Poland’s political landscape is in the midst of a constitutional crisis over the issue of judicial appointments, reigniting a similar dispute from 2015. Prime Minister Tusk’s Civic Coalition is clashing with the hard-right Law and Justice Party (PiS), which controls the presidency despite being the opposition party in parliament. The European courts have sided with Tusk’s Civic Coalition for now, but Poles will ultimately have to decide for themselves which party is in the right.
Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about Poland. Specifically, we’ve got both the Prime Minister and the president pointing fingers at one another saying they’re trying to throw a coup and they’re all right. What we’ve got going on is two major rightist parties in Poland. The one that controls the government at the moment is called Civic Platform. It is run by Donald Tusk, who is also a former EU president. The other one is called PiS, which in Polish stands for Law and Justice, which is a more populist group, a little bit more kind of like, well, I mean, the Civic Platform is kind of like the Republicans were 20 years ago, and PiS – Law and Justice is more or less like what the Republican Party under Trump is now. Those aren’t perfect comparisons, but it’s a good kind of stake in the ground. Anyway, Civic Platform controls the presidency guy by the name of Nawrocki and Nawrocki basically came back from a big government overseas trip and from some points of view, broke into the Constitutional Court in order to prevent some judges from switching positions. What’s going on is back in 2015, which is when the Civic Platform ran the government and then lost an election and PiS took over for eight years. There were some judges in the Constitutional Tribunal, which is kind of like the Supreme Court whose positions were expiring. That’s an eight year term. And so the sitting government, the Civic Platform, appointed new ones. Then they lost the election before they could be confirmed. And so the PiS came through and invalidated those appointments and put in their own. Back then Civic Platform said that what piss did was unconstitutional, which is correct according to the constitution. And back then PiS said that it was their prerogative as controlling the government to be able to do whatever they wanted, which is also correct according to the constitution. Remember that Poland was run by the Soviet Union until 1989, so when all of their founding documents got put into place, they haven’t really been through the wringer yet. This is really the first time. And so both sides are right in. Both sides are wrong. The European Union’s courts sided with Civic Platform, but the PiS said we don’t care what they say because we just don’t recognize the European courts as having supremacy here, which the European Court of course said no, of course we do have supremacy and they’re right to.
Fast forward to today. And the Civic Platform once again runs the government, and they are once again trying to put their judges in, and they’re now trying to remove some of the old ones that were put in by PiS in a way that the Civic Platform says was unconstitutional. And again, everybody is right and everybody is wrong. The problem is that the institution that would decide who is right here is the Constitutional Court. So we have a true constitutional crisis between the two largest factions in Polish society, which collectively make up the vast majority of voters. The Europeans have gotten involved at the supernational level, and there’s no clear route forward without having yet another fresh election. Basically what the problem here is, is one group did something that the other group said is illegal. And now the second group is trying to fix what the first group did by doing things that the first group says is illegal and everyone is right. So there is no easy way out of this. And the two parties really aren’t very good at speaking with one another. They haven’t been for 20 years, so expect this to be the new norm in Polish politics for at least several weeks, probably several months, with the European Union basically playing cheerleader for one side.
Okay, that’s all I got bye.
