Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS)

Poland’s Law and Jus­tice (Pra­wo i Spraw­iedli­wość, PiS) is a right‑wing, national‑conservative and pop­ulist par­ty found­ed in 2001 by twin broth­ers Lech and Jarosław Kaczyńs­ki under the lega­cy of the Cen­tre Agree­ment, posi­tion­ing ini­tial­ly as a Christian‑democratic, law‑and‑order force in post‑communist Poland. Lech head­ed the par­ty until 2003, when Jarosław took over, steer­ing it toward stronger cul­tur­al con­ser­vatism, Euroscep­ti­cism, and state inter­ven­tion in the econ­o­my. After win­ning pow­er in 2015—securing both a par­lia­men­tary major­i­ty and the presidency—PiS enact­ed sweep­ing judi­cial reforms, reshap­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Tri­bunal, Supreme Court, and dis­ci­pli­nary sys­tems in ways that crit­ics argue under­mined judi­cial inde­pen­dence and vio­lat­ed EU demo­c­ra­t­ic norms. The par­ty also rolled out gen­er­ous social pro­grams like the “500+” child allowance and anchored its polit­i­cal brand in Catholic and nation­al­ist val­ues. It advanced con­tro­ver­sial his­to­ry poli­cies, includ­ing leg­is­la­tion that crim­i­nal­ized sug­ges­tions of Pol­ish com­plic­i­ty in Nazi crimes, aim­ing to con­trol col­lec­tive mem­o­ry and pro­mote a nar­ra­tive of vic­tim­hood and hero­ism. Although PiS retained pow­er through 2019 and 2020, it lost its major­i­ty in the 2023 elec­tions but remains a dom­i­nant force in oppo­si­tion, sup­port­ed by a loy­al base and sym­pa­thet­ic media infrastructure.

Ref­er­ences

• Law and Jus­tice – Wikipedia

• Hos­tile Takeover: How Law and Jus­tice Cap­tured Poland’s Courts – Free­dom House

• Law, Jus­tice, and Mem­o­ry in Poland – Jew­ish Review of Books

• Poland: The Law and Jus­tice Gov­ern­ment and Rela­tions with the EU, 2015–2023 – UK Parliament

• Some Poles Col­lab­o­rat­ed With the Nazis. But Poland’s ‘Min­istry of Mem­o­ry’ Wants Peo­ple To Forget