The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) Party has selected Adam Bielan MEP as President of the grouping, at a congress held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on September 12.
The ECR brings together parties that emphasise, among other things, the importance of nation states, fiscal responsibility, security and the competitiveness of the European economy, including Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, the Sweden Democrats and the Romanian Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR).
It is one of three European groupings of the right in the European Parliament (EP), with Patriots for Europe and Europe of Sovereign Nations, who are all in opposition to the coalition of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and the liberal Renew Europe groups which holds a majority in the EP.
In its statement, the ECR presented Bielan’s election as part of an effort to strengthen the ECR Party at a time of growing interest in a conservative political alternative across European countries.
The ECR said that Bielan’s presidency will focus on strengthening cooperation between conservative parties, expanding the ECR’s European political family and building a political alternative based on the sovereignty of nation states, security and economic competitiveness.
The priorities are also said to include protecting European identity and strengthening the position of conservative forces in the debate over the future of the European Union.
Following his selection, Adam Bielan stressed that taking over as President of the ECR Party was both an honour and a responsibility. He also pledged to continue strengthening the European conservative movement and defending the sovereignty of member states.
“It is a great honour and responsibility to lead the ECR Party. Our political family is growing because more and more people across Europe want a change in the direction of the European Union. We want to strengthen the conservative movement, defend the sovereignty of our nations and build a Europe that is secure, competitive and confident in its identity,” he said.
Bielan said the ECR’s main goal under his leadership would be to make gains in the next European Parliament elections, which are due to be held in 2029.
“We are currently the fourth-largest group in the European Parliament in terms of the number of MEPs. We want to be an even larger group after the elections,” he told the Polish state news agency PAP.
He also pointed to the run of national elections facing ECR member parties, beginning with Sweden’s the following day. That result offered the group little comfort. With 94 per cent of ballots counted, the Sweden Democrats had taken 17.6 per cent, down from 20.5 per cent in 2022, falling behind the Moderates into third place, while the centre-left opposition bloc led the governing coalition by 176 seats to 173. The final count is not expected until later this week.
Bielan also stressed that the ECR wants to play a greater role in shaping Europe’s future believing that the EU is in need of deep change.
“Today, we see that many EU citizens are recognizing what we have been warning about for years, including the enormous costs of poorly designed climate policies and the problems linked to migration. […] Together with our member parties and partners, we are ready to take greater responsibility for Europe’s future,” he said.
Poland’s PiS, of which Bielan is a member and head of that party’s delegation within the ECR, was together with the British Conservative Party one of the founding members of the ECR in 2009, when both broke away from the EPP. Bielan was among the signatories of the Prague Declaration that created the group, a point he made after his election.
But it is the Brothers of Italy Party led by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni which is currently the largest party inside the ECR with 24 MEPs, ahead of PiS on 17. The group as a whole puts its strength at 84 members from 18 member states.
Meloni was the head of the ECR Party before agreeing, as part of a deal to keep PiS inside the ECR, to make way for former PiS PM Mateusz Morawiecki to head the party after the 2024 EP elections. She stood down in December 2024, saying the party deserved a full-time president, and proposed Morawiecki herself; he was elected by acclamation the following month.
Morawiecki resigned as President of the ECR on July 28 after he, along with around 40 Polish MPs, one senator and three MEPs, broke with PiS and formed a new association, Rozwój Plus (Development Plus), which is positioning itself on the centre-right of Polish politics. He stepped down the same day he was expelled from PiS over the association, and Italian MEP Carlo Fidanza served as acting president until the Dubrovnik congress. Morawiecki has said the grouping will register as a political party by October 15.
The former Polish PM decided that since he was elected to the position of President of the ECR because of support from PiS he could no longer serve in that post having left the party. He said the role had been allotted to the second-largest party within the ECR and that his own delegation would not qualify.
It remains to be seen whether Morawiecki along with his new political grouping will stay within the ECR. Thus far the three MEPs who are associated with him — Michał Dworczyk, Piotr Müller and Waldemar Buda — have remained as members of the ECR caucus in the EP. In early September the three formally applied to set up their own Rozwój Plus delegation inside the group, chaired by Müller, having left the PiS delegation in late August.
