Polish president tells opposition, Brussels to back off

WARSAW — As opposition protesters and MPs continued to lay siege to Poland’s parliament, the highest court was paralyzed by internecine war and the European Commission accused the country of violating the EU’s democratic principles, President Andrzej Duda put the blame for the political and constitutional impasse in one place: the political opposition.

“Poland is stable politically,” he said in an interview Wednesday with POLITICO and 300POLITYKA, a Polish political portal. “The opposition is making it impossible for parliament to work.”

The Polish leader also asserted that the most senior judge in the country, who stepped down earlier this week, broke the law and rebuffed the Commission’s warnings about backsliding by Warsaw, saying that Brussels had “overstepped” its authority.

Duda, 44, has been a crucial player in the country’s roiling crises since his ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party came to power last year. As president, Duda is supposed to stand above partisanship, and the opposition and Western officials have called on him to act as a check on the party, which has an absolute majority in parliament. Led by Poland’s paramount leader and party chief Jarosław Kaczyński, the PiS government has asserted control over state media, purged state-controlled companies and taken steps to hobble the independent judiciary.

Time and again, Duda disappointed those who hoped he’d push back against PiS and Kaczyński. It started a year ago with his refusal to veto the government’s law to pack the country’s highest court with allies, bucking his fellow lawyers in the Polish bar. Although he has tried to build ties with other European presidents on the foreign stage, he hasn’t established himself as an independent player in domestic politics.

“If the Constitutional Tribunal and its president violate the constitution what can be done? Nothing.”

Duda’s loyalty to the party came through again on Wednesday, when he nominated a new head of the Constitutional Tribunal, the country’s highest court. His decision cements Law and Justice’s control over the court after a year-long battle.

The fights over the tribunal have been marked by accusations of rule-breaking and partisanship, and Wednesday’s nomination ceremony was no exception. Duda chose Julia Przyłębska for the top job although eight justices chosen by previous governments refused to take part in the process. Instead, three justices whose election the tribunal had earlier found to be unconstitutional were allowed to help choose her.

The tribunal has been embroiled in crisis since last year, when the previous Civic Platform party government chose five new justices, two of whose terms hadn’t yet expired. When Law and Justice took power in October, it elected five of its own justices — all of whom were swiftly sworn in by Duda.

The tribunal, under the leadership of Andrzej Rzepliński, whose term expired on Monday, refused to seat three of the new justices. The tribunal also ruled that several government attempts to impose new rules on the court were unconstitutional — verdicts that the government has ignored.

That resistance to the will of Law and Justice makes Rzepliński, to hear Duda, the main culprit in a stand-off that has soured Poland’s relations with the European Commission and allies like the United States, and regularly brought thousands of anti-government demonstrators onto Polish streets.

An demonstration by opposition supporters and Committee for the Defence of Democracy movement (KOD) outside the Polish parliament on December 16

“He broke the law and the constitution,” Duda said in the interview. “If the Constitutional Tribunal and its president violate the constitution what can be done? Nothing.”

Now that Przyłębska is in charge, Duda said he’s “counting on her experience and ethics as a judge,” to end the fight over the tribunal. “I’m expecting a dynamism” from the court, he said.

A skeptical Commission

That’s not likely to satisfy the European Commission, which has been looking at events in Poland with growing alarm — although its power to force a change in Warsaw is limited. The Commission again discussed the situation in the country on Wednesday. “There is a persistent problem with the rule of law,” said European Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans.

In July, when the Commission said there was a “systemic threat” to the rule of law in Poland, Warsaw brushed off Brussels’ concerns. The Commission’s only weapon is the threat of removing Poland’s vote in the Council, but it’s very unlikely that such a move would get the backing of all EU member countries. On Wednesday the Commission gave Poland another two months to respond to “additional recommendations” on how to address concerns over respect for the rule of law.

“The European Commission has overstepped its bounds,” Duda said.

The president is similarly dismissive of opposition claims that last Friday’s vote on the budget was irregular and should be held again. After the opposition blocked the podium in the main chamber of parliament, the speaker moved the session to an adjoining room and the budget was voted through on a show of hands. Opposition MPs say they weren’t allowed to speak and that the procedure was so chaotic that it’s unclear if there was a quorum to hold the vote.

Opposition MPs plan to continue their sit-in in parliament into January.

“It’s completely unacceptable and absolutely against all the rules for the opposition to take over the speaker’s chair,” Duda said, adding that he’s observing the situation closely and calling for calm on all sides.

“It’s simply embarrassing when the opposition calls on me not to sign laws bringing in the program of PiS.”

That’s not going to be much satisfaction to the opposition, which wants Duda to take a more active role and intervene directly to end the crisis.

But the president made clear that’s not going to happen because he closely identifies with PiS and its goals. He’s sometimes denounced as a “notary,” who obediently signs all the legislation passed by Law and Justice. Fakt, the country’s largest circulation paper, on Wednesday called Kaczyński “the president of the president.”

A loyal president

“I haven’t left the PiS program,” Duda said.“I signed the program because I agreed with it; that’s why I joined the party … I want to laugh, it’s simply embarrassing when the opposition calls on me not to sign laws bringing in the program of PiS.”

It was Kaczyński who plucked Duda from the back benches of the European Parliament last year to be his party’s presidential candidate. The two are close, using the familiar form “ty” when addressing each other, a privilege that Kaczyński only gives out sparingly.

In recent days Duda has met with opposition leaders (he uses the stiffer more formal form of address with most of them) and with Kaczyński and other PiS chiefs to see if there’s a way to end the stand-off in parliament.

Duda shakes hands with Jarosław Kaczyński during a party convection in Warsaw | Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images

But whatever he said to Kaczyński who sat at the round table in his office in the presidential palace earlier this week, he doesn’t seem to have made a significant impact on the PiS leader. On Wednesday, Kaczyński held a press conference together with Prime Minister Beata Szydło and other PiS leaders to address the situation.

“We are dealing with the acceptance of criminal actions,” Kaczyński said of the opposition sit-in.

After the PiS press conference, Grzegorz Schetyna, the leader of Civic Platform, the largest opposition party, said, “there is no new proposition” from the ruling party.

Kaczyński built his party’s support on a potent combination of generous social programs targeted at the country’s poorest people and nationalism aimed at boosting pride in the country after what he sees as years of cosmopolitan fecklessness under Civic Platform and its leader Donald Tusk, who is now president of the European Council.

Duda shares that vision.

He said his proudest achievements as president were signing legislation paying out a monthly baby bonus to larger families and a recent bill lowering the retirement age — both steps that many economists fear will make public finances unsustainable, but which are hugely popular with PiS’s core electorate.

He also revels in national symbolism. Hanging behind Duda’s desk is a gargantuan painting showing pre-war Polish cavalry units galloping past Józef Piłsudski, the authoritarian leader who led the country to independence.

“The head of the Polish armed forces and above him is a painting that every general when he comes in here feels good about. It’s the symbol of the Polish army, the Polish cavalryman,” Duda said with pride while looking up at the painting.