WARSAW — Beata Szydło was the moderate face of Poland’s Law and Justice party and the promise she would become prime minister helped propel the party to a historic victory in recent parliamentary elections.
But that doesn’t mean she’s getting the final word in forming what is supposed to be her government.
Instead, Jarosław Kaczyński, the party founder and former prime minister, has been meeting with other top officials to hash out ministerial appointments while Szydło spent a few days off relaxing after the grueling campaign.
“This isn’t going to be a government composed by a single person. This is going to be a government of Law and Justice,” Mariusz Błaszczak, the head of the parliamentary wing of the party, told Poland’s TVN television this week.
Over the weekend, a week after Law and Justice took 37.6 percent of the vote and won an absolute majority in parliament, Szydło was nowhere to be seen while Błaszczak and others from Kaczyński’s inner circle conferred on the shape of the new cabinet.
She scrambled back into view on Monday, meeting Kaczyński, and Błaszczak tried to walk back his earlier comments, saying on Tuesday, “We’re a team.” But the overwhelming impression is that Kaczyński will be in charge of the tricky business of accommodating various party factions and powerful barons as Law and Justice builds Poland’s first non-coalition government since 1989.
On Tuesday, she was holed up with Kaczyński and other leaders in party headquarters located in a dingy office building on the edge of central Warsaw.
Szydło’s first prominent role was running the presidential campaign of Andrzej Duda, which ended with a surprise victory in May. Kaczyński chose Duda in recognition that his own brand was too toxic to win an election. That same calculation dictated his choice of Szydło to be the party’s face for the October 25 parliamentary elections.
But now that the party rules the Polish political landscape, there are growing pressures to be true to its nationalist and ideological roots, and shed the moderate image it presented before the election.
That means some of the party’s more vibrant personalities are back in play:
Antoni Macierewicz, an activist dating back to communist times, is one of the top names being considered for defense minister. Macierewicz was a deputy defense minister during Law and Justice’s brief 2005-2007 stint in power, where his main function was the destruction of the military intelligence agency which he considered to be in the grip of communist-era spies.
In recent years he has been a leading advocate of the theory that the 2010 plane crash that killed Lech Kaczyński, Poland’s president and Jarosław’s twin brother, as well as other senior officials was an assassination not an accident. While the official Polish government report found that the crash in Smolensk, Russia, was mostly due to undertrained pilots flying the airliner into the ground in a dense fog, Macierewicz has chaired a parliamentary committee trying to prove a bomb brought down the plane.
“I really value minister Antoni Macierewicz,” Błaszczak said. “He’s one of the creators of an independent opposition. A unique person.”
There is also friction over who gets to be foreign minister. The leading candidate is Witold Waszczykowski, a former deputy foreign minister. Deeply pro-American, Waszykowski helped negotiate Poland’s participation in the missile defense shield project before it was canceled by Washington.
Both Waszczykowski and Macierewicz are seen as bitter enemies of Radek Sikorski, the Oxford-educated Polish politician who served as defense minister and then broke with Law and Justice to become foreign minister under the outgoing Civic Platform government.
“If it’s Waszczykowski there’s going to be a bloodbath,” said a senior foreign ministry official, his leather briefcase tucked under his arm as he hurried along a darkened Warsaw street. “Waszczykowski is going to get rid of a lot of people brought in under Sikorski.”
Zbigniew Ziobro was the law-and-order sheriff of the last Law and Justice government, serving as both justice minister and chief prosecutor. He unleashed the full power of the state in an effort to stamp out corruption and attack what the party felt was a shadowy network of crooks and spies running Poland from behind the scenes. The party’s opponents worried that the enthusiasm for police agencies and prominent prosecutions — often announced by Ziobro in high-profile press conferences — overstepped democratic norms.
Ziobro later fell out with Kaczyński and was thrown out of Law and Justice. He now heads a small right-wing satellite party of Law and Justice. He could make it back into the justice ministry.
The final shape of the government is likely to be announced Friday. Szydło and her cabinet are likely be sworn in November 11, Poland’s independence day.
Watchers will be looking at who gets the most important jobs to get a sense of the new administration’s direction. The question is whether Szydło’s moderate image was accurate, or if was simply a vote-getting ploy and the party will return to the harder-edge it showed from 2005-2007.