The country’s most powerful political machine has been stopped short of total control. On October 15, 2023, Poland voted. And while the ruling Law and Justice Party, PiS, won more seats than any single rival, it lost its grip on power.
PiS took a plurality. That is the raw fact. The United Right alliance, which PiS leads, placed first for the third straight election. But for the first time in eight years, it does not command a majority in the Sejm, the lower house of parliament. The numbers simply are not there.
This is where the stakes harden. A party that has spent two terms reshaping the judiciary, clashing with the European Union over rule-of-law standards, and tightening its hold on state media now faces a coalition of opponents who have promised to reverse those changes. The opposition—the Civic Coalition, the Third Way, and The Left—won a combined 54 percent of the vote. That is a clear majority. They intend to form a government.
Donald Tusk, the former prime minister and former European Council president, led the Civic Coalition. He is the figure around whom the opposition assembled. Tusk has been a direct antagonist to PiS for years. He returned to Polish politics specifically to challenge them. The election results give him the opening he needed.
The Senate tells a similar story. The opposition electoral alliance Senate Pact 2023 won a plurality of the vote and a majority of seats in the upper house. The Senate is the weaker chamber, but it is not powerless. It can delay legislation. It can force amendments. With a friendly majority there, the opposition can slow or block PiS initiatives even during the transition period.
PiS had sought a third consecutive term. No party in post-communist Poland has ever achieved that. They came close. They fell short. The party and its allies campaigned hard on a platform of economic nationalism and a hard line against immigration. They put those same issues before voters in a referendum held the same day as the election. The referendum contained four questions on economic and immigration policy. It was an attempt to drive turnout among their base. It did not deliver the majority they needed.
The result is a divided parliament. PiS holds the most seats, but not the keys to government. The opposition holds the majority, but only as a coalition of three distinct blocs. Keeping those blocs together will take work. The Civic Coalition, Third Way, and The Left do not agree on everything. They agree on one thing: PiS must not govern alone.
What happens next is the real story. The president, Andrzej Duda, is a PiS ally. He will likely first ask the PiS candidate for prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, to try to form a government. Morawiecki has been prime minister since 2017. He will attempt to build a coalition. He will almost certainly fail. No other party has signaled a willingness to join a PiS-led government. The arithmetic is against him.
When that attempt collapses, the Sejm will get its turn. The opposition coalition will nominate its own candidate. That candidate will almost certainly be Donald Tusk. Tusk was prime minister of Poland from 2007 to 2014. He has held that office before. He knows the machinery of the state. He also knows the fight ahead.
Poland now enters a period of political uncertainty. The election settled who won seats. It did not settle who will govern. That fight is just beginning. And the outcome will determine whether eight years of PiS rule can be unwound, or whether the party’s institutional changes survive even after its electoral defeat is complete.
