WARSAW, Poland » Sitting quietly in the bustle of the campus cafe, Daria Zysk paused to find just the right words to explain why she had voted for a presidential candidate whose party’s right-wing policies did not match her own views.

"Young people are completely tired of the situation in Poland," said Zysk, a 21-year-old political science major. "This endless political war between the two main parties that never produces anything. They want change. I want change."

In the recent election for the Polish presidency, a largely ceremonial office, the incumbent, who was allied with the party that governed Poland during eight years of prosperity was trounced by a much more conservative and little-known opponent.

Almost lost in the surprise was the greatest source of the right-wing challenger’s support: not Poland’s conservative, churchgoing older people, but its young population.

About 60 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 supported the challenger, Andrzej Duda, 43, whose media-savvy, American-style campaign made the more staid approach of the incumbent Bronislaw Komorowski, 62, feel a bit creaky. Five years ago, 54 percent of young voters chose Komorowski.

Of those who cast ballots for the first time, the great majority of whom had come of voting age since the last election five years ago, 67 percent backed Duda, according to Polish election officials.

Coming just a week after Ireland legalized same-sex marriage and on the same day that Spain shifted sharply to the left in local and regional elections – results driven heavily by young voters – Poland and its youth seemed like cultural outliers, turning right when everyone else was going left.

But that may be a misreading of the results, political analysts, cultural historians and many young voters say.

Disenchanted and alienated young Poles may not have veered right so much as they embraced a trend that young voters share across much of Europe: A fierce rejection of whatever happens to be the current political order, whether left or right.

"Something very serious has happened during these last elections," said Kazimierz Kik, a professor of political science at the Polish Academy of Sciences. "They reflect a phenomenon that has become increasingly visible across the continent, and especially in southern Europe – a wave of political negation, a rejection of the whole political establishment."

A surge in new voters, most of them young, was crucial to the passage of a same-sex marriage referendum in Ireland. Young voters flocking to protest parties like Podemos drove Spain’s political shift, as they had earlier ones in Greece and Italy.

Even in Britain, where the conservative incumbent David Cameron won another term as prime minister, a rise in young voters in the north was credited with propelling the Scottish National Party’s rout of the Labour Party, the traditional home for left-leaning voters in Scotland.

In Poland, even though the election pitted two conservatives against each other, Duda seized upon his status as the challenger to position himself to more socially liberal voters as the candidate most likely to overturn the status quo.

"Poles crave change," Kik said. "They didn’t shift to the right as much as the results of the election seem to indicate. There just was no viable candidate on the left for them to vote for."

If this political disenchantment among young European voters persists, analysts predict the rise of many more third parties along the lines of Podemos in Spain and the National Front in France – parties on different ends of the political spectrum that share only a sharp rejection of the traditional political order.

Michael Poplawski, 21, who is studying finance and accounting at the University of Warsaw, described himself as an ardent supporter of capitalism and said he decided, in the end, to support Komorowski.

But he knows many of his fellow students rejected the president.

"I think it was mostly a protest vote," he said. "A rejection of the current president and the ruling party, which made many promises in the last election but failed to keep them."

The key, Poplawski said – and many political analysts agree – was the surprising rise of a third-party challenge by a well-known rock star, Pawel Kukiz.

In the first round of voting, in early May, no candidate got over 50 percent, setting up a second round between Komorowski and Duda. But in that first round, Kukiz assembled a coalition of angry retirees, rowdy anarchists and disaffected youth that drew 20 percent of the vote, stunning the Polish elite.

In the second round, it was Duda who won most of those Kukiz voters even though the platform of his party, Law and Justice, had virtually no correlation to the grab-bag of changes that Kukiz had proposed.

"Duda presented himself very successfully as the person who represented change," said Andrzej Rychard, a sociologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. "Kukiz was the first to recognize that there was something new in the air, this anti-establishment energy, and Duda was able to capitalize on it."

Rychard said that what he found most interesting about the coalition that Duda assembled to win the presidency was that it mixed two large groups of dissatisfied voters: older ones, who struggle to make do with their pensions and think the pace of market-based overhaul has gone too far, and younger ones, who hunger for more jobs, faster growth and believe the changes have not gone nearly far enough.

"How long he will be able to keep these two groups integrated, well, that is an open question," Rychard said.

In the fall, Poland will hold parliamentary elections that will result in the choice of a prime minister, a far more powerful position here than president. Kukiz has vowed to mount a fresh, third-party effort in that race, and other groups are circling around the idea of forming new parties, sensing an opportunity to break the stranglehold the two major parties have had on Polish politics.

Similar third-party insurgencies are brewing in many European countries, loosening and perhaps unraveling the stranglehold of some traditional, longstanding parties.

Adam Lewanski, 24, who is finishing a master’s degree in diplomacy at the University of Warsaw, said he thought that Duda won because the opposition choose a fresh face as its standard-bearer, offering young people a chance to vote for generational change. Duda was the first presidential candidate from Poland’s post-communist generation.

Whether Duda will still attract voters to the opposition in the fall, when older, more familiar party figures are standing for office, Lewanski is not so sure.

"Let’s face it," he said. "Both parties are really right wing, one is perhaps just a bit more right wing. So this attempt to create a Polish-Polish war between them, painting them as very different, is becoming more and more of a joke to Polish young people."

Rick Lyman, New York Times