The incumbent Andrzej Duda won the most votes in Sunday’s Polish presidential election, but fell short of the 50% he needed to win without a second round of voting.

Duda, allied with Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, had received 43.7% of the vote with 99.78% of ballots counted and the liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, was in second place on 30.3%.

The results mean Duda and Trzaskowski will go head to head in a second round a fortnight from now, on 12 July, in a vote that will determine Poland’s political future. Polls before Sunday’s vote suggested a runoff between the two candidates would be too close to call.

Independent candidate Szymon Hołownia was in third place, while the far-right nationalist Krzysztof Bosak was in fourth.

Since coming to power in 2015, PiS has put Poland on a collision course with Brussels over democratic backsliding and rule of law issues. After the party won parliamentary elections last year, a win for Duda would ensure a continued free hand to govern for several more years.

Duda, who had previously not used the homophobic rhetoric common to the more radical parts of the Polish right, appeared to resort to attacks on so-called “LGBT ideology” and its threat to Poland as part of a last-minute attempt to rally the PiS’s conservative base.

He made a pledge to “defend children from LGBT ideology” and compared the LGBT rights agenda to communism. Trzaskowski has been a supporter of LGBT rights during his time as Warsaw’s mayor, but has tried to sidestep the issue during the campaign. Read more via Guardian