Poland election's first exit polls show race still too close to call
A preliminary exit poll prepared by the Ipsos research centre has shown liberal pro-EU candidate Rafał Trzaskowski to be ahead by a razor-thin margin in the presidential election's second round with 50.3% of the vote. His conservative opponent Karol Nawrocki won 49.7% of the vote.
The final result is too close to call at this stage, with a more comprehensive count expected on Monday morning.
Turnout was 72.8% - higher than the 67.3% reported in the first round on 18 May. Voting started at 7 am and ended at 9 pm.
At a conference at 6:30 pm, the chairman of the Polish National Electoral Commission said incidents had been reported during the voting, with "232 possible offences" taking place.
The exit poll data was collected by the Ipsos research centre on behalf of three television stations: TVP, TVN and Polsat.
This is a developing story and our journalists will update it as more news comes in.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Euronews
an hour ago
- Euronews
EU faces new legal action over bottom trawling in protected areas
EU leaders are facing a fresh legal complaint over widespread destructive fishing practices like bottom trawling in marine protected areas (MPAs). The lawyers behind it say that continuing to permit this activity goes against the bloc's core nature laws and puts the ocean and people in grave danger. Bottom trawling is a destructive fishing practice which involves dragging a net - some so large it could fit a Boeing 747 plane - across the seafloor to catch fish. It disturbs sediment, destroys marine habitats and far more than just the target species gets caught in these nets. The complaint is being brought to the European Commission by a coalition of non-profit organisations: ClientEarth, Oceana, Seas at Risk and Danmarks Naturfredningsforening. It points out persistent instances of unchallenged bottom trawling in three countries: Denmark, the Netherlands and Spain. The challenge claims that destructive fishing practices in MPAs in these member states flout the EU Habitats Directive and calls on EU officials to launch infringement action against the countries in question. The Habitats Directive requires Natura 2000 MPAs - the most important network of marine protected areas in Europe - to be protected from any activity likely to significantly affect the integrity of the site. 'Legally speaking, bottom trawling in protected areas is not legal, and if policymakers don't live up to their obligations, we will bring them before court,' says Tobias Troll, marine policy director from Seas at Risk. ClientEarth ocean lawyer John Condon adds that 'urgent action' is needed at the EU level to confirm that bottom trawling is against EU law, alongside an 'immediate response' from governments. This legal challenge is the latest in a string of litigation across the EU over bottom trawling in MPAs. Individual national cases have so far been launched in France, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden and Germany. In April, another group of NGOs filed a similar legal complaint with the EU, alleging breaches of the EU Habitats Directive by Italy, France and Germany. 'This complaint, and others like it, reveal a systemic problem across Europe and one that member states have failed to address for years now, contrary to their legal obligations under EU law,' explains Nicolas Fournier, campaign director for marine protection at Oceana in Europe. The new legal challenge also comes hot off the heels of a crucial judgment from the EU's General Court in May, which confirmed that protected areas must be protected from potentially harmful practices like bottom trawling. The Commission concluded that countries have every right under EU law to ban damaging fishing methods like this in vulnerable marine areas. Some EU countries, like Greece and Sweden, have already announced plans for national legislation to ban bottom trawling in protected areas within their territories. The EU's 2023 Marie Action Plan calls on member states to phase out bottom trawling in all MPAs by 2030. But recent research from NGOs Oceana, Seas At Risk and ClientEarth revealed that no EU country currently has a comprehensive plan in place to phase out destructive fishing practices in these protected areas. And a study published in March this year by Pristine Seas found that around 60 per cent of these vulnerable marine areas in the EU are currently being trawled. With the UN set to host its Ocean Conference in Nice, France, on 9 June and the EU expected to release its strategy to promote a sustainable and competitive blue economy in the next few days, pressure is mounting for more comprehensive ocean protection. Campaigns calling for action on destructive fishing practices in the EU have been backed by fishermen and hundreds of thousands of Europeans. 'The world is waiting for leaders at UNOC to defend the ocean, and make sure protected genuinely means protected,' adds noted MPA defender and founder of the Mediterranean Conservation Society, Zafer Kızılkaya. 'Fishers depend on it - communities depend on it - the world depends on it.'
