“I hope I will have the opportunity tomorrow evening to meet the president-elect, Karol Nawrocki, immediately after my return from Vilnius,” Duda told reporters in the Lithuanian capital, where leaders of the Bucharest Nine and Nordic states are preparing for NATO’s late-June summit in The Hague.
Poland’s electoral commission on Monday said that Nawrocki, backed by the conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, won Sunday’s runoff with 50.89 percent of the vote against liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski on 49.11 percent. Turnout was a near-record 71.63 percent.
Duda, who had already congratulated Nawrocki on social media, called the 370,000-vote margin “a very significant advantage – the size of a large Polish city” and said the result was “indisputably clear.”
The outgoing president said Poles had endorsed the strategic course he inherited from the late leader Lech Kaczyński and pursued for the past nine years: “building close ties with the United States, strengthening our security by expanding the Polish army and raising defense spending, and ensuring balanced development across the country.”
Duda is in Vilnius for meetings hosted by Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and will hold bilateral talks on Tuesday before flying home for the encounter with Nawrocki, who is set to be sworn in on August 6.
(jh)
Source: PAP