Political parties in Poland

Supporters and members of opposition parties take part in a protest against the amendment to the Broadcasting Act in front of the Polish parliament building in Warsaw, Poland, 11 August 2021. EPA-EFE/Piotr Nowak

Fast forward to today and this weekend's congress of Civic Coalition is supposed to be accompanied by the news Tusk will take over leadership of the fledgling coalition that contains the party he once led to two consecutive electoral victories, serving as prime minister from 2007 to 2014.

In May, PiS has attempted to repeat the same trick with a package of measures dubbed the "Polish Deal" (initially the "New Deal"), the most prominent of which are changes to the tax system aimed at benefitting the neediest in society.

He has certainly made the headlines recently. In late March he gave an interview to the far-right weekly Sieci, in which he openly accused the prime minister, his nominal boss, of implementing policies more in tune with the opposition. Mateusz Morawiecki, he said, "is a skilled politician who knows how to convince the PiS leadership to run a policy contradictory to the 2014 agenda".

Ziobro argued that the measures to allow the EU to generate "own resources" for the plan (ie. issue debt) would lead to a further - unacceptable, in his view - erosion of national sovereignty. Also, as the architect of the PiS's controversial justice reforms, he did not like the rule-of-law conditionality that the European Commission has attached to the disbursement of funds from the RRF.

This is a problem for the urban elites in Poland - they have a much more serious opponent than in other European countries.

- Dr Jaroslaw Flis

A few weeks later, after a successful European Council summit, which agreed a compromise solution over the rule-of-law conditionality that EU institutions want to impose on EU funds, Morawiecki was hailing it as a victory for Poland: "Thank you [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orban for our cooperation for the best budget for Poland and the fight to keep the agreed conditions."

Politicians from Poland's governing coalition have fallen back on the typical anti-German tropes to justify the veto.

The resulting public confusion would have guaranteed Duda victory in the first round. But the election did not take place on May 10, owing to a revolt by Agreement, a small party whose leader, Jarosław Gowin, had hitherto been loyal to Kaczyński.

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