Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, has failed to cope with the responsibility he imposed on himself and this is evidenced by the result of the last general election and the abject failure to prepare his party for defeat, argues Polish Prof. Andrzej Nowak in the journal Arcana.
PiS was left in a bind since it had no potential coalition partner, which has left it relegated to the opposition.
Prof. Nowak argues that Kaczyński failed to shed light on the Smolensk air tragedy and then reacted far too late in appointing a special commission on Russian influence just ahead of the election. He cannot understand why such a commission was not set up immediately in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which would have given it enough time to show how Tusk’s reset policy helped to bring that war about.
“No number of monuments to the late President Lech Kaczyński will atone for that oversight,” writes Nowak.
The academic also criticizes the PiS leader for his approach to the local elections due on April 7. He accuses Kaczyński of showing disdain for voters, which is evidenced by the fact the party had failed to select a candidate for the major city of Kraków with just weeks left of the campaign, adding that the situation was little better in many other towns and cities across the country.
Nowak is also scathing of the party’s record in the media. He argues that the party is guilty of shutting the stable door after the horse bolted with its proposal to create a television outlet independent of the present government.
“Why was nothing done to achieve this for the eight years in which the party ruled the country?” he asks. The professor said that the reality is that the world of commercial media is in the hands of the liberals, who have now also seized the public media too.
The professor concludes by calling for a generational shift in the leadership of the party. He believes that it is too late for Kaczyński to change people’s perception of him and that younger leadership is required to take up the fight for the right to survive and reach the voters its current leaders simply cannot reach.
