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Eight years of Law and Justice (PiS) rule has left a deep mark on Poland, combining generous social policies with nationalism and an increasingly conservative social agenda. Its governments clashed with the European Union over the rule of law, restricted abortion rights and turned LGBTQ+ issues into a political battleground. Now, after losing power, PiS is struggling with a different problem - its own future. In July 2026, the party’s leader Jarosław Kaczyński expelled three dozen sitting MPs, effectively splitting the party.
PiS-aligned Karol Nawrocki’s razor-thin victory in Poland’s 2025 presidential election should have been a triumph for Law and Justice. Nawrocki’s victory seemed to prove that the party could return to power in the 2027 parliamentary election. Party leaders treated the result as evidence that PiS was still strong enough to win on its own. But his success was not gained with the votes of PiS supporters alone.
The victory did not produce the political revival PiS had hoped for. Instead of rising in the polls, the party soon found itself caught up in internal conflicts, while Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition began gaining support despite the government' s failure to deliver several of its key election promises.
The boost PiS expected after Nawrocki’s victory never came. Its support fell from around 32 percent in September 2025 to about 20 percent in August 2026, while Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform climbed to around 32 percent. More importantly, PiS was beginning to lose its old position as the natural home of almost every voter on the right.
PiS Losing its Monopoly on the Right
Conservative voters who wanted to defeat Donald Tusk and his liberal camp had few realistic alternatives. Smaller right-wing parties existed, but PiS was the only one capable of winning national elections and forming a government.
This is no longer the case. The change began with the rise of Konfederacja (Confederation). This right-wing party has grown into an independent political force, particularly among younger voters. Its co-leader Sławomir Mentzen has built a large following on social media, presenting himself as a politician from outside the old political establishment. His message combines low taxes and hostility towards state regulation with opposition to migration, criticism of the European Union and increasingly sceptical views on support for Ukraine.
Parts of Confederation also have close political ties with Germany’s AfD. Some of its MEPs sit alongside Germany’s AfD in the European Parliament, and the similarities are easy to see: a hard line on migration, attacks on EU climate policy and opposition to the Green Deal.
The relationship between the two parties is therefore both competitive and dependent. PiS wants to weaken Confederation, but may need its MPs to form a government after the 2027 election. Confederation, meanwhile, has little reason to return to the role of a junior force on the right. Mentzen has openly rejected cooperation with Kaczyński under the current conditions, while some PiS politicians have acknowledged that cooperation between the parties may eventually be necessary.
For many young Poles, PiS simply feels out-dated. Mentzen offers something new – short videos on TikTok instead of long boring political speeches, jokes and provocation instead of party language, and easy answers on taxes, bureaucracy and migration. In the first round of the 2025 presidential election, around 35 percent of voters aged 18–29 chose Mentzen.
This political shift is further defined by a stark gender divide: young women have increasingly aligned with the Left - a trend accelerated by the 2020 mass protests against abortion restrictions - whereas young men have become a core constituency for Confederation. The difference is visible in election results: in the 2023 parliamentary election, Confederation won 9.3 percent among men but only 3.4 percent among women, while the Left performed significantly better among women.
To win back voters attracted to Confederation, PiS can move further to the right on migration, Ukraine and cultural issues. But doing so risks pushing away more moderate conservatives.
This divide is also economic: young men are more attracted to Mentzen’s promises of lower taxes and deregulation, while young women tend to place greater emphasis on public services, affordable housing and social security. Confederation has also successfully appealed to young men who feel that their problems, from military service to the higher retirement age for men, are largely ignored by mainstream politics. This suggests that the political rebellion of Poland’s younger generation is moving in two very different directions.
For Kaczynski, Mentzen is not the only problem. Further to the right, Grzegorz Braun is building his own, even more radical movement. Braun himself won 6.3 percent in the presidential election.
Braun has built much of his support on growing anti-Ukrainian sentiment. Political scientist Rafał Chwedoruk argues that fear of Poland being drawn into the war has fueled these attitudes and created a competition on the right over who can take the toughest position on Ukraine. In his view, PiS first lost some of these voters to Confederation and later to Braun, particularly in traditionally conservative south-eastern Poland.
