Poland’s former ruling Conservatives (PiS) is pushing for the European Conservative Reformers (ECR) to adopt senior MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski as its candidate for the post of president of the European Commission.
PiS wants Jacek Saryusz-Wolski as the candidate, in recognition of the fact that PiS makes up the majority of the ECR political grouping in the European Parliament, which also consists of a number of other conservative European parties, such as Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. During the last process of electing the European Commission president, PiS MPs in the European Parliament backed current President Ursula von der Leyen.
This time round, PiS seems adamant that neither it nor the ECR as a whole should back her because she has, according to them, broken all her “promises” regarding the group.
Saryusz-Wolski has been an MEP since 2004. He sat with the European People’s Party (EPP) for most of that time before defecting to the ECR in 2016.
He was the chief negotiator and minister inside the Polish government at the time, which in the 1990s negotiated Poland’s accession to the European Union and in 2017 he stood as Poland’s candidate for the post of President of the European Council against his compatriot, now the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk.
Saryusz-Wolski is an outspoken supporter of the idea of a Europe of nation states, which he believes is more “in line with” the intentions of the founders of the community back in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, he has remained a staunch opponent within the European Parliament of attempts to push forward the “federalisation” of the EU.
