The law doesn’t apply to liberals, only conservatives—at least that is what liberal Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk is insinuating.
Speaking at a conference on Tuesday, September 11th, Tusk said that his government’s actions to “restore” the “constitutional order” following eight years of conservative rule may not be “fully compliant with the provisions of the law.”
The prime minister was referring to a recent decision of his that constitutional law experts and the opposition conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party called unlawful.
Tusk approved and then “revoked” his signature concerning the appointment of a judge who he later realised did not belong to his political camp. The PM said he made a “mistake” because he signs “hundreds of documents”, sometimes “dozens a day,” and the official responsible for preparing the signing did not notice the “political nature” of the document in question.
Elaborating further on Tuesday he said:
If we want to restore the constitutional order and the foundations of liberal democracy…[we] will probably make mistakes or commit actions that, according to some legal authorities, will be inconsistent or not fully compliant with the provisions of the law.
He accused his predecessor, the PiS-government, of having the specific “intention to destroy the [constitutional] order and not to strengthen or build it.”
Tusk’s accusations echo the allegations by European Union institutions that instigated a witch hunt against the previous Polish government (2015-2023) for violating the so-called ‘rule of law’ with its judicial reforms. PiS has argued that it did nothing unlawful and the attacks against Poland at the time were political in nature. The party regularly drew the ire of the liberal Brussels elite with its tough pro-sovereigntist, anti-migration, anti-abortion and anti-gender ideology stances.
The EU punished PiS by withholding billions of euros of EU funds and launching a so-called Article 7 procedure—which allows for suspending membership rights if a country “seriously and persistently breaches the principles on which the EU is founded”—against Poland.
Brussels is not so sensitive to ‘rule-of-law’ violations now that Donald Tusk and the liberals are back in power. The EU institutions have not uttered a word about the new government’s purge of its conservative political opponents—the arrest of PiS lawmakers, dawn raids against former ministers, the removal of PiS-nominated officials from courts and public offices. In fact, the EU rewarded Tusk by unfreezing the funds it had blocked at the time of the PiS-government.
Conservatives ridiculed the PM for his comments made on Tuesday. MP Tobiasz Bocheński wrote
Tusk [says he] will probably break the law to restore the law. According to this logic, one must steal to become honest.
Concerned MEP Beata Szydło tweeted “Tusk officially announced that he would break the law. If Poles do not oppose Tusk, Poland will soon cease to be a democratic country.”