PiS remains Poland’s largest opposition grouping, despite a slide in its opinion poll ratings and emerging competition on the right from the Confederation Party, Grzegorz Braun MEP’s Confederation of the Polish Crown and Morawiecki’s new grouping.
Recent surveys put the party between 15 and 22 per cent, with Confederation at around 13 to 15 per cent, Braun’s party just below 10 per cent and Morawiecki’s grouping at or just below the electoral threshold of 5 per cent. A CBOS poll published on September 11 gave PiS 15 per cent, its weakest showing since the 2023 election, with Confederation 0.2 points behind on 14.8 per cent. This represents a marked decline in PiS ratings as the party polled 35 per cent in the parliamentary election in 2023 when it came in ahead of Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO) but lost power to a coalition of centrists and the Left that the present PM Tusk was able to cobble together.
After the PiS candidate Karol Nawrocki managed to win the presidential election in 2025 the party was still polling above 30 per cent in opinion polls but the slide in its poll ratings has been caused by a mixture of complacency, internal wrangling over the choice of candidate for prime minister in the 2027 election and Tusk using the defeat in the presidential election to marginalise and discipline his coalition partners.
Adam Bielan, the PiS MEP who has replaced Morawiecki in the post of President of the ECR as a result of a decision taken by the ECR’s Board of Directors on September 12, is a close associate of PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński, but is seen as being on the more moderate wing of that party when compared with the former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro or PiS’s candidate for Prime Minister in the 2027 parliamentary election Przemysław Czarnek, named by Kaczyński in March.
The new President of the ECR who had been a PiS MEP since 2004 left the party in 2010 after disagreements about the party’s direction following a presidential election the party lost in that year. He was one of the founding members of a break-away Poland Comes First (PJN) grouping that stood a separate slate in the 2011 parliamentary elections and failed to make it into Parliament.
Bielan left the PJN even before the election and began his long way back into PiS’s orbit. He joined a centre-right party founded by Jarosław Gowin, the leader of the conservative wing of Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO) who broke away from that party over its drift to the left in 2013 and formed an electoral coalition with PiS in 2014.
Gowin’s party split in 2021 with Bielan forming a break-away grouping, the Republican Party, which remained in coalition with PiS and after the 2023 parliamentary elections it merged with the much larger PiS in December that year.
By that time Bielan was a close ally of Kaczyński with whom he had worked closely to split Gowin’s party and to bring about the merger. He played an important role in promoting Karol Nawrocki, the successful candidate backed by PiS in the 2025 presidential election and has close links with the US Republican Party, the ECR’s partner formation in the United States.
Bielan takes the helm of the ECR at a time of significant change on Europe’s political scene in the run-up to the 2029 EP elections in which the right hopes to deprive the ruling coalition of its majority.
The grouping is also involved in rivalry with Patriots for Europe and Europe of Sovereign Nations group for members and influence in the EP and European politics in general.
The ECR’s position under both Meloni and Morawiecki has been to stress the need for reform of the EU in the direction of giving back powers to the member states.
Patriots for Europe, founded in June 2024 by former Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán with Austria’s Herbert Kickl and the Czech Andrej Babiš and joined weeks later by French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen, whose National Rally provides its largest delegation, wants to move in the same direction but is more hostile to the EPP than have been Meloni and Morawiecki, whereas the Europe of Sovereign Nations grouping pivots towards arguing for a new, much looser organisation of sovereign states to replace the EU. Patriots for Europe is the third-largest group in the EP, one place above the ECR.
Bielan and the party he represents, PiS, seem more willing to confront the EU establishment than is the case with Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and did seriously consider moving across to the Patriots for Europe grouping, but differences of view over Russia proved difficult to bridge.
Both PiS and Meloni have backed Ukraine in the war whereas parties inside the Patriots for Europe movement are sceptical about backing Ukraine and its bid for EU membership.
The parties within the Patriots for Europe group also have some sympathy with Russia’s opposition to cultural liberalism and support for Christianity even if they do not support Russia’s territorial ambitions and repression of internal opposition.
Bielan will have to steer a course which will keep Meloni and PiS happy inside one grouping while maintaining good relations with other right-wing groupings.
But it may be future tactics towards and relations with the EP’s largest parliamentary grouping, the EPP, which may cause the ECR greatest problems as the European parliamentary elections draw ever closer.
