Is democracy dying in Poland?

A major assault on democracy and judicial independence is under way in Poland, said Ingrid Steiner-gashi in Kurier (Vienna), yet the EU seems powerless to stop it. The ruling Law and Justice party (PIS) – buoyed by the way Donald Trump appeared to approve of their authoritarian policies on his recent visit – sought to take control of the independent body that appoints judges. And now it has pushed through further bills, including one that allows it to replace Supreme Court judges with party loyalists.

In Warsaw, thousands of people carrying candles took to the streets on Sunday to protest. There is also “massive outrage” in Brussels. The European Commission is threatening to invoke Article 7 of the EU Treaty, which is triggered when all the other member states in the European Council agree that the offending state is guilty of a “serious and persistent breach” of the union’s values. If they do, this could lead to Warsaw being deprived of voting rights in the European Council. But the EU is bluffing. The Council will never achieve the unanimity required as long as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán continues to side with Poland. But thanks to Poland’s President Andrzej Duda, there has at least been a temporary reprieve, says Rick Lyman in The New York Times. Normally a staunch PIS supporter, Duda surprised everyone on Monday by vetoing two of the three bills before him.

Poles shouldn’t think that the only victims in all this will be the politicians and journalists – all of us are threatened, says Cezary Michalski in Newsweek Polska (Warsaw). Imagine the effect on women’s rights once fanatical Catholic conservatives are running our courts. Without the curb of judicial restraint, think how easy it will be to fire teachers for opposing school reforms, or to eavesdrop on our phones. PIS leader Jarosław Kaczynski, the power behind the throne in Polish politics, will now have free rein to pursue PIS critics, said Ewa Siedlecka in Polityka (Warsaw). All those who demonstrate against the monthly church services he has introduced to honour his dead brother (the former president, who died in the 2010 Smolensk air crash) could be given jail sentences for “disrupting religious rites”. We might even see the former prime minster Donald Tusk – whom Kaczynski has long blamed for causing the crash through his negligence – being put on trial.

The PIS claims it is obliged to enact the new reforms because Poland’s judges are corrupt and because the court system is too slow, said Leonid Bershidsky on Bloomberg (New York). Neither claim is true: only five judges have been convicted of bribe-taking in the past 15 years, and court hearings take about the same time as in Germany. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing for politicians to have some say in choosing judges: it happens in both the US and in Germany, for example.

But the difference is that in those countries, the opposition has some say in confirming the candidates, said Bartosz Dudek in Deutsche Welle (Berlin). It won’t in Poland. So disregard all the PIS talk about “democratic legitimacy”. When Kaczynski speaks of “returning the courts to the people”, he really means tightening his party’s grip on power, just as he did last year, when he began “reforming” the state media in the name of “news diversity”: he actually turned it into an instrument of state propaganda. The worrying thing, however, is that he will probably get away with his reform. The press may have given a lot of attention to the candlelit protest, but in reality, it was no more than 10,000 people in a city of nearly two million. What’s more, the PIS still polls at 35% to 40%, compared to 22% to 25% for the largest opposition party. “We can only hope that the thousands of protesters did not carry their candles in vain.”