POLAND: Europe’s New Scapegoat.

When an EU country elects a government with nationalist or Eurosceptic policies, the European Parliament calls an urgent investigation into ‘the situation’ in that country. When Victor Orban became Prime Minister of Hungary in 2010 for example, the European Parliament called a debate entitled ‘the situation in Hungary’. Orban’s Fidesz party is known for its conservatism and its regard for national sovereignty. When Orban was democratically elected with a two thirds majority in the Hungarian Parliament, he was elected with a mandate to reform the state institutions, which had become corrupt under communist rule and had been stagnating ever since. When he set about enacting the above, the European Parliament accused him of aspiring to dictatorship by replacing enemies with friends within the judiciary. It then drafted a resolution which condemned Hungary for allowing for ‘a systemic deterioration of the rule of law’.

Hungary was asking for it. Its nationalist policies were considered a threat to EU integration —and rightly so. . . .

Hungary’s tough border controls and its refusal to participate in the EU’s asylum proposals have led the European parliament to ‘initiate an in-depth monitoring process concerning the situation of democracy…in Hungary’.

Europe now has a new ‘situation’: Poland. The European Parliament has been calling for a debate to discuss ‘The Situation in Poland’. They are outraged because the newly-elected Law and Justice party (PIS) has blocked the instalment of five judges to the Constitutional Tribunal, a powerful body that rules on the constitutionality of laws. The accusation against the new government, much like that against Orban, is that they are illegally sacking the judges and replacing them with their own people. But the accusations are unfounded: the restructuring of the Constitutional Tribunal had to happen as a result of corruption which took place before PIS came to power.

In June 2015, the centre-right Civic Platform (PO), knowing that they were on track to lose the elections in October, wanted to secure their influence before the new government came to power by ensuring a PO majority in the Constitutional Tribunal. The judges, mostly PO appointees, cooked up a new law which stated that judges whose terms came to an end after the election could have their replacements lined up before the election. This way, the judges would be chosen by PO. The first hint of corruption was that the Constitutional Tribunal is not allowed to initiate legislation, and here it was doing just that. As a result, it is now acting as the judiciary in a trial contesting the constitutionality of a legislation it itself created. The proposal was pushed through by the then-president Bronislaw Komorowski so quickly that nobody saw it happen.