of the Polish national flag) alliance to change Poland for better – an invitation directed at the smaller opposition parties (Kukiz’15 and Peasant’s Party) but at the same time another attempt to draw a line between those who are “patriotic” (white-red) and those who do not belong to the community. The “Bazarek” (Polish for bazaar) prices were tweeted and text messaged among friends, and indeed largely matched the exit polls, done exclusively by the private IPSOS center for three television stations. The party’s leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and the future prime minister, Beata Szydlo, have completed the country’s swing to the right of centre with their victory coming just months after Law and Justice Party (PiS) candidate Andrzej Duda was voted in as Poland’s sixth president.
The United Left Wing, as a coalition of several left wing parties, did not succeed in passing the threshold of 8 per cent to obtain seats in the parliament.
Kaczynski, dressed in the trademark black suit and tie that he has worn since the death of his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, in a plane crash in 2010, said he plans to follow a moderate course, an indication he is abandoning his divisive style of the past.
“We are the same as our countrymen, we have not detached ourselves from reality”, she said.
Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz has conceded defeat after an exit poll showed that her pro-European Civic Platform party faced a decisive defeat by the right-wing Law and Justice party.
When Law and Justice last held power a decade ago, there was a lot of turmoil domestically as Kaczynski sought revenge on his political foes and on former communist collaborators.
Remember the Conservatives’ decision to leave the federalist European People’s Party and set up its own, eurosceptic group in the European Parliament?
Local television channels predicted the PiS scored 238 out of 460 seats in the lower house of parliament, ousting the PO liberals, who took 135 seats.
The party has had bad blood for years with Tusk, and a few political observers find it nearly inconceivable that the party could give its support to a man they have vilified for years. “We can be proud of it. We will never have to be ashamed of ourselves, as we did many times in the past, through no fault of ours”, Kaczynski said.
Ex-premier Kaczynski stages a comeback as conservatives trounce Civic Platform. Those ideas are broadly supported by the other big victor in Sunday’s polls, an anti-establishment grouping led by rock star Pawel Kukiz.
The party also hammered at the Civic Platform’s scandals and unfulfilled promises during its eight years in control.
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“The madness of pre-election promises has nothing in common with real rule and I’m sure that Law & Justice will need to amend its pledges”, Piotr Bujak, a senior economist at PKO, Poland’s largest bank, said on Sunday. You see this because of the way voters are capable of moving from one small party to another. He says nobody was hurt and officials were able to secure all the documentation.