Euronews
an hour ago
- Euronews
Six months without a new EU privacy chief, and still no deal in sight
Six months after the mandate of the privacy watchdog of the EU institutions – the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) – expired, EU lawmakers and national governments still can't agree on who will lead the authority. And the decision on who will take over from the current EDPS, Poland's Wojciech Wiewiórowski, is no closer to being taken, according to people familiar with the matter. The selection process has been plagued by delays. Hearings, which were due before 5 December, when Wiewiórowski's mandate ended, were pushed back by the Commission to January because of delays with approving a shortlist of candidates. After that, politicians failed to agree on a successor, with both the European Parliament and the member states backing different candidates from the four contenders picked by the Commission following hearings in January. A special working group with representatives from both institutions was set up, which met a few times, but those meetings were inconclusive, and no further meeting has been convened on the issue. The Parliament's Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee, LIBE, voted to appoint long-time Commission official Bruno Gencarelli, from Italy, while the member states are backing Wiewiórowski to stay on for another mandate. In March, think tank Centre for AI & Digital Humanism and a group of privacy academics wrote to the Parliament and Commission presidents, signalling Gencarelli ought to be conflicted from the role. Appointing him would be 'a violation of the constitutionally protected complete independence of EDPS and of the principle of good administration. This would also undermine the European system of checks and balances, in favour of the Commission,' the letter said, adding that the next privacy chief should be a 'candidate whose independence is beyond doubt.' The EDPS job has never been held by a former Commission official: Wiewiórowski, as well as his predecessors Peter Hustinx (2004-2009 and 2009-2014) and Giovanni Buttarelli (2014 -2019) all previously worked at national supervisory authorities. Established in 2004, the EDPS is unable to fine tech giants for breaches of EU privacy rules — that's a competence of the national data protection authorities — it publishes opinions on legislative proposals and weighs in on upcoming digital legislation. In the absence of a new head of the watchdog, Wiewiórowski is continuing his work. For example, earlier this month the EDPS office published an opinion on rules proposed by the Commission to establish a common system for the return of third-country nationals staying illegally in the EU. His advice was to carry out an in-depth fundamental rights impact assessment 'to better identify and mitigate potential risks." Isabelle Roccia, Managing Director, Europe of privacy professional's organisation IAPP, told Euronews that the role of the EDPS has developed much more than was anticipated when it created 20 years ago. 'It [now] oversees compliance for close to 80 EU entities and has built a significant role in EU policymaking over time,' Roccia said. 'Understandably, MEPs and member states are carefully gauging how the next Supervisor could navigate data protection vis-à-vis other areas of law, new technology, security and geopolitics, at a time when the Commission is focused on competitiveness and simplification,' she added. The Commission did not reply before publication to a request for a comment. French artificial intelligence (AI) start-up H Company, which launched last year and raised hundreds of millions of euros in investment before it had even released its first product, brought out three new AI agents on Tuesday. "We are all in on the agentic race, that's our path. We are even potentially ahead with really good results in computer use technologies," Charles Kantor, the company's CEO and co-founder, told Euronews Next. Agentic AI models, or AI agents, do not just process information but also try to plan and complete tasks and solve problems. However, Kantor said that humans would 'always be at the centre' of their AI models, so that if the agent wrote an email, it would just be a draft and only the human would be able to send the message. The three models that H has released are called Runner H, Tester H, and Surfer H. H said that the three products reflect the company's vision for a "trusted, action-oriented AI that delivers task execution beyond traditional chatbots". It claims that it achieves a 92.2 per cent success rate while reducing costs by up to 5.5 times against competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Runner H allows users to automate workflows and streamline tasks. Kantor said it was "a more advanced version of Manus," he said, referring to the Chinese AI agent. It is aimed at consumer use. Surfer H allows you to surf the web and navigate browser environments, and the company claims the model achieved a 92.2 per cent task completion accuracy on the WebVoyager benchmark at $0.13 (€0.11) per task. This is much cheaper than competitors, such as OpenAI's Operator agent, which costs $200 (€175) per month for its Pro subscription plan. "It's really like almost an agent acting on your behalf, using planning to visual capabilities to recognise