After weeks of speculation, Poland’s nationalist conservative Law and Justice (PiS) has finally unveiled who the party has tapped to lead the charge into the 2027 parliamentary election: Przemyslaw Czarnek.
The 48-year-old law professor, introduced at the PiS convention in Krakow on Saturday, is a party veteran. PiS’ deputy head since 2025, he previously served as Poland’s education and science minister from 2020 to 2023. At the time, his proposed reforms triggered a landslide of protest, with universities accusing Czarnek of infringing on academic freedoms.
In his inaugural speech as the party’s new lead candidate, Czarnek said he wanted to be the “engineman of a well-oiled bullet train,” with Kaczynski at the helm. He also took aim at the man he wants to replace, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and his pro-European government, which has been in power since 2023.
“We want to take care of the authentic Poland,” Czarnek said, according to the Polish news agency PAP. “This true Poland we want to give back to the Polish people, so that the normal, ordinary Pole can once again be a citizen of his own state.”
Playing to PiS’ extreme voter base
Czarnek also criticized the EU’s climate politics, and especially the emissions trading system, saying that the bedrock of Poland’s energy security remained Polish coal. He juxtaposed the “leftist project in Brussels” with the “real and normal Poland.”
Reiterating his much-criticized anti-LGBTQ+ stance, he went on to insist that a “normal” family consisted of a man and a woman, a grandfather and a grandmother. Mocking same-sex marriage, he asked, “Why should marriage just include two men, why not three or four?”
Instead, Czarnek painted a nationalist conservative image of women as “mothers who raise their children to be patriots,” thereby reversing Poland’s demographic crisis. In 2025, childbirth in the country dropped to its lowest rate since the end of World War II.
As if to assure his audience that neither he nor his party were misogynist, Czarnek added that, “we lifted the mother of God up to become queen of Poland” — a common devotion among Polish Catholics, who form a significant part of the PiS voter base.
Reacting to the PiS nomination on Sunday, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski of Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition said snidely that Czarnek would be a “good candidate” for the office of prime minister.
“Not in Poland, but in Afghanistan, where his views on education and women’s rights are already being implemented.”
Is PiS abandoning centrist voters?
Olgierd Annusewicz, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw, said given its plummeting popularity ratings the PiS party’s main goal is to win back right-wing voters. “Czarnek can do that,” Annusewicz told the PAP news agency.
For years, the PiS party has had no competition from the right. Now, there are two far-right groups challenging Kaczynski’s party. In the 2023 parliamentary election, PiS gathered 35% of the popular vote. Now, support for the party is down to around 20% — the same as both far-right parties taken together.
Grzegorz Braun, head of one of the far-right parties, the Confederation of the Polish Crown, is not shy about his antisemitic, anti-European and anti-Ukrainian positions. He has even called the historical truth of the Auschwitz concentration camp and its gas chambers into question.
Should PiS fail to reach a solid majority in the 2027 election, it might have to share power with Braun’s confederation. This is why PiS is attempting to poach voters ahead of the election by displaying its own radical tendencies.
“Thanks to his extreme ideas, Czarnek can win back extreme voters,” the daily paper Gazeta Wyborcza wrote in a commentary. “He is radical, homophobic and nationalistic.”
Czarnek singles out Germany for criticism
Czarnek’s speech on Saturday was laced with confrontational barbs directed at the centrist Civic Coalition and Germany, which he said was controlling the Tusk government. At one point, he encouraged Poland to build a new port on the Baltic Sea, as it would translate into “more money for Poland and less for Germany.”
The populist politician clarified that he did not see himself as anti-German, but said that “Poles want to be partners, and not servants or slaves.”
Observers are concerned that having Czarnek as prime minister would strain Polish-German relations, given his propensity to single out Berlin. In 2022, while he was serving as education minister, he reduced German school lessons for the German minority in Poland from three hours to one hour a week. He reversed his decision a year later, but argued he had done it to pressure the German government to increase funding for Polish lessons in Germany.
Czarnek also spent years withholding approval for a German-Polish history textbook series, claiming that in the estimation of his experts the final volume of the internationally acclaimed cooperation project was “insufficiently patriotic” from a Polish perspective.
Tusk: ‘Poland faces an all-out battle’ in 2027
Daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita said Czarnek’s nomination showed that “Kaczynski is foregoing any efforts for politically centrist voters.” Prime Minister Tusk said that by tapping Czarnek as their lead candidate, PiS has brought itself closer to the far right.
“There’s nothing to fear, but we cannot underestimate them,” Tusk wrote on the social media platform X on Saturday. “One thing is certain: in 2027, Poland faces an all-out battle.”
Following his nomination, Czarnek called on his followers to fight for Poland. On Monday, he began his fight by announcing a draft bill that would lower value added tax for gas from 23% to 8% — the war in Iranhas caused pump prices to hit a record high of 8 zloty (€1.88/$2.18).
This article was originally written in German.
