This change provides an opportunity to Poland and other eastern EU states to push their nationalist agenda, but it also poses a risk if Germany (which is four times more important to Poland’s economy than the UK) feels the need to crank up the stalled Franco-German motor to stop the EU from falling apart.

“At this moment it is hard to know which way it will go,” says Prof Aleks Szczerbiak, professor of politics at the University of Sussex, and author of Poland Within the European Union: New Awkward Partner or New Heart of Europe.

“Will Germany tighten the Franco-German axis, or will Brexit allow Poland to play something of the Eurosceptic ‘bad-cop’ role that Britain played before its departure?”

Mr Kaczyński is no stranger to playing bad cop in Europe. When his party won power in 2015 he also launched a domestic “cultural counter-revolution” to “recapture” Poland, as he saw it, from the Western-orientated, urban liberal elites that were the poster-children of EU expansion and integration.

As a result of this abrupt reversal of direction, Poland has been put on watch by the EU which last December warned that Law and Justice’s actions posed a “systemic threat to the rule of law in Poland”.

Mr Kaczyński not surprisingly rejects this as the kind of “post-colonial” EU attitude to Poland that he will never accept. Whatever Law and Justice have done, he argues, it pales into insignificance when set against what was done by the previous ruling elite.

“Whereas whatever is happening in Poland right now, it doesn’t give grounds to say that democracy is at risk,” he says, promising that Poland will “entirely” ignore the EU institutions if they attempt to censure Poland when a deadline to institute corrective measures expires at the end of this month – a move that would only ever amount to a demonstration of discontent on the EU’s part since Hungary has already promised to block any attempt to sanction Poland.

The looming fight between Warsaw and Brussels is further spiced by the fact that Donald Tusk, the current President of the European Council which must coral the disparate 27 member states on Brexit, is a former Polish prime minister who is an ideological arch-enemy and old political foe of Mr Kaczyński.

Last week, as Mr Tusk called for EU member states to unite and deepen their ties at the EU leaders’ summit in Malta, he was predictably slapped down by Poland’s prime minister for simply failing to heed the lessons of Brexit and the fact that “reform is needed” in the EU.