WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s largest opposition party is on the brink of a formal split, with its leader announcing Friday that over 30 lawmakers have essentially walked away from the group amid a deepening internal feud.
The conservative nationalist Law and Justice party governed Poland from 2015 until 2023, when Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his liberal coalition took the reins. During its years in power, Law and Justice tightened its grip on the judicial system by installing loyalist judges in higher courts and using disciplinary measures against those who pushed back.
Efforts by the Tusk administration to undo those judicial changes have repeatedly been stalled by two consecutive presidents who have been sympathetic to Law and Justice.
Despite that shared opposition to the current government, tensions within Law and Justice have been building as the country moves toward a national election next year — and as the party faces pressure from even more right-leaning political rivals.
At the heart of the conflict are longtime party chief Jarosław Kaczyński and Mateusz Morawiecki, who served as Poland’s prime minister from 2017 to 2023. Morawiecki leads a more moderate wing of the party and in April founded an association called Development Plus — a move that many within Law and Justice have viewed with deep suspicion.
A Thursday night deadline requiring lawmakers to pledge they were not members of any outside political associations passed without resolution. A face-to-face meeting between Kaczyński and Morawiecki that same evening failed to bridge the gap between them.
Kaczyński announced Friday that more than 30 party members had resigned their memberships as a result, according to the Polish news agency PAP. He added that the party’s political committee would convene Tuesday to formally recognize those departures.
However, Piotr Müller, a European Parliament member representing Law and Justice and a Morawiecki ally, pushed back on that characterization. Müller wrote on X that none of the party members affiliated with Development Plus had actually submitted resignations from Law and Justice.
Morawiecki, for his part, said Friday that he and his fellow association members had not yet had any discussions about forming a new political party. “We have to discuss all plans for the future,” he said, according to PAP.
Law and Justice currently holds 186 of the 460 seats in the Sejm, Poland’s lower chamber of parliament.
