Mateusz Morawiecki

Mateusz Morawiecki (born June 20, 1968, Wrocław, Poland) is a Polish banker, economist, and politician who served as prime minister of Poland (2017–23). Morawiecki, who had been serving as deputy prime minister and finance minister and minister of development in the Law and Justice (PiS) government, led by Beata Szydło, replaced her as prime minister as a result of a cabinet reshuffle engineered by Jarosław Kaczyński, the man behind the throne in the PiS.

Early life and career

Morawiecki grew up in Wrocław in southwestern Poland. His father, Kornel Morawiecki, a theoretical physicist, was an anti-communist dissident as a student, an early member of Solidarity, and the founder of Fighting Solidarity, a radical offshoot of Solidarity that refused to compromise with Poland’s communist government. In 1990 he sought the Polish presidency but failed to obtain the 100,000 signatures necessary to get him on the ballot. In 2010 he was on the ballot but did not garner enough support to advance to the second round of voting. Finally, in 2015, he was elected to the Sejm.

Morawiecki followed his father into Fighting Solidarity and also became involved in an independent students’ union. His political activism resulted not only in his arrest but also in him being beaten by communist security officers. He earned a degree in history at the University of Wrocław (1992), but this was just the first stage of what would be Morawiecki’s extensive formal academic journey. He also studied business administration at Wrocław University of Science and Technology and the Central Connecticut State University (1993), earned an MBA degree from Wrocław University of Economics (1995), studied European Law and Economics of European Integration at the University of Hamburg (1995–97), was awarded a Master of Advanced European Studies degree at the University of Basel (1995–97), and completed the Advanced Executive Program at Northwestern University. In the process, Morawiecki became fluent in German and English.

While pursuing his education, Morawiecki also began his professional career in 1991. His first job was with Cogito Co., a Zabrze, Poland-based company that specialized in supplying spare parts for earth-moving vehicles. From 1993 to 1996 he worked in the publishing industry, principally with ENTER Marketing-Publishing in Wrocław. In 1995 he served as an intern with Deutsche Bundesbank, and in 1996–97 he held a position at Goethe University of Frankfurt in Frankfurt am Main. In 1998 he began his career as banker, working from that year until 2015 for Bank Zachodni WBK, a Polish bank owned by the Spanish financial group Banco Santander, SA. In 2001 Morawiecki became a member of the management board of Bank Zachodni WBK, and in 2007 he was named the bank’s CEO.

In the meantime, Morawiecki served as deputy director of the Accession Negotiations Department in the Committee for European Integration in 1998. In that capacity he helped negotiate conditions for Poland’s accession to the European Union (EU). From 1998 to 2001 he sat on the supervisory boards of the Industrial Development Agency and the Electricity Board in Wrocław. At this time he also tried his hand at electoral politics, serving as a councillor in the nascent Lower Silesia Regional Assembly.

Politics and premiership

Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, Morawiecki remained independent politically, choosing not to join a political party. In 2010, however, he acted as an economic advisor to Donald Tusk of the liberal Civic Platform (PO) party when Tusk (who became president of the European Council in 2014) was prime minister of Poland. In 2015 Morawiecki was appointed minister of economic development in the cabinet of the majority government formed by the PO’s principal political rival, the conservative PiS, after its sweeping victory in that year’s legislative election. Morawiecki’s appointment was not completely out of the norm for the PiS, which, during its tenure in power in 2005–07, had employed three finance ministers whose approach to the economy was arguably more akin to that of the PO. The addition of Morawiecki to the cabinet was widely seen as an attempt to calm international investors who had become anxious about the populist PiS’s efforts to re-Polonize a national economy that had been heavily dependent on foreign investment since the fall of communism in 1989. Beyond his familiarity with international finance, Morawiecki came into office committed to deregulation, private entrepreneurship, and the development of smart technologies.

Owing at least partly to the efforts of Morawiecki, who became the finance minister and who joined the PiS in 2016, the Polish economy thrived during the two years of the government led by Szydło, growing at an annual rate of 4 percent in 2017. Moreover, unemployment registered at an impressively low 7 percent. As a result, Szydło’s government was widely popular with Poles. Nonetheless, it was embattled. Its attempts to reform the judiciary by removing standing judges and bringing the appointment of new judges under legislative control were criticized at home (with large street protests) and abroad. The EU in particular took issue with the proposed changes, characterizing them as undemocratic and as undermining the rule of law.

Opposition by Pres. Andrzej Duda stalled judicial reform, but revised legislation that had been framed by Duda was adopted by the Sejm in December 2017. That month, former prime minster Kaczyński, the de facto leader of the PiS, oversaw a cabinet reshuffle in which Morawiecki, who had added deputy prime minster to his list of responsibilities in September 2016, replaced Szydło as prime minister. In addition to leading the government, Morawiecki retained portfolios as finance minister and minister of development. Many pundits believed that Kaczyński was convinced that the polished, cosmopolitan Morawiecki was better equipped to win favor with the EU than Szydło, who remained in the cabinet as deputy prime minister. In addition to navigating vehement EU opposition to Poland’s judicial changes, Morawiecki was faced with the challenge of defending the government’s refusal to adhere to EU policy regarding the acceptance of migrants and refugees fleeing turmoil in Africa and the Middle East.

