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“The Polish coalition government no longer exists in practice.” Those words come from Kaczynski’s closest man, Ryszard Terlecki, leader of the PIS party group in the Polish sejm.
The fact that Poland has been plunged into a government crisis may seem unexpected. PIS candidate Andrzej Duda won the presidential elections in July, something that, together with a parliamentary majority, should have assured the right-wing coalition three years of calm and political control of the government. But it wasn’t many weeks after this summer’s election victory before cracks in the ruling field began to expose.
The crisis between Kaczynski and the small alliance party Solidarna Polska, led by Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, has become so acute that many are now in favor of a new election, less than a year after the October parliamentary elections. 2019.
Polens justitiem Minister Zbigniew Ziobro.
Photo: Hubert Mathis / TT
It all came to the surface last week when Kaczynski, a committed animal lover, pushed for a law banning fur farming in Poland. Ziobro’s party frowned and voted against. But the law was passed in the Sejm (lower house) with the support of both the Liberal Citizens’ Coalition and the left.
The conflict is basically due to an old duel between Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Ziobro for the leadership of the Polish right.
In the last week, the conflict has escalated. Ziobro didn’t just go against the Animal Welfare Act, a matter of Kaczynski’s heart. More serious was that it also did not support a special law that provides impunity to politicians and officials who violated the law when dealing with the crown pandemic.
In practice, the law applies only Morawiecki. An administrative court in Warsaw ruled that it had made a series of decisions (of course, by order of the leader of the Kaczynski party) to organize a vote by mail in the next presidential elections in May, without any legal basis. Therefore, Morawiecki committed a crime. Behind this verdict is that Ziobro is both Minister of Justice and Attorney General, and therefore controls the judiciary, prosecutors and the politically controlled Ministry of Justice.
The PIS bill was written to save Morawiecki from this legal situation, and Ziobro now saw an opportunity to catch his rival. The problem was that he ended up directly facing Kaczynski, the man who controls the government from behind the scenes.
Everything indicates that Kaczynski fully endorses Morawiecki. This means that Ziobro has been given an ultimatum: either give in or the coalition is broken.
But with that, Kaczynski may have gotten into a corner as well. Your party may try to continue only in government, then in a minority government. The survival of such a government is based on PIS receiving support on crucial issues, whether from Ziobro or from another party. Few believe that Ziobro, if expelled from the government, will continue to support the PIS.
The other parties that can be chosen are the PSL farmers union and the far-right Konfederacja party.
The radical alternative is to call new elections, which is a gamble. So far, PIS has had stable opinion figures of around 36-38 percent, but they are lower than the 44 percent PIS received in the 2019 election that it enjoys since 2015.
Read more:
Fur farming stops create an unholy alliance in Poland
