Leaders without Leadership: Surrogate Governments in Poland

Abstract

The subject of this analysis is a situation observed in Poland and, in recent years, other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, in which the leadership of the executive is located outside a constitutionally defined government. A representative situation in which a prime minister is controlled by a party leader without a formal government position is defined as a ‘surrogate government’. Five Polish cabinets in the period 1991–2019 met the preliminary criteria of ‘surrogate government’; of these, the cabinets of Beata Szydło and Mateusz Morawiecki come closest to fulfilling the criteria completely.