In Poland, no law and no justice

Jaroslaw Kaczynski is not a man to back down. His zealous vision of a “Fourth Republic” is an idealized Catholic Poland stripped of Communist remnants and Western social liberalism. And on his second try to achieve it, he will not be deterred — not by the European Union, not by protesters, and definitely not by the courts. That is what makes his current conflict with the Supreme Court so fateful, for Poland and for Europe.

The courts are an especial bugaboo for Mr. Kaczynski. When Law and Justice, the party he founded with his identical twin, Lech Kaczynski, first held power between 2005 and 2007, the courts blocked parts of their nationalist agenda. After the party was defeated in parliamentary elections — and after his brother, then president, was killed in a plane crash in Russia (which he insists was Russia’s doing) — Jaroslaw Kaczynski honed his tactics and his zeal.

He did not seek office when Law and Justice retook Parliament in 2015, pushing more acceptable candidates to the fore. But he is the real power behind the government and its assault on the courts, first seizing control of the Constitutional Court, which is supposed to ensure that laws do not violate the Constitution, and then going after the Supreme Court, the country’s highest court. The tactic was to lower the retirement age for judges to 65 and then to stack the high court with party loyalists.

Tens of thousands of Poles, including Lech Walesa, went into the streets on Tuesday, chanting “Solidarnosc” as they once did against the Communists; the European Union, which has already formally threatened Poland with sanc- tions, including a suspension of its voting rights over its assault on judiciary independence, opened a new “infringement procedure” that could lead to a suit against Poland in the European Union Court of Justice.

Most grave, the president of the Supreme Court, Malgorzata Gersdorf, who is 65 and so was supposed to retire, refused to do so. With white roses in hand, Justice Gersdorf told a crowd outside the court that she was defying the government “to defend the rule of law and to testify to the truth about the line between the Constitution and the violation of the Constitution.”

The government’s claim that it is clearing the courts of Communist debris is nonsense. Justice Gersdorf, for one, was an active player in the Solidarity movement in the 1980s and has solid post-Communist academic and legal credentials. Mr. Kaczynski’s real motive, familiar among populists from Donald Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, is to neutralize one of democracy’s major checks on untrammeled power.

Mr. Kaczynski will not easily back down. The threatened European Union measures are slow to take effect, and he knows he has support among like-minded central Europeans — and in Washington. That makes it all the more important that the union and all other governments and institutions that understand the threat Mr. Kaczynski poses to the rule of law give their support for the Poles who are resisting their government’s power grab and make clear to the tragically misnamed Law and Justice that it is dangerously out of line.