Poland: Europe’s new enfant terrible? by Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska
Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party has never hidden its admiration for the Fidesz government in neighbouring Hungary. “I am convinced that one day we will have Budapest in Warsaw,” said Jarosław Kaczyński, the party’s leader in 2011, when PiS lost the parliamentary elections. Today, Kaczyński can realise his dream: PiS has a parliamentary majority and it is free to copy Fidesz policies. But while Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, managed to get away with most of his ‘illiberal’ reforms, the Polish authorities may not be so lucky. On January 13th the European Commission decided to assess whether the rule of law is under threat in Poland.
more difficult for the Tribunal to challenge new legislation. The new law obliges the Tribunal to rule on cases in the order it receives them, rather than deciding for itself which cases are more important and should be moved to the front of the queue. As a result, it will be some time before the Tribunal has the opportunity to assess the constitutionality of PiS measures.
Neither Orbán nor Kaczyński like being criticised, whether by the media or the courts. When Orbán won the parliamentary elections in 2010, he quickly turned the public media, which were often critical of him, into a government mouthpiece. The current Polish government has also pushed through legal changes enabling it to replace the top management in public radio and TV with supporters of PiS.
The EU institutions worry that Budapest and Warsaw are deliberately trying to weaken democratic checks and balances. The European Parliament regularly summoned the Hungarian prime minister to Strasbourg to explain his ‘illiberal’ policies; and the Commission took Hungary to the European Court of Justice for violating EU law by, among other things, forcing the country’s 274 judges to retire. The Commission did not, however, activate article 7 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) against Hungary. This article – regarded as a ‘nuclear option’ – is designed to address a serious and persistent threat to democratic values in a member-state and can lead to the suspension of EU voting rights. EU leaders (minus the one concerned) must agree unanimously to impose sanctions under article 7 – something that would
When the Hungarian constitutional court questioned some of Orbán’s laws, Fidesz (which until 2015 had a ‘super-majority’ in parliament) simply amended the Hungarian constitution. But PiS cannot do this: it lacks a constitutional majority. It can however amend laws. In December 2015 it changed the act governing the Constitutional Tribunal (Court) to make it