Polish defense is in the hands of debutants. The presidential election will deepen this

• On Monday, May 12, Adam Leszkiewicz took over as president of PGZ. This is his first job in the arms industry.
• The current Minister of Defence, as well as the Deputy Minister of Assets responsible for armaments - they also had no previous experience in the defence sector.
• Lack of experience in the arms industry is nothing new - we had a similar situation when PiS was in power.

On Friday, May 9, the supervisory board of Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa , which includes several dozen state-owned defense industry companies, decided that Adam Leszkiewicz would be the new president of PGZ . He took up the position on Monday.

This is the new president's first job in the defense sector. Until Friday, he had been president of Grupa Azoty for over a year. During the previous PO-PSL coalition, he was president of the nitrogen plant in Kędzierzyn-Koźle, as well as chairman of the board in the Polish Chamber of Chemical Industry. During Donald Tusk's first term as prime minister, he was also a minister in his chancellery and then deputy minister of the State Treasury. At that time, he supervised companies from the chemical, shipbuilding and real estate sectors, among others.

As we wrote on Friday in WNP.PL, Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa needs an efficient manager, and the new president has many years of experience in managing large industrial groups and restructuring them . In Grupa Azoty, which was in very bad shape after the previous governments, Leszkiewicz managed to improve cooperation between companies in the group. The same challenge now awaits him in PGZ .

President as Minister

The fact that in the defence sector we have a person with extensive experience in other areas, but making his debut here, in an important position is now not the exception, but the rule.

Take the current Minister of National Defense and Deputy Prime Minister. Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz , before taking up these positions in December 2023, had nothing to do with defense. As an MP, he never sat on the Defense Committee or even on a committee dealing with similar issues, such as the Foreign Affairs or Internal Affairs Committees. As a doctor by profession (he has a doctorate), he worked on the Health Committee.

Since he took office as an MP in 2015, he has signed over 200 interpellations, inquiries and questions on current affairs for two terms until 2023. None of them concerned the armed forces .

Interestingly, the current minister was once connected to the ministry... through family . Namely, Zenon Kosiniak-Kamysz, a diplomat and Władysław's uncle, was a deputy minister in the Ministry of National Defense responsible for the purchase of weapons and military equipment from March 2008 to November 2009.

Kosiniak-Kamysz is the first defense minister since 1989 who is also the leader of a party that forms a government coalition. In November, he will have been the chairman of the Polish People's Party for 10 years. He also has experience as a constitutional minister - in the 2011-15 term, he was the head of the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy.

In the Ministry of State Assets, since the beginning of February, companies in the defense sector have been supervised by another debutant in the defense sector. Konrad Gołota is associated with the Left, before taking up the position in MAP he was the head of the political cabinet of the deputy prime minister, minister of digitalization Krzysztof Gawkowski .

His LinkedIn bio shows that Konrad Gołota was employed by political parties for over a decade – first by the Democratic Left Alliance in Warsaw, then, in 2016-23, by the Party of European Socialists in Brussels. There, he analyzed public policies in Central and Eastern European countries. He also has some work in the private sector.

Beyond party divisions

The appointment of politicians and managers with no experience in the industry to important positions in the defense sector did not begin with the governments of the current coalition, which consists of the Civic Coalition , Poland 2050 , PSL , and the Left . Law and Justice governments also reached out to people who had previously worked in other areas.

Let's take the predecessor of the last defense minister before the change of government. Mariusz Błaszczak headed the Ministry of National Defense for almost six years, making him the longest-serving defense minister after 1989. Before taking up this position in January 2018, he had never sat on the defense committee as an MP (and had been since 2007) . He only got there in the current term.

He did have experience in administration, first as a civil servant, then as a minister. During the first PiS government (2005-07) he was the head of the Prime Minister's office. After the "good change" at the end of 2015, he became the head of the Ministry of Interior and Administration for a little over two years.

In January 2018, a group of his closest associates came to the Ministry of National Defense along with Błaszczak and took up the positions of deputy ministers, department directors, etc. One of them was Sebastian Chwałek , who in 2021 became the president of PGZ, the last one before PiS handed over power.

Like all of Błaszczak's associates, Chwałek had no experience in defense before 2018. He is a lawyer, and in 2005-15 he was an employee of the PiS parliamentary club (he headed the legislative and analysis team), and in 2007 he also worked in the prime minister's office.

After 2018, he was first deputy minister of defence, then vice-president of PGZ, again deputy head of the Ministry of National Defence, and finally became president of PGZ.

A newbie doesn't have to be a dilettante

The entrusting of important positions in the defense sector to people with experience in other industries is not happening only in Poland. There is no point in dwelling on Russia any longer, where since last year the defense minister (although it would be better to say: minister of war) has been an economist (and his two predecessors were respectively: an economist and a specialist in rescue services).

Let's look at our western neighbors. Since January 2023, the Federal Minister of Defense of Germany has been Boris Pistorius (SPD). Before that, he headed the Ministry of the Interior and Sports for a decade, but not in Berlin, but at the level of one of the federal states - Lower Saxony. In turn, in the years 2006-13, he was mayor of the city of Osnabrück, with a population of just under 170,000.

Pistorius was one of the most highly rated ministers in the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) and is now one of the most popular politicians in Germany. He was the only member of the previous cabinet to retain his position after Friedrich Merz (CDU) was sworn in as chancellor last week. He was elected to the Bundestag for the first time in the February elections.

The commander-in-chief of the Polish armed forces will also be a debutant

Poles will vote in the presidential elections next Sunday. The second round is scheduled for June 1. According to polls, Rafał Trzaskowski (KO) and Karol Nawrocki (supported by PiS) will face off. The third most popular candidate is Sławomir Mentzen (Konfederacja).

Regardless of who takes over the presidency in early August and thus becomes commander-in-chief of the armed forces, they are united by their lack of experience in the defense sector . Although Nawrocki likes to show up at the shooting range during the campaign, and Trzaskowski recently underwent a one-day training session with the military, neither of them (including Mentzen) has ever worked in administration or parliament in defense-related positions.

Just like Andrzej Duda did when he took office in 2015.