JAROSŁAW KACZYŃSKI

Formally, Jarosław Kaczyński is just one of 460 members of the Polish parliament. In reality, the former prime minister and current chairman of the ruling Law and Justice party is the most powerful man in the country. Whatever the decision — who will run Poland’s state television? Should Donald Tusk be backed for a second term as European Council president? Does Prime Minister Beata Szydło get to keep her job? — it is Kaczyński who makes the final call.

In Poland, that has meant a sharp change in direction as Kaczyński has pushed back against what he sees as a quarter century of corruption, runaway liberalism, and dissipating national identity and control. Along with his ally in Budapest, Viktor Orbán, the 67-year-old leads the eastern flank of the anti-establishment brigades that have scored significant victories in the West, from Brexit to Donald Trump, and is setting its sights on critical elections in France, Germany and the Netherlands next year.

A lifelong bachelor, Kaczyński needles Brussels and cosmopolitan pieties with brio and pushes Catholic family values, all the while seizing — and to his vocal critics, emasculating — Poland’s relatively young democratic institutions that were a model of a successful transition away from authoritarianism.

In his tangles with Brussels so far, score it for Kaczyński. The Commission criticized his party’s moves to overhaul Poland’s constitutional court and media sector. It was ignored, and its attacks handed the wily Pole a propaganda gift at home. The nation state “is the only institution able to guarantee democracy and freedom,” Kaczyński told a group of leading European newspapers.

“Who attacks us will not win. Poland will remain Poland.” His hostility to the EU comes unadulterated. “The question is, if the Union in its current shape, with its horrible bureaucracy and institutionalized undermining of the nation state, is able to survive,” he told a Polish interviewer. “According to me, no.”

Polish citizens supporting freedom of the press gather in protest against the Law and Justice party’s swift move to seize control of state media | Wojciech Grzedzinski/Laif

In the months ahead, Kaczyński will play a role in the EU’s negotiations with the United Kingdom, looking to defend the interests of a couple million Poles who reside in the U.K. while at the same time not doing Brussels any favors. After Brexit, Poland will become the EU’s fifth most populous country and its seventh largest economy, one that could be the EU’s geographic and political center.

If Europe as we know it is to recover from the blow of Brexit, Brussels and Berlin will need a Poland that embraces the EU, possibly joining the eurozone. Count on Kaczyński to fight that relentlessly.

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— Kaczyński arrives at work at about 10 in the morning, driven by his security detail (he has no driver’s license).

— He doesn’t go out for lunch. He prefers traditional Polish food bought from a nearby canteen by his secretary. He almost always eats alone.

— He is a 67-year-old life-long bachelor.

— He speaks no foreign language, owns no computer, and only opened his first bank account in 2009.

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