Poland’s opposition PiS party names hardline conservative as prime ministerial candidate

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland’s main opposition party, the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), has named Przemysław Czarnek as its candidate to be prime minister if it wins next year’s parliamentary elections.

Czarnek, who served as education minister in the former PiS government, is known as a hardline conservative who played a prominent role in the party’s campaign against so-called “LGBT ideology” and sought to give Catholic teaching a greater role in schools.

Speaking at an event to announce his candidacy, Czarnek declared that he wants to remove from power the “overtly German” government of the current centrist prime minister, Donald Tusk, and to make Poland “normal” again.

Today’s announcement follows days of speculation after PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński revealed last week that his party, which has recently slumped in the polls, would unveil an important decision on 7 March. It was widely rumoured that this would be the selection of a candidate for prime minister.

Although Kaczyński has led PiS since 2003 and remains its dominant force, he has over the last decade preferred to choose other figures as the party’s figurehead in election campaigns and to serve as prime minister. Kaczyński, meanwhile, pulls the strings behind the scenes.

Whereas Kaczyński’s previous pick, former PiS prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, represented the more moderate and technocratic wing of PiS, Czarnek is known as a conservative firebrand. In particular, he was a prominent figure in the PiS’s government’s campaign against “LGBT ideology”.

In 2020, Czarnek declared that “LGBT ideology comes from the same roots as Nazism” and that its adherents “are not equal to normal people” so we should “stop listening to this idiocy about human rights or equality”.

After being appointed as education minister later that year, he criticised “irresponsible” principals who allow events in support of LGBT+ pupils to be held in their schools. He also claimed that “LGBT ideology” is responsible for a rise in attempted suicides by children in Poland.

Meanwhile, Czarnek, who warned that “Poland will either be Christian or it will not exist”, called for Polish children to receive a Christian education so that they can “save Latin civilisation” and created the new academic disciplines of biblical studies and family studies at universities.

In his speech today, Czarnek declared that the current government, a coalition ranging from left to centre right, is “violating the constitution and the rule of law, introducing chaos and disorder in Poland”.

He called it an “overt German option”, referring to regular claims by PiS that Tusk serves German, not Polish, interests. Czarnek said that, under a PiS government, Poles can be “partners” of Germany but never its “servants or slaves”.

“We want to restore a normal and genuine Poland,” said Czarnek, “a strong state that will protect the normal, ordinary Pole.”

Czarnek also criticised a variety of European Union policies, including its trade deal with the South American Mercosur bloc, its climate rules, and the SAFE programme to provide loans for defence spending to member states, with Poland set to be the largest recipient.

Today’s announcement was held in a highly symbolic location for PiS, the historic Sokół sports hall in the city of Kraków. It was here that PiS previously announced the presidential candidacies of two figures who were both relatively little known at the time, Andrzej Duda in 2014 and Karol Nawrocki in 2024.

Both figures, despite long trailing in the polls to rivals backed by Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition (KO; formerly Civic Platform, PO), ended up winning the presidential elections of 2015 and 2025 respectively. Kaczyński will now be hoping to repeat that feat with Czarnek.

It is, however, highly unusual for any party to announce a candidate at such an early stage. The parliamentary elections will not take place until autumn 2027.

The move is seen as part of efforts by Kaczyński to turn around the fortunes of his party, which has been falling in the polls for months and now has its lowest level of support (around 25%, according to polling averages) since 2012.

Meanwhile, two far-right groups, Confederation (Konfederacja) and Confederation of the Polish Crown (KKP) have recently surged in the polls to support of around 13% and 8% respectively.

The selection of a hardline figure like Czarnek may be an attempt to neutralise that threat, and potentially make it easier to form a coalition government with the far right if that is necessary after the election.

For example, whereas Kaczyński has rejected the idea of an alliance with KPP – whose leader, Grzegorz Braun, is antisemitic, anti-Ukrainian and anti-American – Czarnek last month refused to rule out the possibility, saying that “anything is possible” and “only cooperation with Tusk is out of the question”.

Czarnek was also a prominent figure during Nawrocki’s successful election campaign last year, and will be seen as someone who can work closely with the president if he becomes prime minister.

Monthly polling averages for major Polish political groups (source: ewybory.eu)

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: PIS/X

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.