Yesterday's replacement of four vice-prime ministers of the Polish government with one supposedly looks like an economy, but in fact everything is quite the opposite - the number of ministers is the largest in the history of Poland.
This is reported by RMF24.
There are 16 ministries left in the Polish government, but the Council of Ministers currently has 28 members. The Polish government is now larger than the European Commission (the European Commission now has 26 members, including the president), and one in three ministers holds office without having a ministry.
The increase in the number of government officials was the result of the resignation of four deputy prime ministers, but only from the positions of deputy prime ministers. Mariusz Blaszczak, Petro Glinski, and Jacek Sasin continue to head the ministries of defense, culture, and state assets, so they remain in the government. Vice Prime Minister Henrik Kovalchyk, who lost the Ministry of Agriculture a few months ago, resigned from his position, but not from his place in the government.
Yesterday, Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński also joined the members of the government working without ministries, while the group of "portfolios", apart from the Prime Minister, still includes ministers Agnieszka Shchygay, Marek Kuhczynski, Michal Dvorczyk, Adam Hoffman, Lukasz Schreiber, Szymon Shynkivskyi vel Senk, Wlodzimierz Tomaszewskii and Michal Vujcyk. Eleven of the 28 members of the Council of Ministers are currently in office without portfolio.
There were not so many ministers in any Polish government. After 1989, the most numerous were the governments of the early 1990s (Tadeusz Moravetskii - 24 and Anna Sukhotska - 25 members).
In 2018, including deputy ministers and state secretaries in the prime minister's office, the total number of government officials exceeded 125 people. Then the Prime Minister ordered to reduce it by about 20%. It was planned to reduce the number of positions to 100, but this was only possible for a while.
Today, in addition to 28 constitutional members, the government also includes 76 deputy ministers in individual ministries and a dozen officials of this rank in the president's office. In total, the government in this sense has 115 people.
It is also worth remembering that the number of commissioners appointed by the government and the prime minister for certain issues is also constantly growing. If earlier their number was around 50, today there are already 60 such authorized persons.
We will remind you that the President of Poland, Andrzej Duda, on Wednesday officially appointed the head of the ruling "Law and Justice" party as the deputy prime minister in Mateusz Morawiecki's government.
