Poland’s largest opposition party, the Conservatives (PiS), unveiled the former education minister Przemysław Czarnek as its candidate for Prime Minister for the next parliamentary election due in autumn of 2027.
Czarnek told the convention in the city of Kraków at which his candidacy was announced on March 7 that his aim was to free Poland of the centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. He said he wanted to stop the import of South American agricultural produce and to continue to mine coal for energy.
Accepting the nomination, Czarnek set his and the party’s course firmly against European Union policies, promising there would be “no more compromises where Polish interests and independence are concerned”.
Czarnek said he wanted a Poland that protected the family and traditional roles for men and women.
“We want to restore a normal and genuine Poland. A strong state that will protect the normal, ordinary Pole,” he said.
He accused the Tusk government of being an “overt German option” and argued that under his government Poles would be “partners of Germany, but never its servants or slaves”.
Czarnek also criticised EU policies, including the trade deal with the South American Mercosur bloc, which he said that his government would refuse to abide by. He also said he was prepared to confront climate rules by continuing and expanding Poland’s coal industry.
“We have a lot of coal in Poland which it would be, in current circumstances, crazy not to exploit, whatever the EU thinks,” said Czarnek.
PiS will hope it can repeat the success of its presidential election campaigns of 2015 and 2025 when Andrzej Duda and then Karol Nawrocki defied the pollsters and won the presidential elections. Both had started their campaigns at the Kraków venue at which the party announced Czarnek’s prime ministerial campaign.
It is highly unusual for a major party to announce its candidate for PM at such an early stage but the party was in need of a boost following a slide in the polls from being close to 35 per cent to averaging around 25 per cent in the latest batch of opinion polls.
The PiS decision, announced by its leader Jarosław Kaczyński, follows weeks of soul searching by the party. Different factions attempted to persuade the leadership of their claim to the premiership in what, they hope, will be a future government of the Right.
The allies of the former PiS PM Mateusz Morawiecki clashed with those who have criticised his PiS government for taking too conciliatory a stance towards the European Union over issues such as the Green Deal. They have also targeted its allowing through the conditionality mechanism under which the European Commission withheld Poland’s post pandemic funding during the lifetime of the last PiS government.
Morawiecki has defended the record of his government and has made no secret of wanting to have a role in any new administration, especially in setting its economic policy. His allies in the party have at times signalled that if dissatisfied with the course the party is taking they and their favourite could leave and set up one of their own.
Kaczyński, who has over the past decade desisted from seeking either the post of PM or President for himself, had tried to persuade Nawrocki to part with the chief of staff at his chancellery Zbigniew Bogucki. The PiS leader wanted to be the party’s PiS nominee as a compromise choice that could be acceptable to all factions but the President declined.
Kaczyński then turned to Czarnek, a professor of law and a popular charismatic figure in the party. Kaczyński believes he has the most potential to take back support from the two other right-wing parties: The Confederation Party and the Polish Crown Party. Both have gained ground in the polls over the past year at the expense of PiS.
The PiS nomination of Czarnek for PM is viewed by political commentators as a sign that the party is moving rightwards by producing a candidate who will be more acceptable for potential coalition partners on the Right as well as Nawrocki.
Reacting to Czarnek’s elevation, Tusk said Poland now had three parties of the right-wing – PiS, Confederation Party and Grzegorz Braun’s Polish Crown party – with very little difference between them.
Sławomir Mentzen, one of the leaders of the right-wing Confederation Party, said Czarnek’s price for being nominated was that he was “not any longer allowed to criticise the last PiS government”.
In order to discomfort the PiS PM nominee, Mentzen then asked whether Czarnek agreed with what PiS had done with regard to lockdowns during Covid, the acceptance of the EU’s Green Deal by the Morawiecki government and the unconditional support given to Ukraine in 2022.
Czarnek responded with a post on X where he stated he was open to discussing these issues but felt that the need now was to look to the future and “building a responsible government of the Polish Right”.
