Poland's ruling party wins EU vote: results

(WARSAW) - Poland's ruling liberal Civic Platform party was the big winner in the European parliamentary elections, receiving 44.39 percent of the vote, near-complete results showed Monday.

With 98.9 percent of ballots counted in Sunday's poll, the figures from the national electoral commission gave the party 25 of the 50 seats allocated to Poland in the 736-member European Parliament.

The performance of the party outstripped the 24.1 percent it had garnered in the 2004 EU elections, the first in which Poles could vote as new members of the bloc.

"It's a great thing to get a better result than we scored in the parliamentary elections one-and-a-half years ago, while being in power during such a difficult period of crisis," Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.

"We can say the government has not gotten a yellow card. Much to the contrary, it has gotten a new vote of confidence," he said.

The Civic Platform had won 41.51 percent of the vote in Poland's general election in October 2007.

Sunday's turnout was 24.53 percent according to the electoral commission, surpassing the 20.87 record in 2004 but a far cry from the 53.8 percent in the last Polish general election.

Tusk's movement is part of the European People's Party, an umbrella group of centre-right parties which returned as the biggest bloc in the EU's only elected institution.

The right-wing opposition Law and Justice party run by ex-prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski -- the identical twin brother of President Lech Kaczynski -- took 27.41 percent of the vote, translating into 15 seats.

The party is poised to join an anti-federalist group in the EU parliament which will also include Britain's Conservatives.

The ex-communist left-wing Democratic Left Alliance and the tiny Union of Labour, which stood on a joint ticket, ranked third with 12.33 percent and seven seats. They are both part of the EU parliament's Party of European Socialists.

Civic Platform's junior coalition partner, the Polish Peasants' Party took 7.03 percent of the vote, giving it three seats. It is also a member of the European People's Party.

Poland, a country of 38 million people, was the largest of the 10 mostly ex-communist states to have joined the EU in 2004.

No other party in Poland crossed the five-percent vote threshold required to enter the EU assembly.