PiS rupture hands Poland's hard right an opening ahead of 2027 vote

Friday night, 25 July. Roughly 45 Polish MPs refused to sign the document Jarosław Kaczyński had set them, renouncing the faction Mateusz Morawiecki had quietly assembled inside Law and Justice. By Saturday morning, Poland's dominant conservative party, the largest political force on the national right for the better part of a decade, was formally split for the first time since it took power in 2015, and the country's most famous former prime minister was on the outside.

The rupture followed a year of whispered grievance and a month of open war. Kaczyński, the 76-year-old chairman and the architect of eight years of PiS government, had demanded loyalty pledges after months in which Morawiecki's backers built a parallel operation preparing for the 2027 parliamentary election. The two men have never been close. The split was the culmination of a long struggle for the party's future, and probably Kaczyński's calculation that he had to act before the factions drifted further apart.

Morawiecki, prime minister from 2017 until PiS lost to Donald Tusk's Civic Coalition in late 2023, is not, by any European measure, a centrist. As finance minister and premier he presided over a generous welfare programme, courted the Catholic right and ran the most serious rule-of-law confrontation with Brussels that the EU has seen since admitting the countries of central Europe. Within PiS, however, his supporters represented a more economically liberal and tactically less confrontational current, one that wanted to win back centrist voters exhausted by eight years of culture-war politics. The Brussels-friendly wing, in shorthand. Kaczyński appears to have concluded that wing had to go.

The numbers tell a more complicated story than Tusk's allies would like

Allies of the pro-EU prime minister reacted to the split as if it were a gift. Two MPs from the governing coalition filmed themselves watching Kaczyński's expulsion speech while eating popcorn. The arithmetic appeared to support the celebration: POLITICO's Poll of Polls had Civic Coalition on 32 percent and PiS on 26 percent before the rupture. PiS has since slumped to 22 percent.

Look across the right as a whole, however, and the picture inverts. An IBRiS poll taken after the split put the combined support of right-wing parties at 47.9 percent, up from 47.5 percent before it. The voters leaving Kaczyński are not crossing to Tusk; they are shopping elsewhere on the right. Tusk acknowledged as much in his own understated way on Monday: "I won't cry for Law and Justice, but there is certainly nothing to celebrate."

The geography of the right has changed, in other words, but its size has barely moved. In any other European country a 4 percentage point loss for the main conservative party in a fortnight would be a story by itself. In Poland it is, for the moment, an internal transfer of allegiance within a coalition of parties that already shares 47 or 48 percent of the electorate.

The hard right reaps the rewards

The biggest beneficiaries are the parties that used to live in PiS's shadow. Konfederacja, the libertarian-nationalist outfit that has spent the post-2015 period denouncing the EU's climate policy, its migration rules and, increasingly, its very existence, is polling between 13 and 15 percent. Grzegorz Braun's Federation of the Polish Crown, a movement that grew out of his far-right Confederation faction and is best known outside Poland for its leader setting fire to a Hanukkah menorah in the parliament in 2023, is at around 10 percent.

That is the context for Anna Bryłka's argument. "For years, a right-wing voter in Poland had no alternative. If you had right-wing views, you voted for Law and Justice, because there was nothing else. Today that alternative exists. Law and Justice is simply losing its hegemony on the right," she said, summarising a shift that took roughly four years of internal feuding to produce. Her colleague Michał Wawer, the party's national treasurer, put it more bluntly. Asked whether Konfederacja would govern with Braun, he replied: "We maintain good relations. We are ready for cooperation in government in the future, if the majority works out that way."

Kaczyński has spent the past year reaching for those voters himself. His choice of Przemysław Czarnek, a hardline former education minister whose tenure was defined by battles over sex education and LGBTQ+ rights, as PiS's candidate for prime minister was designed to claw back ground from Konfederacja. The numbers suggest the strategy has misfired. As Bryłka put it: "Why would a voter choose the copy, when they can vote for the original?"

The Ukraine fault line

What makes the Polish right's fragmentation consequential outside Warsaw is Ukraine. Since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, Poland has been Kyiv's loudest advocate in the EU, its biggest supplier of military equipment and the country that has absorbed more Ukrainian refugees than any other, well over a million at the peak of the displacement. PiS in government was an enthusiastic backer of that role, even when it complicated relations with Berlin and Brussels.