This creates a difficult choice for PiS. To win back voters attracted to Confederation, the party can move further to the right on migration, Ukraine and cultural issues. But doing so risks pushing away more moderate conservatives. At the same time, copying the Confederation narrative may only strengthen its arguments. Because if voters want a more radical anti-establishment right, why should they choose PiS rather than the politicians who already represent it.
The President that Kaczyński Cannot Control
Yet perhaps the most surprising rival came from much closer to home. And the competitor is Nawrocki himself. After entering the presidential race as a relatively unknown candidate, he quickly became one of the most important figures on the Polish right.
Nawrocki’s position is unusual. He was never a member of PiS, even though during elections he was backed by the party and openly admitted voting for it. This was partly the point. When PiS chose him as its presidential candidate, Kaczyński presented him as an independent figure who could reach beyond the party’s traditional electorate.
But after winning the election, this independence became much more important. Nawrocki has an electoral mandate, the visibility that comes with the presidency and, crucially, the power to veto legislation. During his first year in office, he used that power frequently, vetoing a record number of 41 laws and putting himself at the centre of the conflict with Donald Tusk’s government.
Karol Nawrocki wants to become the patron of a future right-wing government and strengthen the powers of the presidency, while building his own centre of power rather than simply acting as PiS’s president.
He has blocked legislation that would have given legal recognition to unmarried couples, including same-sex couples, while putting strong emphasis on national sovereignty, security and large state investments. In foreign policy, he has stressed Poland’s relationship with the United States. For Antoni Dudek, a professor and long-time observer of Polish politics, Nawrocki’s ambitions go much further. He wants to become the patron of a future right-wing government and strengthen the powers of the presidency. In Dudek’s view, this may worry Kaczyński, as Nawrocki is building his own centre of power rather than simply acting as PiS’s president.
This gives him room to speak to a much broader right-wing electorate. Nawrocki has said that he feels close to the “patriotic” circles around Confederation. This makes him potentially attractive to voters who share PiS’s conservative values but no longer feel loyal to Kaczyński’s party.
This is where Nawrocki may become a problem for PiS. The party helped him reach the presidency, but it also gave him something no potential successor to Kaczyński has: his own national mandate. He can now build a political identity somewhere between PiS and the forces further to its right, without formally joining either.
The question is therefore no longer only whether Nawrocki will help PiS return to power in 2027. It is whether he could eventually become the figure around whom the Polish right reorganises itself after Kaczyński.
PiS's War of Succession
PiS has never developed a clear mechanism for choosing a successor to Jarosław Kaczyński, who has dominated PiS for more than two decades. What began as competition for influence around him has therefore turned into a battle over who will eventually replace him.
Morawiecki had particularly strong reasons to see himself as the natural successor. He served as prime minister for six years, from 2017 to 2023, gained experience in European and international politics, and became one of the most recognisable figures next to his leader.
But Kaczyński did not choose Morawiecki. Instead, PiS named Przemysław Czarnek as its candidate for prime minister if the party wins the 2027 parliamentary election. The decision was a major blow to Moraiwecki’s ambitions and his belief that he could eventually take control of PiS. It also suggested a different direction for the party.
Czarnek, who served as education minister in Morawiecki’s government, represents a more hardline conservative wing. He played a prominent role in the party’s campaign against what it called “LGBT ideology” and pushed for a stronger role for Catholic and nationalist values in Polish schools. Czarnek’s nomination can also be seen as an attempt to win back radical voters lost to Braun. He has taken an increasingly hard line on Ukraine, even calling for military aid to be suspended and using rhetoric from which Kaczyński himself later distanced himself.
His nomination therefore raised a bigger question inside PiS - should the party focus more on the economy and development, or continue the conservative cultural battles that Czarnek represents.
Mateusz Morawiecki could try to position himself closer to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni: maintaining a hard conservative line, particularly on migration, while remaining inside the European political mainstream and trying to influence it from within.
