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Poland’s main opposition party is gearing up for a battle over whether to replace its founder and leader whose political fightback against pro-EU Prime Minister Donald Tusk has alienated many voters.
Jarosław Kaczyński’s rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) party has obstructed Tusk’s attempt to overhaul Polish institutions, with the help of a PiS-aligned president and constitutional court, but the prime minister’s coalition has continued to gain public support.
The gap between Tusk’s victorious coalition and PiS has widened to more than 25 per cent since the government took office in December, according to recent opinion polls.
That setback for the opposition has prompted internal discussions about whether the 74-year-old Kaczyński should retire. His leadership will be subject to “a verification process” at next year’s party congress, according to former PiS deputy premier Jacek Sasin.
Within the Tusk-led coalition, officials are watching their rivals’ disarray with relish. “There is now an internal fight for the PiS leadership, the outcome is uncertain but I can tell you that PiS will never again win elections with Kaczyński,” deputy prime minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said. “I’m sure that Kaczyński knows this and the people around him also.”
Since Tusk took office, Kaczyński has accused the prime minister of ordering jailed politicians to be tortured, breaching the constitutional order and treating the rule of law like Hitler did. He has also called for the ousting of Tusk by “various methods”, prompting the premier to suggest that Kaczyński might be considering a coup.
While senior party officials insist their leader will only leave on his own terms, former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki told Polish radio station Zet last month that he stood ready to replace Kaczyński when the time came.
With local elections due in April, followed by a vote to elect Polish members of the European parliament in June, Morawiecki will lead the PiS campaigns, he told the FT. The former PM said that Tusk’s reform drive had “united the [PiS] party a lot”.
Morawiecki said that the tens of thousands of PiS supporters who attended an anti-Tusk protest in January were “the first signals of a nation that is unhappy”.
Tusk, however, hopes that the two sets of elections will show that Poles support his reform agenda, including the removal from state institutions of PiS loyalists.
The PM has already seized on his coalition’s rise in the polls and threatened to call snap elections if President Andrzej Duda, a PiS nominee, continues to block his legislation. Tusk also said Kaczyński was “very, very lost” and in denial about his party losing power.
Politicians in Tusk’s coalition believe that the longer Kaczyński stays in charge, the more he will become a liability for his party. The next PiS leader will need to connect with the younger generation, which helped Tusk’s coalition oust PiS last October after eight years in power.
“There are some people who can be ready in a couple of years to be leaders of a new populist rightwing party,” said parliamentary speaker Szymon Hołownia, who leads the Poland 2050 party within Tusk’s coalition. “If you want to see who can be the next ultra-populist leader in Poland, just look at Przemysław Czarnek: we have our own little Trump already now.”
Czarnek, 46 and a former education minister, told the FT that he found the “little Trump” label “actually nice”, although he preferred to be a “normal-sized Przemysław Czarnek than a little Trump or anyone else”. He called Trump “a great politician . . . who cares about ordinary people, not just the elite”.
Mirroring the exaggerations of the former US president, Czarnek told a recent rally that Tusk led an “invasion of savage communists” when his coalition came to power.
As for Kaczyński, Czarnek projected another “10 years of political activity at the highest level”. People who call the PiS founder “the old leader”, he said, should instead “look at the world, especially the US”.
