Kaczynski enters the Polish Executive for the first time to end the crisis with his coalition partners

It's over with running Poland in the shadows.

Since this Wednesday, the ultra-conservative Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has been in power since 2015, has held the post of deputy prime minister.

With this designation, the United Right coalition government, on the verge of collapse in the last two weeks, thus settles a crisis that has revealed the power struggle for the Kaczynski succession.

At 71, and in deteriorating health, he has already announced that he does not have much time left in politics.

"But before that moment arrives, Kaczynski has decided to return to the Executive to take control of the situation and not endanger the PiS Government, which cannot afford to lose its two partners and rule in a minority," he explains by phone from Warsaw the conservative analyst Lukasz Warzecha.

According to analysts, two men are vying for the position to lead the most conservative right in the country: on the one hand is the current prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, appointed by Kaczynski and who represents the most moderate wing of the PiS.

And on the other, Justice Minister Zybigniew Ziobro, leader of the Solidarna Polska party, one of the coalition partners.

“And that in recent years the Ministry of Justice has politicized with its controversial statements against homosexuals, which has run against the Istanbul Convention for the rights of battered women ... Ziobro is a reactionary of the extreme right which moves Poland further away from the EU, ”says Jacek Kucharczyk, director of

the Warsaw Public Institutes

.

The political storm unleashed on September 12, when Ziobro and the rest of the Solidarna Polska deputies voted against the bill on animal welfare that Kaczynski had defended so much.

The other partner of the Government, the centrists of Porozumienie, also did so.

As well as a fortnight of parliamentarians of the own PiS.

All argue that the new animal law has an economic impact because it prohibits the raising of animals for fur, and Poland is the second largest producer of animal skins in the EU.

“It was a challenge from Ziobro himself to put Kaczynski on the ropes, force him to take sides in this fight for power, get him out of the hole.

And in the end he has come out winning, because his arch enemy is wounded from this crisis, "says political analyst Lukasz Warzecha." Polish public opinion will think that the real leader is Kaczynski, and this weakens the current prime minister, "he adds.

Kaczynski will lead a security committee that will comprise Interior, Justice and Defense.

Ziobro will have to report to this committee because he is a member of the Ministry of Justice, so Kaczynski takes control and Ziobro will dispatch directly to the leader, leaving Morawiecki aside.

According to analyst Jacek Kucharczyk, during the secret negotiations of these two weeks, Ziobro would have threatened to reveal information about the murky affairs of the PiS and its prime minister during these five years of government, -information to which he has had access by his current position - if Kaczynski broke with the coalition agreement.

Another substantial change in this restructuring of the Government is the appointment as Minister of Education of Przemyslaw Czarnek, a professor at the Catholic University of Lublin who is manifestly against the LGTBI collective, very much in line with the vision of Ziobro, who has defended at all costs to the hundred of cities declared "zones free of LGTBI ideology".

The ultra-Catholic leader, who had not held any official position since 2007, when his twin brother Lech Kaczynski led the country, who died in a plane crash in 2010, now stands as arbitrator between two successors condemned to understand each other within the same Government.

At a time when the country is touching the economic recession for the first time, in which the relationship with the EU is worse than ever due to PiS policies, which according to Brussels have deteriorated the rule of law, and when the number of infections due to coronavirus rises from the last week to more than a thousand every day.