Status: 01/13/2023 5:49 p.m
Poland’s Prime Minister Morawiecki needs the Corona billions blocked by the EU. To do this, he wants to reinvent the controversial disciplinary body. However, even this EU rapprochement goes too far for his coalition partner.
It’s getting noisy in the Polish Sejm. Because behind draft law 2870, which is being debated here, lies what is perhaps the greatest defeat of the ruling party PiS in the ongoing dispute with the EU Commission: the law on the supreme court. Only: Courts appear only marginally in the debate. It’s all about money, European money. Borys Budka, leader of the largest opposition faction KO:
The money from the EU is now for Polish entrepreneurs, Polish families, the regional administrations like oxygen for the cycle – indispensable to save the Polish economy.
According to Budka, the PiS government is unable to get the money. So the pro-European, pro-bourgeois opposition must do what the government should have done long ago.
It’s about 35 billion euros
The EU Commission is withholding around 35 billion euros for Poland from the Corona reconstruction fund – because of the PiS government’s intervention in the independence of Polish courts. There is an election campaign in Poland, the energy crisis and high inflation are putting the PiS under pressure.
She needs the money from Brussels. That is why she is – probably after consultation with the commission – ready to rearrange the so-called disciplinary chamber at the highest court.
Disciplinary Chamber becomes “Chamber for Professional Responsibility”
The Disciplinary Chamber is a central component of the PiS government’s judicial reform – in practice, above all, to sanction unwelcome judges. It was indeed dissolved by the Sejm in June last year under pressure from the EU, but only in order to be re-established under a different name (“Chamber for Professional Responsibility”).
This would – according to the calculations of the PiS – eliminate a central point of criticism from the EU Commission. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has therefore been campaigning for support for days:
Here and now, after the pandemic and at a time of dangerous geopolitical confusion on our eastern border, it’s really worth embracing the grants – money that we can really use to make a lot of investments (…) If there are flaws in the law, you shouldn’t concentrate on that, rather on what is really important now.
A compromise is unthinkable for the coalition partner
And there are shortcomings: Experts criticize that the law is not constitutional at all. The opposition criticizes that many other serious encroachments on the rule of law would not even be touched upon.
But PiS’s biggest opponent is its own coalition partner, Solidarna Polska. Thanks to the judicial reform, its chairman, Zbigniew Ziobro, is both Attorney General and Minister of Justice. For Ziobro, the EU is nothing more than Germany’s extended arm. A compromise? For him unthinkable:
The European Commission relies on methods of organized crime. (…) If we give in, it will only lead to further demands. It’s all about depriving Poland of its sovereignty as a state with equal rights in the EU. It is about a change of power in Poland, so that the screenplay of the coming elections will be written in Berlin and not in the hearts of Poles.
The law has not yet been passed
The coalition is at odds, but the opposition is coming under public pressure – it is now up to them whether Poland will receive the funds. The law goes through – only because the opposition is almost completely abstaining.
Now, however, it still has to pass through the second chamber of parliament – and that is dominated by the opposition. Poland must continue to wait for the transfer of billions from Brussels.
PiS gives way in dispute over the rule of law
Martin Adam, ARD Warsaw, January 13, 2023 3:52 p.m