Poland’s right-wing opposition party has split after months of infighting over its political direction.
A rift on the right
When Jaroslaw Kaczynski expelled 30 members of his conservative nationalist Law and Justice Party (PiS) including former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki last Friday, he said he had tried to avoid a split and hoped there would be no hard feelings.
“In no case do we want to part with hostility or stronger negative feelings. That is simply how events unfolded,” he said.
Morawiecki said he too had been fighting for unity to the last minute, prompting Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, to remark that “they are fighting so hard for party unity that there won’t be one stone left standing”.
The split is the climax of a months-long internal conflict over the political direction of a party that has been the dominant force on the right of Polish politics for a quarter of a century. Kaczynski’s twin brother Lech was president from 2005 until his death in 2010 and the party has held the presidency again for the past 11 years, first with Andrzej Duda and since last year with Karol Nawrocki.
Law and Justice was in government from 2005 to 2007 and again from 2015 to 2023, when it lost power to Tusk’s Civic Coalition. But it has seen its fortunes tumble since that election as two strong rivals have emerged to its right, attracting the support of about 25 per cent of voters between them.
Law and Justice responded to the threat from the right by doubling down on culture wars against sexual minorities and embracing tougher stances on the European Union and Ukraine. Earlier this year, the party chose hardliner Przemyslaw Czarnek as its preferred candidate for prime minister in advance of next year’s general election.
An economist whose career before politics was in banking, Morawiecki argued against this course, suggesting the party should instead woo centrist voters with a message focused on economic growth. Last April, he set up a stand-alone organisation called Development Plus to promote his agenda, attracting dozens of the party’s legislators in what Kaczynski correctly viewed as a challenge to his authority.
Kaczynski demanded that all Law and Justice legislators should sign a pledge of loyalty, renouncing membership of all other political groups and when Morawiecki and his allies failed to do so by last Thursday’s deadline, they were expelled.
Tusk and his allies have been relishing the opposition party’s travails, with foreign minister Radek Sikorski crowing that “I love PiS so much, I’d love to have two of them”.
It remains to be seen how the split will influence Poland’s political direction in the longer term but its immediate effect will be to push Law and Justice farther to the right. Without Morawiecki and his technocratic allies, there will be fewer voices arguing against a future coalition with the libertarian-right Confederation and the far-right, ethno-nationalist Confederation of the Polish Crown.
Poland is in many ways a great European success story, boasting an economic performance that has outpaced most of the rest of the EU, with average GDP growth of about 3.5 per cent between 2015 and 2025, compared with a euro zone average of 1.3 per cent. It is on course to be the 20th biggest economy in the world by 2028 and it is already the sixth largest in the EU.
It has the third largest military in Nato, after the United States and Turkey, and has served as a crucial logistics hub, transit corridor and arms supplier for Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Three million Ukrainian refugees crossed into Poland in the first few months of the war and the country still hosts almost a million, at a significant economic and social cost.
But this performance and capability is not matched by diplomatic influence and despite Tusk’s experience and connections as a former president of the European Council, Poland punches below its weight in the EU. This owes much to opportunities lost during the period when Law and Justice were in power and Warsaw was in constant conflict with Brussels over rule-of-law issues.
As Poland was growing in economic and military stature, it was excluded from the informal networks of political influence within the EU. And Warsaw’s maximalist position on Russia, a product of its history and geography, has often seen it place more emphasis on its security relationship with Washington than with its European partners.
There has been a shift in recent months, which have seen Warsaw signing new defence pacts with Paris, Berlin and London. But the prospect of a more right-wing Law and Justice party winning next year’s elections, perhaps with more extreme coalition partners, will alarm many of Poland’s friends and neighbours.
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