Bewildered

Just when we painted the picture of the underdog Law and Justice (PiS) coming back to have the chance to win the race amid a disastrous election campaign by the frontrunner Civic Platform (PO), two opinion polls show the ruling party way way ahead. Several days ahead of the Sunday parliamentary vote the daily Gazeta Wyborcza gave the PO a 10 percentage point lead and the daily Rzeczpospolita gave it a bewildering 15 percentage point lead! Two other polls released this week showed the parties effectively tied.

So, basically five days ahead of the election, we have two pollsters saying that the two leading parties are nearly tied and two pollsters saying they are light years apart as that 10-percentage point difference translates into something like 72 more seats, according to Wyborcza.

It looks like even pollsters have got caught up in the partisan reality of Polish politics: some appear skewed towards PiS and others towards the PO.

Such a spread in surveys means that they are absolutely useless in determining support for the parties ahead of elections, or rather you can choose the pre-election reality you live in: the PO is about to win easily or they have a dogfight on their hands.

But there is a bright side to this. This time around maybe at least one of the polls will get the final election results right come Sunday night.