Poland pulls back

An assault on courts is stopped, for now at least

Why is Poland steering to the right, away from greater freedoms? Why is Hungary taking that path as well?

Poland has just, for the moment anyway, avoided a disaster in one area. President Andrzej Duda vetoed two out of three bills that would have stifled the country’s courts, putting them under partisan political control.

It’s significant that Mr. Duda is a member of the right-wing Law and Justice Party, which holds a majority in the parliament and passed the offending legislation. So what’s the idea? Some dewy-eyed Poles and Americans put this so-far fizzled political putsch down to President Donald Trump. He visited Poland earlier this month and praised the country, rightly, for the people’s courage in the face of Nazi and then communist oppression. But the speech, all in all, was somewhat over the top. Poles respect America, but not that much.

In fact, in attempting to put its courts out of serious law-and-order business, the Law and Justice Party government risked bringing down the wrath of the European Union, which raised the specter of sanctions on Poland.

The EU has high respect for Poland, making its former prime minister, Donald F. Tusk, president of the European Council and having provided Poland prodigious amounts of development aid over the years, to try to bring its economic state up to the level of the primary EU states, France and Germany.

There is no gainsaying the fact that Poland has been in an unenviable geographic position over the years, between Germany and Russia, and, before that, Prussia, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

None of those entities had been shy about dominating Poland and seizing pieces of its territory.

But now, with the Sovietdirected Warsaw Pact gone, Poland in NATO with its guarantee of a collective response to any outside attack, and Poland’s economy in relatively healthy shape, the argument of insecurity as a justification for hammering down freedoms simply does not hold.

Nor does it hold for Hungary, which has the same guarantees and also a sometimes freedom-averse government under Viktor Orban.

Passing legislation that harkens back to the bad old pre-World War II days of nationalistic, near-fascist governments that tolerated pogroms does not do honor to the best of Poland, the Chopins, the Kosciuszkos and Pulaskis who helped America, and the courageous Poles who continued to defy the Nazis and the communists.

Mr. Duda held the line for freedom this time, but he really shouldn’t have to.