FIRST Israel, then Britain, and now Poland: lately it seems pollsters cannot get anything right. The Polish presidential elections were once expected to result in a smooth first-round victory for Bronisław Komorowski, the incumbent, who is backed by the ruling centre-right Civic Platform party (PO). Over the course of the campaign his ratings slipped, suggesting that although he was still leading the pack, he would face a second-round runoff against his main rival, Andrzej Duda (pictured) of the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS). Yet as exit polls began filtering in on the evening of May 10th, it became clear that the surveys had all been wrong: Mr Duda had come in first.

No champagne corks popped at the president’s election-night event at Warsaw’s national stadium. Within 15 minutes of the final exit-poll announcement, Mr Komorowski had left the room. His supporters shuffled around the coffee machines, wondering what had gone wrong. As of mid-afternoon the next day, with 27 of 51 districts reporting their official results, Mr Duda had 36.7% of the votes, with Mr Komorowski at 31.9%.

At a campaign event two days before the election, Mr Komorowski dismissed the right-wing PiS, which gained a reputation for erratic politics during its sole term in power from 2005 to 2007. Poles know that “Poland doesn’t benefit from excesses, experiments and political extravagances,” he scoffed. After Sunday's results, he may be less sure. The election lacked urgency, with voters expecting a second round anyway. The newly confident Mr Duda, who greeted the result Sunday night flanked by his wife and daughter, is a 42-year-old lawyer from Kraków who was virtually unknown when his candidacy was announced last autumn. But the striking thing is not that Mr Duda's support rose so high—he only modestly bettered his party's approval rating of about 30%—but that Mr Komorowski's support fell so low.

Mr Komorowski veered too far left, says Roman Giertych, former leader of the radical-right League of Polish Families, who served as deputy prime minister in the PiS-led government in 2006-2007 and now works with the president. Yet style rather than content may have been the weakness of Mr Komorowski’s campaign. Many thought the president had grown complacent; he was the only one of 11 candidates to shun a televised debate the week before the election. Mr Komorowski is better at being president than at running for president, one political analyst quipped.

The most striking performance of all was that of Paweł Kukiz, a 51-year-old former rock musician who ran as an independent, courting voters fed up with the system. The partial results Monday afternoon gave him a whopping 21%; a poll suggested his support among people aged 18-29 may have been twice that high. (The two left-wing candidates received a combined 4%.) “We have already won, without money, without [party] structures,” shouted Mr Kukiz from the stage at his event in Lubin, a city of 75,000 in western Poland. Speculation quickly turned to which of the two top candidates Mr Kukiz's supporters will back in the runoff, but he declined to endorse either one, saying the votes cast for him “are not my property”. PiS is courting him: in his post-election speech Mr Duda called Mr Kukiz a “great patriot”, adding that he is open to the musician's key campaign demand of shifting from a parliamentary system of party-list candidates to one of single-member constituencies.

Mr Komorowski's campaign tried to tie Mr Duda, who styles himself as a moderate conservative, to the PiS's party leader Jaroslaw Kaczyński, a more divisive right-wing figure. That appears not to have worked, and Mr Duda’s success could boost PiS in the general election this autumn. Mr Duda's popularity and centrist image could also cause ripples within the PiS, possibly creating a leadership challenge for Mr Kaczyński.

For the most part, though, Sunday's results are a wake-up call for PO, which has held power since 2007. It is trying to reassure supporters that the worrisome first-round results will not be repeated in the second round on May 24th, or in the parliamentary elections this autumn. “We guarantee that we will win in two weeks’ time,” said Ewa Kopacz, the prime minister. Earlier polls suggested that Mr Komorowski would beat Mr Duda in a run-off. Yet for the first time, a win for Mr Duda now seems, if not likely, at least conceivable.