The result was a split that Kaczynski had long tried to avoid. The conflict became visible when Mateusz Morawiecki and his allies began building their own political platform around the Rozwój Plus (Development Plus), a think tank-like platform focused on socioeconomic issues. The initiative now has its own parliamentary group, with around 40 MPs, and is expected eventually to become a political party. From 15 October, Morawiecki plans to tour the country, holding nearly 400 meetings in towns and municipalities to collect ideas for a new political programme and build regional structures. The project has attracted huge media attention because Kaczyński has never faced a rebellion of this scale from within his own camp. Never before has a politician from Kaczyński’s own camp managed to take so many PiS MPs with him.
Interestingly, PiS and the emerging Rozwój Plus project are still politically very close. They speak to the same voters, operate in the same social media environment and share the same ideas for society.
Mateusz Morawiecki could try to position himself closer to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni: maintaining a hard conservative line, particularly on migration, while remaining inside the European political mainstream and trying to influence it from within.
This also explains how Rozwój Plus is being presented to conservative voters. Rather than breaking with PiS, Morawiecki and his allies want to portray the new project as a return to the party’s more successful years: conservative and anti-Tusk, more focused on economic development and investment.
But Morawiecki’s more pragmatic image should not be confused with a softer political line. On migration, he has moved further to the right, backing faster deportations and even a special deportation service modelled on the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). But Morawiecki’s idea of creating a special deportation service has not convinced most Poles. According to a recent IBRiS poll, more than 30 percent strongly oppose the proposal, compared with 20.5 percent who strongly support it and 18.4 percent who somewhat support it. This poll highlights the political risks of Morawiecki’s strategy: while a tougher stance on migration may resonate with the right, its most radical aspects remain difficult to sell to the broader public.
This may also help explain the political model Morawiecki appears to be moving towards. Rather than following Viktor Orbán’s increasingly confrontational relationship with the EU, he could try to position himself closer to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni: maintaining a hard conservative line, particularly on migration, while remaining inside the European political mainstream and trying to influence it from within.
The Left’s Missing Generation
The 2025 election suggested that this duopoly may be weakening. But that has not produced a shift towards progressive politics.
Last year’s presidential election showed how much young voters could shape the result. In the first round, many of them rejected candidates associated with the traditional political establishment. Mentzen won more than a third of the vote among 18 to 29-year-olds, while the second most popular candidate in this group was Adrian Zandberg of the left-wing Razem party. In the second round, Nawrocki was more successful than Trzaskowski in attracting many of these anti-establishment voters.
The return of Donald Tusk to power in 2023 was presented as a turning point after long power of PiS. His government repaired relations with the EU, unlocked billions in European funds and began reversing some of PiS’s institutional changes.
Yet many promises important to progressive voters, from liberalising abortion law to recognising same-sex partnerships, remain unfulfilled, while housing remains a major problem for younger Poles.
The split reflects a broader dilemma for the left: whether to accept compromises in government to keep the right out of power, or build a more clearly left-wing alternative from opposition. Either way, the weakening of PiS has not automatically strengthened the left.
On migration, the difference between the liberal government and the right has become less clear. Tusk has adopted increasingly tough language on borders and migration, showing how far the political debate has already shifted to the right.
This creates a problem not only for Tusk, but also for the Left, which is itself divided. The New Left (Nowa Lewica) joined Tusk’s coalition and holds several ministries, but remains a small partner and has struggled to turn its presence in government into major progressive reforms. Razem, led by Adrian Zandberg, chose a different path: it did not join the government and left the joint parliamentary group in 2024, arguing that the coalition had failed to deliver on housing, public services and workers’ rights. The split reflects a broader dilemma for the left: whether to accept compromises in government to keep the right out of power, or build a more clearly left-wing alternative from opposition. Either way, the weakening of PiS has not automatically strengthened the left. So far, much of the frustration with the political establishment has instead been captured by forces on the right.
The question ahead of 2027 is therefore not simply whether PiS can return to power, but what kind of right could replace the current government, and whether the left can offer an alternative before that happens.
