Trzecia Droga is a coalition between liberal Polska 2050 and conservative-agrarian PSL. Polska 2050 is something of a neo-PO, their agenda is pretty much “we are not PiS”, so they 100% won’t support PiS in forming the government.
However PSL on the other hand is something else. They are very experienced in politics, in fact they are the oldest continously-functioning party and their core electorate is farmers in particular. While they swing between 5 to 10% nationwide support since always, they have unproportionally many voters in farming industry-heavy regions – up to 80% in some smaller constituencies! They are also infamous for being easily swayed into coalition governments: in the early 2000’s there was a running joke about them, that had you asked a PSL politician who is most likely to win an upcoming election, they would say “our coalition partner of course!” no matter what the results eventually said. Also PSL and Polska 2050 already announced they are splitting ways the day the election results are in and will not form a coalition parliamentary group in the new term Sejm.
The law says that now the President is to pick a candidate for the prime minister and then their proposed gabinet has to receive majority support in the Sejm (231 votes). Traditionally, the President is most likely to pick someone from the winning party. If the proposed gabinet doesn’t receive vote of confidence, then other parliamentary groups can do the same thing and each candidacy is put under the same procedure of voting.
If the official results in the following days are similar to what the exit poll suggested last night, then PSL may turn out to be the kingmaker — they potentially have the power to sway the vote of confidence either way if PiS gets them to support another Morawiecki term. The only variables now are how many PSL deputies end up in the parliament within the Trzecia Droga coalition and which side offers them better benefits.
However having said that, I personally believe the Trzecia Droga result will end up bit lower, around 10%. First of all, none of the polls within the past 6 months or so ever suggested they could achieve a score that high. Second matter is voter turnout. Polls suggested something between 60 and 65% and right now we are expecting the actual turnout in the low to mid 70’s. The exit poll is based on the results from 900 (out of 30 thousand) polling stations and when picking the representative group they had never accounted for the voter turnout that high, so the liberal votes are definitely under-represented in the projected scores because they were HUGE queues in cities — some Wrocław polling station stayed open until 3 in the morning! And the third thing is ewybory street poll – in the 2019 election they projected the final seats better than any other polling office (right within like 4 seats total? Not sure don’t quote me on that) and their projected results this year are drastically different to the exit poll (Lewica 13%, TD 11%).
At the moment we barely have the results from 26% of the polling stations — mostly from rural areas. PiS has 39% support and TD has 14%. On the other hand Lewica has 8% which seems to reflect what the exit poll said. But the official vote always swings liberal late in the evening because city votes are counted last. What that means? That Lewica and KO will definitely go up later tonight and TD and PiS will definitely go down. Konfederacja could go either way really. Therefore my projection as of 9:42 on Monday is:
PiS 35%, KO 32%, TD 11%, Lew 10%, Kon 7%.
edit: as of 10:45 36% of polling stations released their results but they account for barely 22% of the votes cast yesterday
edit2: as of 16:00 the tendency in TD votes is opposite – they are totally going up still. but PiS already announced trying for coalition talks with PSL