The Polish parliament returned from its Christmas break on 11 January, but the new parliamentary term continued to be disrupted by a protest from opposition MPs which began in December. Ben Stanley writes that although the opposition eventually suspended its occupation of the plenary hall on the second day of the session, the crisis remains, with government and opposition not only unable to reach consensus about the legality of vital laws, but also unable to reach consensus about the legitimacy of the means for reviewing those laws.
During 2016, Poland metamorphosed from the poster boy of post-communist democratic transition to the rebellious teenager of the new populist zeitgeist. Having come to power on the back of a cannily moderate campaign, the Law and Justice government immediately set about pursuing a radical path of reform that has led to accusations of democratic backsliding and prompted an unprecedented rule-of-law investigation by the European Commission, although the government has maintained domestic popularity with generous spending and the rolling back of a planned increase in the retirement age.
In December, a parliamentary crisis erupted after a deputy from the main opposition party Civic Platform was excluded from the day’s proceedings during plenary debate on the 2017 budget bill, with opposition parties blocking the rostrum and speaker’s chair of the plenary hall of the Sejm (lower house of the Polish parliament) and staging a three-week occupation. To understand why an easily resolvable spat has escalated into a stand-off that threatens the integrity of the legislature, it is necessary to view these events as the consequence of a broader conflict over the nature and legitimacy of the constitutional order in Poland.
One of the key dividing lines in Polish politics runs between those political elites who fully accept the legitimacy of the political system and those who have always contested it. Since the early 1990s, Law and Justice leader Jarosław Kaczyński has maintained that the liberal-democratic transition was a sham, founded on the self-interested actions of an alliance of former communists and co-opted former oppositionist liberals. In Mr Kaczyński’s view, the 1997 Constitution was not the founding stone of a democratic Poland but merely the means by which this illegitimate, inauthentic elite cemented its advantages. The actions of the current government – nominally headed by Beata Szydło but undoubtedly dominated by Mr Kaczyński – must be understood in the context of their leader’s drive to build a Fourth Republic on the ruins of the Third.
As I have explained in more detail in a recent article in Democratization, Law and Justice’s previous attempts to undertake radical reforms to the system between 2005-07 were thwarted not so much by the political opposition but by the system itself, with the Constitutional Tribunal proving a particularly stubborn bulwark. On regaining power in late 2015, Law and Justice immediately set about defanging the Tribunal, forcing through appointments of judges with no judicial mandate and using ordinary legislative acts to stymie its proceedings. By the end of the year, the Tribunal was not yet subordinate to the executive, but its independence had been severely compromised.
Establishing control over the legislature was the next logical step in the ‘creative destruction’ phase of institutional reform. This is not to suggest that the government necessarily aimed to provoke the crisis. While the exclusion of the opposition deputy was procedurally doubtful, the responsibility for disrupting the session of parliament lies squarely with the opposition. However, the reason that the parliamentary protest escalated into a crisis is because it was useful for the government that this should happen. It was widely reported that Sejm speaker Marek Kuchciński was prepared to reach a compromise with the opposition to end the protest and restore the errant deputy, but changed his mind after a sinew-stiffening conversation with Jarosław Kaczyński. Instead, after a hasty meeting of the Law and Justice parliamentary party, the session of parliament restarted in a hall used for sittings of parliamentary committees.
Ostensibly, parliament reconvened because of the urgency of passing the budget bill. However, the avoidably chaotic circumstances in which it did this, with opposition deputies initially unable to enter the hall and then prevented from making points of order while the speaker swiftly pushed through votes on a show of hands, only conveyed the impression that Law and Justice was purposely cultivating an atmosphere of institutional dysfunction. This impression was compounded in the first days of the crisis, with the Sejm cordoned off to prevent protesters repeating their tactic of blocking its entrances and exits, and all but a few select media outlets barred from entering the parliament building.
No resolution was found over the Christmas and New Year break, despite informal negotiations between government and opposition parties. Law and Justice pressed for a solution that would see the opposition accepting that the budget bill had been passed legally, while the opposition continued to insist that the reconvened session of parliament was illegal, given the inability of opposition deputies to participate in proceedings, the exclusion of the media, and the failure of the Sejm administration to show that the votes were quorate and had been counted properly.
The first session of parliament to be held after the outbreak of the crisis in December did not resolve the stand-off. Although the opposition eventually suspended its occupation of the plenary hall on the second day of the session, the Senate had already rendered the issue of the budget bill moot by passing it without amendment. The budget cannot now be returned to the lower house for consideration, nor can it be vetoed by President Duda, who has no prerogative to veto budgetary legislation. The only institution that can stop the fruit of the parliamentary crisis entering into law is the Constitutional Tribunal, but any ruling from the Tribunal would simply compound the problem. The Tribunal must sit in full session to rule on the constitutionality of budgetary legislation, and since government and opposition are in dispute over the judicial mandate of three of the sitting judges, it is difficult to see how any ruling could be passed that both sides would regard as legitimate.
While the parliamentary protest is over, the crisis remains, and it is a crisis that extends beyond the day-to-day functioning of the parliament and deeply into the institutional mechanics of the Polish state. In essence, Poland now has a twin-track legislature to match its twin-track Constitutional Tribunal, with government and opposition not only unable to reach consensus about the legality of vital laws, but also unable to reach consensus about the legitimacy of the means for reviewing those laws. It is difficult to see how this system can continue to function. But perhaps that is the point.
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Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.