interfaces, clicking, scrolling, acting, fetching information, and so on," Kantor said. Tester H is the final new model, which is built more for enterprise use with one of the big things it can do being software testing. But it can also do things such as smart email replies. You can ask the agent to read your recent emails, and it can draft template answers. But the agent will not hit send; only the human can do this. H said that the three products reflect the company's vision for a 'trusted, action-oriented AI that delivers task execution beyond traditional chatbots'. All the models are trained on synthetic data, which means it uses artificially generated data designed to mimic real-world data, allowing the company to meet Europe's GDPR rules on data protection. According to Kantor, he personally uses H's AI models for the interconnection between tools such as emails and documents to prepare information, such as for billing or drafting emails. But he also uses it for preparing company content that is then reviewed, such as for ads and markets. 'When you start to review the work of an agent, you start to feel the productivity,' he said. H Company created a buzz when it launched last year. Kantor was a university professor at Stanford while the start-up's other co-founders came from DeepMind. Meanwhile, investment came from LVMH's CEO Bernard Arnault, Iliad founder Xavier Niel, Amazon, Samsung, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others. But just several months after launch, three of the co-founders - Daan Wierstra, Karl Tuyls, and Julien Perolat - quit due to 'operational differences,' the company said in a LinkedIn post. For Kantor, the situation surrounding their departure is "in the past". "We had this kind of strategic disalignment, but now they are ambassadors of the company, and H's vision is really clear," he said. "We want to be at the state of the art in terms of action models and the agentic space, and we want this technology to benefit humanity". The company now has around 70 employees in Paris and the United Kingdom and has a big research and engineering department. "It's kind of the concerto of age. You need to be able to really orchestrate in the right manner: Product, research, and engineering synergies to build category-defining AI," he said. For Kantor, agentic AI is the next phase of AI, which will be vital to physical AI, which NVIDIA spoke of at length two weeks ago. "We're gonna see a lot of companies thriving worldwide, but also in France, in robotics. I think Agent AI is gonna be the heart, the gist, I may say, of many fields," Kantor said, referring to computer games, simulated worlds, and robotics. "The software part of robotics is gonna be based on agentics, superintelligence. The opportunities are numerous".
France 24
an hour ago
- France 24
Germany's Merz defends migration crackdown after court setback
The Berlin court said Monday that German border officials cannot turn away asylum seekers before it was determined which country should process their cases under EU rules. The decision, in response to a challenge brought by three Somali nationals refused entry to Germany, dealt a blow to the crackdown Merz launched when he took power last month. But his government insists it is legal to continue turning away asylum seekers while it tries to challenge the ruling, and conservative leader Merz reiterated that stance. The court decision could "limit our room for manoeuvre a little", he acknowledged in a speech to a gathering of local government officials in Berlin. But he insisted the ruling was "preliminary", adding: "We know that we can continue with pushbacks." "We will do it to protect public safety and order in our country and to prevent cities and municipalities from becoming overwhelmed." He said the policy, which has caused tensions with some of Germany's neighbours, would be carried out "within the framework of existing European law". The measures were temporary until security at the European Union's external borders "is significantly improved", he stressed. While the court said the reasoning behind its ruling could be applied to other cases, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt argued the decision only directly affected the three individuals who brought the case. Merz's coalition partners from the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) called for the impact of the ruling to be examined in detail. While the ruling was not final it needed to be "taken very seriously", the SPD's parliamentary leader Matthias Miersch said at a press conference. "This must now be examined," Miersch said, agreeing with Merz that it had the potential to limit the government's ability to act. Miersch said it was vital to provide "legal certainty" for law enforcement in order for them to do their job well. "We cannot afford to let these issues play out at the expense of police officers," he said. Pushing back undocumented migrants at Germany's borders, including almost all asylum seekers, was one of Merz's key campaign pledges ahead of February elections. That vote saw the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) score its best-ever result of just over 20 percent, and Merz insists that action on migration is the only way to halt the party's growth. But Merz's junior coalition partners, the centre-left SPD, have been uneasy with the crackdown.
