“Everything revolves around how to defeat Donald Tusk’s government. That is the fundamental premise behind my actions. (…) There is no hegemon on the Polish right; we must learn to cooperate. Disputes within the right are family disputes, while disputes with the ruling coalition and Donald Tusk’s government are about defending Poland from devastation,” former Prime Minister and head of the Rozwój Plus association, Mateusz Morawiecki, said on TV Republika.
On Friday, Law and Justice (PiS) leader Jarosław Kaczyński announced that more than 30 MPs would be leaving the party. The move is the result of an internal dispute over the Rozwój Plus association founded by former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
Those leaving PiS are politicians who refused to sign declarations stating that they do not belong to organizations of a political nature. On Tuesday, the party’s governing bodies are expected to formally confirm the loss of their membership. The group currently includes 40 MPs (37 of them PiS members), three Members of the European Parliament, and one senator.
Speaking to TV Republika on Saturday, Morawiecki said he had seen something on some television channels “that we should avoid in the near future.”
“Instead of focusing on the state of the Polish economy, the collapse of the healthcare system, or the government’s mistakes in foreign policy, we have been busy inventing insults, slurs, and attaching all kinds of absurd labels. Soon I may even hear that I’m an agent of the BND or of the Martians,” he said.
Morawiecki argued that “everything revolves around how to defeat Donald Tusk’s government.”
“That is the fundamental premise behind my actions,” he declared.
“In recent years, we have seen changes on the Polish political scene. We should ask ourselves how it was possible that during the six years when I headed the government and the eight years when I was responsible for economic policy within the United Right, we were able to defeat Tusk—even twice—while Confederation won just over 7 percent of the vote in 2023. Above all, it is because we know how to govern. I know how to govern, and I know how to beat Donald Tusk. That is the most important thing today: the entire right must develop a strategy to defeat Tusk,” Morawiecki said.
The former prime minister added that “there is no hegemon on the Polish right” and that “we must learn to cooperate.”
“Disputes within the right are family disputes, whereas disputes with the ruling coalition and Donald Tusk’s government are about defending Poland from devastation. It is about defending Poland against political vandalism, and that is why the Rozwój Plus association was created—to unite what mattered most when the right was winning. I am not saying that I am the greatest conservative or the most right-wing politician. I simply know how to defeat Tusk, because we did it twice when I was prime minister. That was the strength of the Polish right.
“That is also why the Rozwój Plus association was founded—to combine two dimensions: the identity dimension, meaning care for tradition, faith, culture, and family values, and the developmental dimension, meaning ambitious goals for growth, economic development, strengthening Polish capital and Polish businesses, supporting their international expansion, and standing up for Polish workers.
“It is clear that combining these two dimensions brought us victory. When we moved away from that approach, some people began attacking the achievements of PiS governments and using the harshest rhetoric. We then started to see that things were no longer heading in the right direction. Let us work together to develop a strategy for defeating the ruling coalition,” he concluded.