The Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wants to defend his country’s controversial judicial reforms in a plenary debate. The most recent ruling by the Polish Constitutional Court, which questions the primacy of EU law, is likely to play a prominent role.
Opposite Morawiecki is EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Your authority has been fighting for a long time with complaints before the European Court of Justice (ECJ) against parts of the Polish judicial reforms and sees the latest ruling by the Polish Constitutional Court as a threat to the legal order of the EU.
Specifically, the highest Polish judges decided at the beginning of October that parts of EU law were incompatible with the Polish constitution. This decision is considered highly problematic because it could give the national-conservative PiS government an excuse to ignore unpleasant judgments of the ECJ. The EU Commission is of the opinion that EU law generally takes precedence over national law.
As a result, Poland already threatened von der Leyen with sanctions. “We will make use of all the powers that the treaties give us to enforce this principle,” she said last Wednesday. The EU is a community of values and rights.
The main fear in Brussels is that the government in Warsaw might disregard ECJ rulings on controversial parts of the Polish judicial reform. In the opinion of the EU Commission, these impair the judicial independence of Polish judges and also do not offer the necessary guarantees to protect them from political scrutiny.
An agreement is not yet in sight. Shortly before the debate in the European Parliament, Morawiecki even tightened the tone in the debate about competencies in the EU. In a letter to the heads of state and government of the EU states, he warned that the community could soon no longer be a federation of free states. There is an unusually dangerous development that threatens the future of the EU, it said in the letter published on Monday.
However, a majority in the European Parliament (EP) sees it very differently. The leaders of the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Liberals, Greens and Leftists called for more pressure from the EU Commission on Warsaw in a letter to von der Leyen in the spring. At present, Parliament is also threatening to sue the EU Commission before the European Court of Justice because it has not yet applied a new regulation to punish violations of the rule of law in EU countries. The mechanism allows EU funds to be cut if the proper use of funds from the Community budget is demonstrably threatened by deficits in the rule of law.
How the conflict could be resolved is completely unclear. From the point of view of countries like Luxembourg or the Netherlands, Poland should actually leave the EU if it does not want to fully comply with Community law. However, Morawiecki recently emphasized that such a step by his country is not up for debate. A large part of the population also rates EU membership positively.
“Poland’s Prime Minister Morawiecki wants one thing without leaving the other,” said FDP MEP and EP Vice-President Nicola Beer at the appointment this Tuesday of the German Press Agency. With the most recent affirmation that Poland’s place is still in the European Union, Morawiecki has clarified his country’s intentions, but still owes the EU to allay its legitimate concerns. If the government in Warsaw wanted to prevent EU funding cuts, it must now approach the EU and ensure that Poland immediately and without a doubt back on the path of the rule of law.