After narrowly losing power in October’s parliamentary elections, Poland’s conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) has spent the last four months battling the reforms of Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who co-founded PiS in 2001 and has served as its chairman since 2003, must now adapt to his role in opposition. On Saturday, Kaczynski said that he would seek another term as the leader of PiS, but this won’t be an easy task. After the excitement of the last few weeks, which has included showdowns with the government over its takeover of public media and the arrests (and subsequent presidential pardon) of two opposition figures, some members of PiS’s leadership have begun to do some soul searching, and not all of them see a future with Kaczynski in charge.

In the last few weeks, a couple of narratives have emerged about what went wrong last autumn, and what needs to be done to get PiS winning elections again. On 19 February, the historian Andrzej Nowak published an essay describing the state of affairs. Nowak, widely regarded to be Poland’s leading conservative intellectual, listed four things that PiS needed to fix. His conclusion was straightforward: for Poland’s embattled conservatives to return to power, Kaczynski must go.

Kaczynski was born in Warsaw in 1949. Both of his parents had served in the resistance during the Second World War, and the neighbourhood where he grew up, Zoliborz, was one of the few pre-war districts to survive the 1944 Warsaw uprising. In 1989, Kaczynski, along with his twin brother Lech – identical twins who’d gotten their start as activists in the anti-Communist opposition – entered public life in the reconstituted Polish republic. In 1990, the brothers helped elevate Lech Walesa to the presidency. ‘Their role was decisive. Everybody understood that,’ Nowak tells me.

The Kaczynski brothers would eventually fall out of favour with Walesa, and later established PiS as an alternative to the liberal consensus that was then pushing the issue of European integration. They combined a socially conservative platform with one that emphasised Polish independence within the EU framework. In 2005, Lech Kaczynski was elected president in an unexpected victory, while Jaroslaw played the less public-facing role of party chairman. ‘He made PiS an astoundingly effective instrument for defending Polish sovereignty in Europe,’ Nowak recalls.

No matter how well Kaczynski does in the upcoming elections, his days as PiS chairman are numbered

Nowak’s first critique of PiS is that, under Kaczynski’s leadership, the party went downhill after the the national tragedy of 10 April 2010, when a Tupolev TU-154 aircraft carrying president Lech Kaczynski crashed near Smolensk in Russia, killing everyone on board. Nowak believes that this event not only traumatised and divided the Polish nation, but permanently altered Jaroslaw’s political judgement. ‘Lech Kaczynski was, for Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the only source of counter arguments and of balancing power for his authority,’ he says. Subsequently, ‘the king-like position of Jaroslaw Kaczynski within the party created a kind of a court situation around him, isolating him more and more.’

In Nowak’s telling, the Polish media – overwhelmingly anti-PiS – has damaged Kaczynski’s public image beyond repair. They pretend ‘Jaroslaw Kaczynski is simply a demon. Almost as bad as a new Hitler, or at least a Mussolini.’ In his recent essay, Nowak blames Kaczynski for not doing enough to develop a strong conservative media centre. He says PiS relied too much on public television to communicate with the party’s base. Nowak’s additional criticisms of PiS – that the party was slow to enact educational reforms in support of the humanities, and that the party has neglected local elections – amount to allegations of negligence and short sightedness on the part of Kaczynski and his inner circle.

Some in PiS refute Nowak’s analysis. Mariusz Blaszczak, who served as defence minister from 2018 to 2023, described Kaczynski to me as ‘a good leader,’ who ‘has proven more than once that he can lead the party to victory and ensure its unity.’ Blaszczak has written off the recent setbacks as part of ‘a natural process.’ He added: ‘The public may become tired of a ruling party that has been in power for a long time – in the case of Law and Justice, an unprecedented time.’ Others say that without Kaczynski at the helm of PiS, the party will collapse.

‘There is no consolidated right wing without Kaczynski,’ says Jacek Kurski, former president of TVP, Poland’s public service broadcaster. ‘The certainty is that without Kaczynski, PiS will break into pieces.’

The simple fact is that Kaczynski must lead his party to a fresh victory to put wind in the party’s sails. Poland’s local elections, which will take place in April, will be a challenge for PiS. The party has historically struggled in such polls. If Kaczynski fails to deliver results, there will be one more opportunity to turn things around, in June, when the European elections are set to take place.

‘The decisive play will take place in the European elections on 9 June, and this is the point that Kaczynski must prevail,’ Kurski said. But Kaczynski is turning 75 this year, meaning that, no matter how well he does in the upcoming elections, his days as chairman are numbered. The question of who could replace him looms over the party at a moment when it can little afford disunity. But at the moment, there is no obvious successor.