The Polish main opposition party, the Conservatives (PiS), which is a close ally of US President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and the nationalist libertarian Confederation party are already looking ahead to being in government after the 2027 elections.
The parties of the Right want to unseat the present centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a fervent advocate of “ever closer union” and “European sovereignty” with regard to defence and security issues.
Despite the differences between them on economic and social matters, PiS and Confederation understand the electoral logic. According to most opinion polls published in Poland there is no chance of either forming a government on its own and there may be need even for another party, either the nationalist Catholic Confederation of the Polish Crown led by Grzegorz Braun or the centre-right Polish People’s Party (PSL).
Both PiS and Confederation will have noted how the last majority PiS government got into conflict with the EU’s top brass, ending up having Polish EU funds withheld and losing several cases before the European Court of Justice. In that dispute PiS lacked powerful allies within the EU who might have come to its aid.
This is why as the election approaches the Polish Right is looking towards potential allies in Europe for its government, therefore last week’s visit by Jordan Bardella, the likely presidential candidate of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), during which he met with PiS, the Confederation party, as well as with the opposition aligned President Karol Nawrocki, was significant.
With his mentor Marine Le Pen battling a five-year ban from public office for allegedly misspending European Parliamentary funds, the 31-year-old Bardella has spent the past year projecting views on the economy, NATO, on Russia calculated to look presidential rather than just an insurgent.
Before his June 18-19 trip to Poland, Bardella made clear that he was not interested in any moves to take his or any other countries out of the EU.
“We do not intend to leave the European Union. We want to change everything without destroying anything.”
According to the Polish President’s aides, Bardella’s meeting with Nawrocki focused on security issues and “the role of sovereign states in the European Union”.
The PiS allied Nawrocki has repeatedly called for reform of the EU so that it becomes a body in which member states remain sovereign and the power of EU institutions is constrained.
Bardella made clear he sees Poland as a potential future partner in reforming the EU saying that, “Poland is today an indispensable country for building the new European architecture that we fervently desire, founded on strength, border protection, and economic growth.”
The French RN leader hopes that, should he win the French Presidential election next spring, he would be able to work with a right-wing Polish government and the Italian right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni, which is facing a battle for re-election next autumn, to bring about fundamental change within the EU.
In a meeting with the PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński, Bardella said that if he becomes president and PiS returns to power, “our two movements will have the opportunity to reshape the functioning of the EU” by preventing migration and rolling back environmental policies.
During PiS’s time in office, it sought close ties with leaders of the European nationalist Right including Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
Interestingly, Bardella was actually invited to Poland not by PiS but by the leader of the nationalist wing of the Confederation Party, Krzysztof Bosak, a politician who together with his party, like the RN, is attempting to move its nationalist ideas into the mainstream of politics rather than remaining on the radical fringe.
Some of Confederation’s founders such as the libertarian conservative Janusz Korwin-Mikke and Grzegorz Braun MEP were once the leading lights in pushing Poland towards attempting to leave the EU.
However, both Korwin-Mikke and Braun have left the party and operate together within Braun’s Confederation of the Polish Crown party which supports Poland leaving the EU, opposes military help to Ukraine and believes that Jews have exaggerated the scale of the Holocaust to further their own interests.
Both Bosak and Sławomir Mentzen, the leader of the libertarian wing of Confederation do not want to go down the road of proposing Poland leave the EU nor the alleged anti-Semitism coming out of Braun’s party.
Their political moves are aimed at winning over young voters interested in reducing both the tax burden and the role of the state in the economy, whereas Braun’s party concentrates on national and religious issues.
Bardella likewise is keen to maintain the RN’s drive towards broadening its electoral base.
In an effort to stress how the current RN disassociates itself from past charges of anti-Semitism, Bardella also visited the memorial to the heroes of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and called the fighters a “universal symbol of courage and human dignity”.
However the Confederation Party’s Bosak, who has distanced himself from anti-Semitism, still wants to compete with Braun for the votes of those who are sceptical of the high levels of Ukrainian migration into Poland and who see Ukraine more as a threat rather than an opportunity.
Speaking alongside Bardella at a press conference in parliament, Bosak said that one of the issues they had agreed on is to “jointly oppose Ukraine’s accession to the EU” because “Ukraine fails to meet EU standards and creates completely unfair economic competition for sectors that are crucial to our countries.” Bosak meant agriculture and road haulage.
In a statement posted to X after meeting with Bardella, Bosak also said that the Polish and French Right “demand a full opt-out from the migration pact, with no relocation quotas and no fines for refusing them; wants the EU–Mercosur trade deal scrapped; wants what it calls the European Court of Justice’s ‘dictate’ ended, with national constitutions restored as supreme law; and wants the European Commission itself stripped of its political role and replaced by direct cooperation between sovereign governments.”
This was fully compatible with Bardella’s recent interview in which he told readers that “what the European Union stands for — globalisation, powerful open markets, uncontrolled immigration, economic decline, and excessive regulation — is profoundly outdated. So we must change the way the European Union functions.”
The French leader also made a point of visiting the Polish-Belarus border at which he praised Poland’s determined defence of that frontier and said that this should be an example for the whole of the EU to follow.
Since 2021, Belarus has assisted tens of thousands of illegal migrants mainly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa in attempting to cross into the EU illegally over that border, prompting successive Polish governments to bolster security there.
While Marine Le Pen has in the past made friendly comments towards Russia, Bardella made clear during his visit that “Russia and its Belarusian proxy” are engineering the migration crisis as part of a “hybrid war against Europe”.
“By defending one of Europe’s outer borders, Poland is in fact defending the whole of European civilisation, protecting our values and our identities, in the face of one of the greatest threats of the 21st century,” he declared.
By rejecting the Brexit road chosen by the British right and acknowledging the problems encountered by Viktor Orbán in Hungary that led to his defet, Bardella and his host Bosak seemed to be looking towards the political positioning adopted by Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni who, in order to avoid conflict with Brussels, has embraced fiscal discipline and deregulation and opposed Russia, but maintained embraced a distinctly conservative posture on culture and migration.
Bosak and his Confederation Party want to become acceptable to voters who may dislike Brussels but feel leaving the EU would be too radical.
However PiS, who wish to retain the status of the main party of the Right, while it may wish to demonstrate that it has potentially strong allies internationally to change the EU, remains committed to its alliance with the US Republicans and President Trump and strongly suspicious of Germany.
PiS, who in the European Parliament is allied with Giorgia Meloni rather than Bardella’s RN, is the party which has suffered the most from Braun’s radical insurgency rather than Confederation. In order to get those voters back onside it has made its messaging on the EU and Ukraine.
With such divergent voices and strategies on the Polish Right, President Nawrocki’s main focus is to ensure that the Right as a whole gets a parliamentary majority as only in that situation will he be able to become the matchmaker and midwife to a right-wing government that might back his quest for a presidential model of government in Poland.
Bardella does not have to dream about a presidential government. He has to win the election in order to have it and exercise it, but will need international allies to have a chance of making his vision of the EU a reality.
His visit and the Polish Right’s response indicate that both understand that they need to hang together so that they don’t hang separately.
