“Over 30 delegates of our group have effectively forfeited their membership,” Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, said on Friday. He’s accusing Poland‘s former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, as well as dozens of his followers, of attempting to split the party.
“We couldn’t accept that,” Kaczynski continued. “It’s all done.” For their part, the rebels alleged they have not resigned but been “expelled.”
A three-hour “last chance” talk between Kaczynski and Morawiecki ended on Thursday without results. “We were looking for understanding, but couldn’t accept subjugation,” Piotr Mueller, an EU delegate close to Morawiecki, later said about the talks on X.
The ultimatum that Kacynski had placed on rebel party members ended at midnight. By then, they were expected to deliver a written declaration that they would refrain from activities in the Rozwoj Plus (Development Plus) association led by Morawiecki. In Kaczynski’s view, the breakaway association has undermined his party’s primacy.
“I’m not signing any loyalty pledge,” Morawiecki told the Polish television station TVN. “That’s something one might have required of me in the 1980s,” he added, alluding to his persecution for his father’s prominent opposition to the regime at the time.
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For a quarter of a century, Kaczynski and his PiS party have dominated the right wing of Poland’s party landscape. Any attempt to establish a new, more radical right was successfully quashed. Since 2001, PiS has been in power twice, from 2005-2007 and again from 2015-2023, and has occupied the office of state president with Kaczynski’s twin brother, Lech, then Andrzej Duda and — since mid-2025 — Karol Nawrocki.
Greatest crisis since party’s founding
Just over a year before the next parliamentary election, the party is facing its greatest crisis since it got its start in 2001.
By now, two parties have established themselves to the right of PiS: the far-right nationalist and libertarian alliance Confederation Liberty and Independence (KWIN), and the extreme right-wing, ultranationalist, traditionalist Confederation of the Polish Crown (KKP). Taken together, they enjoy more support in the polls than the PiS party alone. Kaczynski’s party has lost many voters to these two radical groups.
To win them back, Kaczynski has pushed his party ever further to the right. In March, he nominated Przemyslaw Czarnek, the ultraconservative, ultra-Catholic former minister of education and science, as the party’s lead candidate for the 2027 parliamentary election. Morawiecki and his followers have called the move a fundamental mistake.
Two lungs or one fist?
Czarnek is trying to outflank the two confederation parties from the right with verbal attacks against the EU and Ukraine. In the recent Polish-Ukrainian dispute over unresolved historical issues, Czarnek called for all military aid to Ukraine to be halted until Kyiv changed its position. Supporters of this hard line have said the party should act “like a fist.”
Morawiecki responded to his party’s shift to the right by launching the political association Development Plus. He’s invited 1,000 guests from various political backgrounds to a policy event in late July, where they can discuss the country’s future over a barbecue.
The former prime minister has been traveling up and down the country to speak with local politicians and businesses. As early as April, he clashed with Kaczynski, who accused him of threatening the party’s unity. At the time, however, the party head gone along with Morawiecki’s efforts and spoke of “two lungs” within the PiS party. That compromise did not hold long.
Reaching out to new voters
At public appearances, Morawiecki has repeatedly emphasized that he intends to remain within the PiS party. His goal, he said, was to open the party to new voters, to ensure that right-wing conservatives returned to power in 2027.
Just a few days ago, Morawiecki could count on the support of 40 members of Poland’s lower house of parliament, the Sejm, and several EU delegates. But it’s currently unclear whether all will be able to withstand Kaczynski’s pressure.
Opinion polls conducted by Opinia24 for the Polish channels TVN and TVN24 on July 22 gave Morawiecki 6.2% of the vote, while support for PiS dropped to 17.7%. In the 2023 parliamentary election, the PiS party under Kaczynski won 35% of the vote.
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Out of all of Kaczynski’s longtime associates who have worked with him since the 1990s, Morawiecki is still considered an outsider. Following Poland’s democratic transition, the trained historian held leading positions in several banks before joining the PiS party in 2016.
Under PiS party rule he served as development minister and finance minister, and finally prime minister. Morawiecki and his associates have accused their opponents of orchestrating a plot against them.
Gloating among the governing coalition
The center-right governing coalition under current Prime Minister Donald Tusk has made no secret of its amusement with the PiS party’s current predicament. “I love PiS so much, I’d love to have two of them,” Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski joked when he heard the news..
Political scientist Danuta Plecka said Friday that the situation was like “a gift” to the ruling government. “All the scandals of recent months are now fading into the background,” she explained. “Tusk doesn’t have to do anything, he can just sit by the riverbank and wait for the bodies to float by.”
However, University of Gdansk researcher believes the conflict between Kaczynski and Morawiecki may be a staged performance. “There are hardly and programmatic differences between the two,” she told TVN. “The main difference between them is in the language and political tactics.”
She believes Morawiecki is meant to win over voters who lean more toward the political center. Then, after the election, both groups could work together, Plecka predicted.
This article was originally written in German.
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