As prime minister, Morawiecki strove to advance his party’s advocacy of traditional family-oriented Roman Catholic values, but he continued to meld that conservative agenda for Polish society with a more typically leftist approach to the economy that further expanded social welfare programs that particularly benefited the PiS’s rural and small-town base. Meanwhile, Morawiecki oversaw the government’s ever-tightening control of the judiciary and the media. Yet, even as Poland moved increasingly in the direction of the autocratic “illiberal democracy” established by Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the Polish economy continued to hum admirably.

In the 2019 legislative election, Morawiecki was returned to the premiership when the PiS re-secured its solid majority in the 460-seat Sejm by duplicating its performance in the 2015 election and again garnering 235 seats. The party fared less well in the election for the Senate, losing its majority to the informal coalition that was formed by the three principal opposition parties (Civic Platform, PSL, and Left Alliance), which, with the help of three coalition-endorsed candidates, took control of the 100-seat chamber with 51 seats. With its monopoly on national power disrupted, the PiS faced the possibility of seeing its juggernaut to transform Poland further stymied should Duda lose the 2020 presidential election. However, Duda retained his office, narrowly besting his Civic Platform challenger, Rafał Trzaskowski, Warsaw’s liberal mayor.

In early 2020 Morawiecki and Poland, like most of the rest of the world, were confronted with the life-or-death challenge of trying to halt the spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic. Although Poland’s economy would withstand the negative impact of the lockdowns and restrictions intended to halt the transmission of the virus better than many other European countries, for the first time in some 30 years the country’s GDP contracted in 2020, dropping by 2.8 percent. Moreover, the Polish populace was hard-hit by the disease and suffered one of the world’s highest per capita pandemic-related death rates. By mid-July 2021 more than 75,000 deaths resulting from COVID-19 (the disease caused by the virus) had been reported in the country.

When Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled in October 2020 that the termination of pregnancies in cases of severe fetal abnormalities was unconstitutional, it effectively imposed a near total ban on abortions in the country. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators again took to the streets to protest the ruling, which was condemned throughout the EU. Meanwhile, other EU member states, responding to what they viewed as Poland’s and Hungary’s backsliding on democratic values, introduced legislation that would tie the dispersal of EU funds to member states’ adherence to the rule of law—especially, in the case of Poland and Hungary, regarding matters of judicial independence, press freedom, government checks and balances, and a strong anti-corruption framework. Pushing back, Morawiecki and Orbán threatened to veto the EU’s proposed €1.8 trillion budget and pandemic recovery package if the EU’s new “conditionality mechanism” were not dropped. Tensions were at least temporarily defused in December 2020 when a compromise was reached that called for the mechanism not to be employed until the Court of Justice of the European Union had ruled on its legality. The agreement provided political breathing room for Morawiecki and Orbán, allowing them to withdraw their veto threats.

In June 2021 the PiS lost its majority in the Sejm when three lawmakers withdrew from the governing coalition because of its decision to begin phasing out coal production. Despite their defection, Morawiecki appeared to have enough support from aligned smaller parties and members of the opposition on crucial individual issues to maintain power for the foreseeable future.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Poland became one of Ukraine’s key supporters in the escalating Russia-Ukraine War and played a pivotal role as a hub for the transportation of weapons and other forms of aid. By October 2023 Poland also had provided Ukraine with more than $3 billion in arms and had taken in more than one million Ukrainian refugees. However, in September 2023 Morawiecki brought the future of Polish military aid into question after the EU removed a ban that it had imposed on the sale of Ukrainian grain in Poland and several other central European countries in an attempt to protect domestic grain producers in those countries when tariff restrictions were dropped to allow Ukraine to transport grain to the European market in the wake of Russia’s disruption of Ukrainian exports.

As the October 2023 Polish parliamentary elections approached, Morawiecki warned voters that a return to rule by Civic Platform—once again led by Donald Tusk, returned from service as the president of the European Council—would make Poland beholden to EU masters. He also cautioned that a change of government would lead to a deluge of immigrants, even as his own government was embroiled in a scandal related to the sale of work visas to African and Asian migrants. Meanwhile, the opposition cast the election as a battle to preserve Poland’s democracy.

Some 74 percent of eligible voters turned out for the election, a historic level of participation that surpassed even that of 1989, when Poles rejected communist rule. The PiS finished first, with some 35 percent of the vote, but it fell short of its performance in past elections, capturing about 194 seats in the Sejm, not enough to constitute a ruling majority, even with the addition of the 18 seats won by its potential coalition partner, the Confederation party. Civic Platform and its allies, Third Way and the New Left, together claimed about 250 seats (taking about 31 percent, 14 percent, and 9 percent of the vote, respectively), enough to make up a parliamentary majority.

Despite the unlikelihood that Morawiecki would be able to gain enough support from other parties to remain in power, President Duda gave him the first opportunity to form a new government. After Morawiecki’s caretaker government lost a vote of confidence on December 11, the Sejm elected Tusk prime minister by a 248–201 vote.