Konfederacja's terms for joining a future government include a firm "no" to Ukrainian membership of the European Union. Braun's party goes further and questions Polish membership itself. That is no longer a fringe position. If a right-of-centre coalition takes office after the autumn 2027 election, it will do so on terms set, at least in part, by parties that oppose the central strategic project of Poland's foreign policy for the last four years, and arguably the central project of the EU's eastern policy. The European Commission's enlargement directorate, which manages Ukraine's accession path, has so far been able to count on Warsaw as an uncritical champion. That assumption is now in question.

For the moment, the question is academic. Morawiecki's camp has ruled out any cooperation with Braun, and his spokesman Paweł Jabłoński, a former deputy foreign minister, dismissed the Federation of the Polish Crown as "destructive." PiS loyalist Jacek Sasin, however, was less categorical on Friday, floating "some form of non-aggression pact" across the right and declaring that "there is no enemy on the right." The door is not closed.

A president caught in the middle

The one figure with the standing to knit the Polish right back together is the one with the least direct incentive to do it. Karol Nawrocki, elected president in 2025 with the support of both PiS and Konfederacja voters, is conservative, Eurosceptic and culturally combative in the PiS style, but he is not a Kaczyński creature. The two share an electoral base rather than a project. For months the talk in Warsaw has been of a single right-wing list presented to voters as the president's coalition, with Nawrocki as its nominal patron.

Kaczyński has publicly embraced a version of the idea. In June he said he was working to "unite as large a part of the right as possible, so that we go on one list," on the condition that Konfederacja drops its hostility to PiS. Braun would not be invited. Bryłka for her part is convinced that only Nawrocki can reconcile the Morawiecki and Kaczyński camps, and expects that reconciliation to happen "sooner or later" regardless. "The question," she added, "is whether he wants that role. He has all the tools, and everything suggests he does."

Whether he wants it is the crux. A president who plays kingmaker on the right may also become the prisoner of the right, and Nawrocki's foreign policy instincts, particularly on the EU, are closer to Konfederacja's than to Tusk's. The more he tries to unify the Polish right, the harder it becomes for him to act as a national figure above it.

Tusk's coalition is fraying from the other side

Tusk's own position is more precarious than the popcorn moment suggested. Of his governing partners, only the Left is polling consistently above the 5 percent threshold required to enter the Sejm. The Polish People's Party, the agrarian party that has anchored the centre-right of the governing coalition, has been bleeding support to the centre and to the right, and one recent survey put it below the cut-off. The third coalition partner, Together (Razem), is in similar territory.

That matters because Poland uses proportional representation for the Sejm, with a 5 percent threshold for single parties and 8 percent for coalitions. Tusk's own Civic Coalition remains comfortably above the line, but if two of his three partners fall below it on election day in 2027, he will need a turnout miracle or an opposition catastrophe to hold on. His most likely route to a second term is the right wasting its own votes, particularly if Morawiecki's separate Rozwój Plus list scrapes under the threshold and pulls enough seats away from his former colleagues to deny them a majority.

"Those 4 percent of lost votes could decide what the majority looks like," Wawer warned, articulating the fear that haunts the Polish right. The math is unforgiving. For most of the post-1989 era, the conservative side of Polish politics has won elections when it was united and lost them when it was not. The split makes unity harder, but the share of the electorate prepared to vote for some flavour of conservative, nationalist or right-wing party is, if anything, slightly higher than before.

What to watch before 2027

Three dates will set the trajectory. First, Morawiecki's formal launch of Rozwój Plus as a party, expected in the autumn, which will give pollsters a real number rather than a hypothetical. Polling has put the project between barely registering and roughly 7.5 percent; which end of that range it lands on will determine whether the right wastes 4 percent of its vote or picks up a viable junior partner. Second, any move by Nawrocki towards hosting a single right-wing list, which would force Konfederacja and Braun's party to choose between joining it or being frozen out. Third, the Polish presidency's own institutional leverage: presidents in Poland can veto legislation, and Nawrocki has used that power to block parts of Tusk's programme on judicial reform and on the European Recovery Fund.

Outside Warsaw, the consequences are larger than the personnel question suggests. Poland is one of the NATO alliance's largest armies by personnel and has, since 2022, been the indispensable western supplier of ammunition, tanks and air defence to Ukraine. It is also a country that has held EU treaty change, recovery payments and migration policy hostage in past rounds of intra-EU bargaining. The next Polish government, whoever forms it, will sit at the table when the EU debates the next enlargement round, the next multiannual budget and any further steps towards deeper integration. The shape of the right that takes office in Warsaw in late 2027 will shape, to a degree that has not been true for a generation, what kind of Union emerges from that bargaining.