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Ben Stanley – SWPS University
Ben Stanley is a Lecturer at SWPS University in Warsaw. He tweets @BDStanley
In brief: Poland’s Communists in 1989 decided to gradually change foreign paymaster from Russians to Western European Big Business. The Communists ran the Solidarity Opposition – all the way up to Lech Wałęsa. They ran the Underground Press pre-1989, then set up Gazeta Wyborcza in 1989. As an elite caste they controlled from 1989 on: big business, the press, public and private TV, the judiciary, foreign news coverage (e.g. check who the AP reporter is now), the former Communist Party (SLD) and the Solidarity inheritor parties, the Turth Commission (IPN), the diplomatic corps. Then 2 things happened: Ukraine and the Internet. Ukraine – Putin demanded loyalty from Tusk, but Tusk was conflicted in his game of taking favours from East and West. He sent Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski to Maidan, who threatened the protestors with death. Sikorski’s wife – Anne Applebaum – is Poland’s representative at Bilderberg. Tusk could go no further. Putin then released recordings of govt ministers telling the truth about Poland being a country that existed only on paper. The Interior Minister talked of his dirty ops against the Opposition using secret agents and agents provocateurs. They talked of foreign domination of media ownership. The Internet spread the truth. I could go on. Essentially, foreign Big Business has had an excellent run – achieving dominance in the Polish economy and repatriating profits tax-free thru Juncker’s gangster state of Luxemburg. Not wanting to waste any more of my time, just look at Poland’s most senior diplomatic posting under the Ultra Libertarian former government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryszard_Schnepf Oh – and Poland has just introduced CHILD BENEFIT. The Ultra Libertarians were opposed to raising living standards for the undeserving poor. Extreme child poverty has fallen by half in 6 months.
I think the Moderator allowed your piece appear so we can all have a good laugh, but it’s so bad it’s not even funny. It is line after line of conspiratorial paranoid nonsense. Unfortunately, it is symptomatic of the kind of mind-set which PiS feeds and fosters, the sort of mental aberration which believes that Smolensk was a deliberate assassination. It’s the kind of delusion which elects Donald Trump, and it is much exploited in many countries by Russia. I’m not going to refute you; rather, your extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.
Couldn’t agree more.
One wonders if Solidarity will pull the sword from the stone and again come to the rescue. Until recently they seemed eager to support PiS at every juncture but now maybe their collective conscience might start to bite when they see they are supporting much the same type of system as the one they toppled. The new generation of corporate employees seems reluctant to get off the sofa or show much interest in what created the opportunity for them to sit on it.
Recently, current Solidarity leader Piotr Duda proposed that Solidarity members would come out on the streets and suppress the KOD and other protests “with their hats”. He seems to see Solidarity as PiS’ Brownshirts.
What do you think would happen if, by some miracle, opposition parties agreed to boycott parliament? Since they aren’t allowed to speak there and the government doesn’t debate things as important as the budget, there’s not much to be gained by attending. They would then be in a much better position to organise more effective street protests and other actions. Of course it might be a little uncomfortable.
What we have in Poland is “state capture”, i.e. the complete control of the state by a minority, followed by the destruction of democratic institutions in a way incomprehensible to people in, say, the developed English-speaking countries. in the elections of 2015, in the lower house (Sejm) PiS won 37.6% of the votes out of a 51% turnout, but despite the proportional representation system, won 51.1% of the seats. In addition, a far right nationalist libertarian group led by an ageing rocker got 8.8% of the votes cast for 9.1% of the parliamentary seats. The Left was completely excluded, because the United Left coalition got 7.55% of the vote, below the 8% threshold for coalitions to get any seats, while monolithic parties face only a 5% barrier. A youthful New Left group, refusing to join the United Left and ironically calling itself the Together Party, unexpectedly got 3.6% of the vote, denying the United Left its threshold, and together with the 6% or so voting for other splinter parties, caused the strange situation of PiS attaining a bare majority of seats with a decided minority of votes cast. Furthermore, PiS ran a deceptively moderate campaign, as noted in the article.
Since October, 2015, PiS have demolished the Constitutional Tribunal and is now voiding its collected judgements in an unbelievably outrageous manner. The Opposition which staged the parliamentary sit-in is being threatened with prosecution and jail. All state corporations and public media have been taken over by party functionaries, the military is being purged and a new para-military territorial force formed under the direct command of the Defence Minister. Independent privately-owned media are being starved of advertising, and one can expect pressure on business in general not to advertise in non-Right-wing media. As a result, independent or Opposition-supporting media are under serious economic stress.
For now, the Opposition and the citizens’ movement KOD are hopelessly split, and some of its leaders have seriously, if not irrevocably, compromised themselves. The Left is loaded with post-Communist baggage, people who desperately want to return to parliamentary sinecures just by getting over 5% of the vote, so future coalitions are excluded because of the higher threshold. In any case, the SLD post-communists are no left!
The best hope is a group of very smart women, spread among the centre-right to left Opposition parties, who together have already shown their heft with the famous Black Protest of last year, when PiS supported a proposed absolute ban on abortion. There are some excellent men, too, including the famed Solidarity veteran and businessman Wladyslaw Frasyniuk and the brilliant gay mayor of Slupsk, Robert Biedron, but for now it is the women who must formulate a platform which can attract people away from PiS with its state capture aided by enormous handouts to parents and near-retirees. Some of these women have recently received world-wide recognition for their efforts, e.g. Barbara Nowacka, Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk, Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus and even ex-premier Ewa Kopacz. As in America, the artistic community is strongly opposed to right-wing populism, but in Poland the fight against Kaczynski is much harder than against Trump in the US. Krystyna Janda and Meryl Streep have much in common (again, women …).
Another article in the interest of big global corporations. Poland is beginning to serve its people and not mega thieves and this causes articles like this.