What started out a year ago as a dispute over a post-election transition of power has turned into a crisis in Poland, the European Union’s largest eastern economy. At risk is the democratic order that Poland has built up in the 27 years since ditching communism.
What’s the crisis?
There’s a standoff around the Constitutional Tribunal, the country’s highest judicial panel, which can strike down laws. Politicians from the ruling Law & Justice party have called its judges “cronies” defending the nation’s elites. Lawmakers have passed no less than six new laws to “fix” the Tribunal in the past year, while the government has refused to publish, and hence make binding, rulings that rejected the laws parliament passed as unconstitutional. The EU’s executive arm has taken unprecedented steps to push Poland to adhere to the block’s democratic standards, but has taken no action.What triggered the standoff?
A bitter political crisis in Poland worsened over the weekend with heated protests both in and outside the nation’s parliament and a swirl of allegations of attempted coups and threats to democracy. Around two dozen members of Poland’s main opposition party extended their sit-in protest in parliament on Sunday after talks to resolve a dispute over proposed restrictions on media access failed to produce an agreement. New rules for journalists in parliament put forward by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party have led to the biggest political standoff in years in the European Union state, with protests spreading across the country on Saturday.
Before general elections in October 2015, the former ruling majority picked five judges for the Tribunal, who weren’t sworn in by President Andrzej Duda, a former Law & Justice lawmaker. The Tribunal then declared the previous parliament had overreached its mandate, which was to fill three of the vacancies and leave two for the new parliament.Where is this heading?
As the nine-year term of the Tribunal’s chief justice, Andrzej Rzeplinski, is ending on December 19, Law & Justice is preparing to finally grab control over the highest court. When the Tribunal was set to pick Rzeplinski’s successor this month, justices picked by the ruling party all took sick days, preventing a quorum needed to make such a decision. In the meantime, lawmakers passed a law that allows the president and prime minister to pick an interim chief for the panel in case the existing justices can’t pick their own boss.How is this affecting business?
Businesses have reduced investment, partly because of increasing political uncertainty. Fixed gross capital formation, a component of gross domestic product that measures net investment, dropped 7.7% in the third quarter from a year earlier, the biggest descent since 2010. Economic growth slowed to a three-year low of 2.5%, although remains strong compared to Poland’s EU partners.
