Almost 80% of Poles favor postponing presidential election: poll

The vast majority of Poles – 77.4 percent – believe that the presidential election scheduled for May 10 should be postponed by a year, Rzeczpospolita, a well-known Polish daily reported, quoting the results of an IBRiS survey that the newspaper commissioned.

Importantly, the postponement of elections due to the coronavirus epidemic is similarly supported by voters of President Andrzej Duda and supporters of the opposition candidate Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska, of the Civic Coalition.

According to Rzeczpospolita, the idea of ​​postponing elections, and thus extending Duda’s term in the office, is assessed by 43.1 percent of respondents as “definitely good” and 34.3 percent as “rather good”. Only 13.8 percent of respondents assess it negatively. And 8.7 percent have no opinion on this matter.

Moreover, the vast majority of both Duda’s supporters (74 percent) and Kidawa-Błońska’s supporters (88 percent) are in favor of postponing the elections.

Established in the capital Warsaw in 2014, IBRIS Market and Social Research Institute’s “goal is to deliver data and knowledge essential to make key decisions in politics, business or social activities” as stated on their website.

According to an IBRiS survey for Onet, one of the largest Polish news sites, if the presidential election took place on May 10, 20.7 percent of all the respondents would vote and Duda would win the first round with 54.6 percent votes. The poll also shows that had the election taken place on March 29, 39.7 percent of respondents would have gone to the polls, and in that case, Duda would have got 45.1 percent votes.

Both the surveys – for Rzeczpospolita and Onet – were conducted on March 27 and 28 by computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) on a nationwide sample of 1,100 people. The estimation error is 3 percent.

(Rzeczpospolita, Onet)