Polish voters delivered a surprise heard around the Continent in Sunday’s presidential elections.

Incumbent Bronisław Komorowski not only failed to get his expected outright victory in the first round but lost to Andrzej Duda of the opposition Law and Justice party, according to an exit poll conducted by IPSOS for Poland’s three largest television channels.

The outcome raises a scenario that few in Warsaw or Brussels were prepared to consider seriously this early in Poland’s long 2015 election season: The nearly decade-long dominance of the country’s politics by the Civic Platform may be coming to an end. The party’s candidate Komorowski, who polls showed walking to a victory in the first round, now faces a difficult runoff in two weeks time. The closeness of this presidential race as importantly exposes the vulnerabilities of the ruling party ahead of parliamentary elections this autumn.

The main alternative is Law and Justice. The right-wing party is led by Jaroslaw Kaczyński, a former premier and the surviving twin brother of the late President Lech Kaczyński, who died in an airplane crash in Russia in 2010. In their time in power, the twins were more prickly partners for the EU, in particular Germany, preferring to cultivate closer relations with Washington than Brussels. Duda campaigned on promises to keep Poland out of the euro and lower the retirement age, reflecting his party’s less market-oriented approach to economic policy.

Since taking power in 2007, Civic Platform governments have built a close partnership with Berlin, which Poland has used to secure its position as the EU’s most important eastern country. Donald Tusk, the long-serving prime minister and Civic Platform leader, left Warsaw for Brussels last year to become the president of the European Council. Any change at the presidential palace or the Sejm (parliament) would likely alter Poland’s role in Europe.

Coming into the election, Komorowski, 62, looked unbeatable. Some polls had showed support for him as high as two-thirds of the voters. What even his partisans called a lackluster campaign failed to ignite voter interest and allowed an unexpectedly strong showing by the opposition.

Komorowski took 32.6 percent compared to 34.5 percent for Duda, according to the exit poll. The official count will be released on Tuesday. One caveat is that in past elections Polish exit polls have not always been accurate.

In Sunday’s first round, a significant anti-establishment vote also propelled Paweł Kukiz, a musician and social activist who got 20.5 percent, according to the IPSOS poll. Kukiz campaigned for British-style single member constituencies to replace the current system of party lists common in most other European countries. While electoral reform may seem like an esoteric campaign plank, it fit his call for deeper changes in the way the country is run that tapped into growing discontent with today’s Poland, mostly outside its largest and economically most successful cities.

Speaking to downcast supporters, Komorowski admitted that he will have a “tough fight” to convince Poles disenchanted with the country’s direction to stick the course with him. The Komorowski campaign had hoped that his solid but unexciting presidency would appeal to voters at a time of growing anxiety about Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine and aggressive posture towards the frontline NATO states such as Poland.

Day-to-day the prime minister governs Poland. The president has sway over foreign and defense policy. Komorowski has used that bully pulpit abroad to press for a tougher European response to Russia, as he did in the keynote address at the German Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum in March.

For Komorowski to hold on, he will look to boost turnout above the 49.4 percent on Sunday, among the lowest for any Polish presidential election. Low turnout tends to favor the opposition. He can appeal to the apathetic voters who stayed home — and many of whom expected him to win without their help — by making Duda a stand-in for the divisive Jaroslaw Kaczyński. Duda is a 42-year-old lawyer from Kraków and an MEP who was plucked from the back benches of his party to be the presidential candidate by Kaczyński, the founder of Law and Justice.

Sunday’s result raises the heat on Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz, an uncharismatic former health minister who took over from Tusk, to prepare her party for the parliament vote.

As David Cameron did in his successful reelection campaign in Britain last week, the incumbents in Poland can point to a strong track record in power: Poland has been Europe’s most successful post-communist country, avoiding recession for more than two decades. Its economy is set to expand by 3.3 percent this year, making it one of the fastest growing economies in the EU.

But the causes of disaffection aren’t hard to pinpoint. Unemployment remains high at 11.3 percent. Wages are much lower than in the richer countries of western Europe. Millions have left to seek a better life elsewhere in the EU.

“We are moving forward so that our children can come back from Ireland and England,” Kukiz said in an angry speech in which he denounced the mainstream media as “terrible” and “traitors,” comparing them to communist-era propaganda outlets.

In his speech, Duda made an open appeal to Kukiz’s supporters, whose votes will be crucial when he faces off against Komorowski on May 24. “I’m open to a dialogue with those who supported my counter-candidates,” he told cheering supporters, calling Kukiz a “great patriot.”

Kukiz told Poland’s TVN television that he would not be voting for either candidate in the second round. Aleksander Kwaśniewski, a former president, told Polish television that Kukiz’s voters are much more likely to support Duda than Komorowski.

Magdalena Ogórek, the candidate of the ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance, took 2.4 percent of the vote, a terrible result for a party that had ruled the country for more than four decades under communism and then won power twice under a new name after the end of communism in 1989.

The other left-wing candidate, Janusz Palikot, a vodka magnate turned politician, took 1.5 percent. The two results together are far worse than even the most pessimistic pre-election forecasts for the left.

Kukiz’s strong result shows that there is a large number of people unhappy with the political consensus, but they are not turning to left-wing parties.