Polish coalition at odds over EU peace offering

Poland’s ruling coalition is at odds over a proposal to end a long-running legal stand-off with the European Union, end daily fines of €1 million and unlock emergency pandemic funding.

The internal row, and the resignation of the country’s minister for finance over a botched tax reform, have plunged the government into crisis – amid unprecedented neighbourhood pressures from crises involving Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.

Next week the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will issue a highly-anticipated ruling on whether a key element of Poland’s controversial judicial reforms – a special chamber to discipline judges – adheres to the principle of judicial independence that binds all EU members.

Ahead of its final ruling the EU’s highest court last year ordered Poland to suspend the chamber, which critics say exists to punish or threaten judges out of step with government thinking. Last October, with Warsaw refusing to act on the court order, the ECJ granted a European Commission request to impose fines of €1 million a day.

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Polish government officials dubbed the fine “blackmail”. But last week President Andrzej Duda – a nominee of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party – presented a plan to wind up the disciplinary body.

He said his motivation for the proposal, and another deal to settle a long-running feud with the Czech Republic, was to end divisions and allow Europe stand together in what he called a “tense international situation”.

On Monday, visiting the European Commission in Brussels, Duda said president Ursula von der Leyen had taken his proposal with “agreement and a certain amount of relief”.

EU officials are more cautious over what some see as a tactical retreat in a lost battle.

Root causes

In addition, the proposal does not appear to address the root causes of the EU’s battle with Warsaw over its judiciary, which the European Court of Human Rights says is no longer independent.

Among the unaddressed problems: the illegal appointment of PiS-allied judges and the subsequent takeover of both the constitutional and supreme courts with political appointees who, last year, asserted that Polish law has primacy over EU law.

Also unresolved: a PiS-reformed judicial appointments body that itself is fully under the control of parliament – and the government’s majority.

After nearly seven years in power, though, that majority is melting away as rebellious PiS coalition partners, sensing political opportunity, have rejected Duda’s peace offering to Brussels.

Marcin Warchol, deputy justice minister and an MP with United Poland, a junior coalition partner, said the proposal “won’t satisfy the EU” because it falls short of Brussels’s demands. Worse, he said, “it would be a very bad thing if the president’s policy was seen as a political white flag”.

The governing coalition’s majority – 227 of the 460 seats in the lower house of parliament, the Sejm – hinges on support of independent MPs, and United Poland’s 19 deputies.

With elections due next year, PiS is working against the clock to unblock money it needs to bankroll a national recovery programme. A key part of its re-election plan, the advertising campaign has begun on billboards around the country. But €36 billion of its funding, paid in turn from the EU pandemic relief programme, has been frozen by Brussels until next week’s ECJ ruling.

A day after Duda and von der Leyen discussed compromise, meanwhile, her officials opened a formal procedure to withhold funds from Warsaw to pay €15 million in fines in another stand-off over mining. Hours later, a Polish government spokesman described the ECJ legal rulings behind the move as having “no legal or factual basis”.