Brussels – He was doomed to fail and he failed. Under the eyes of the former president and founder of post-communist Poland, Lech Wałęsa, the now ex-premier Mateusz Morawiecki was rejected by the Sejm (the Lower House of Parliament) in his desperate search for a majority after collapsing in the 15 October elections. Now the ball goes straight into the court of the challenger and true winner of the elections two months ago, the leader of the popular centre-right, Donald Tusk, who is ready to sit again at the table of the 27 EU leaders at the European Council scheduled for Thursday and Friday (14-15 December).
Morawiecki’s Law and Justice (PiS) party had suffered a severe defeat in the vote, registering the lowest percentage of preferences since 2011 (35.38 percent) and trailing the second force in Parliament, the Civic Coalition led by Tusk himself, by only 4.68 percentage points. Thus, despite being the largest force in the Sejm, with 194 out of 460 deputies, it could not make any possible alliance to achieve a majority of 231 seats, not even by joining the ultra-nationalist right-wing Confederation of Freedom and Independence (18). The test of confidence in parliament revealed the flimsiness of Morawiecki’s attempt to return to power, with 266 deputies against and 190 in favour of a new ultra-conservative cabinet. The ball is now in Tusk’s court, who has already been nominated this afternoon as Prime Minister-designate of Poland and appointed by the President of the Republic Andrzej Duda. In a tour de force, a vote of confidence has been scheduled for tomorrow (12 December) before flying to Brussels to attend a crucial European Council where the future of the European Union, from enlargement to the budget review, will be discussed. There do not seem to be any political obstacles in front of the centre-right leader’s path, since the three forces coalesced against the PiS conservatives have a comfortable majority in the Sejm (248 seats) – Civic Coalition (157), the Third Way Liberals (65) and the Social Democrats of Lewica (26) – and during the post-vote consultations with the President of the Republic, this scenario had emerged clearly. The rejection of Morawiecki had been in sight for weeks, after even the ruralist centre-right of the Polish People’s Party – which is part of the Polish Coalition platform, in turn allied with the liberals of Poland 2050 within Third Way – had immediately made it clear that they had no interest in supporting a third term in office for the ultra-conservatives. Despite political evidence, Polish President Duda had decided on 6 November to entrust the outgoing Prime Minister Morawiecki with the first mandate to try to find a majority in Parliament, effectively ignoring the appeal of the three opposition parties allied for elections that had asked for a mandate to form an executive led by the former 2007-2014 prime minister, who has been President of the European Council (from 2014 to 2019) and head of the European People’s Party (EPP) until 2022.
Poland between the EU, Hungary, and Italy
The end of PiS’s power opens up new scenarios for a Poland that since 2015 has taken a path of opposition to Brussels’ policies, forging a blood pact with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary on migration, fundamental rights, and the rule of law. On the first issue, there is a clear a priori negative stance on all dossiers of the Migration and Asylum Pact – in line with what Budapest did – with the dissemination of continuous fake news about the scenario that would emerge when a common policy (such as the one on the compulsory redistribution of migrants arriving on EU territory) is adopted. On the issue of fundamental rights, on the other hand, Warsaw has been in the crosshairs of Brussels for years, both for its discrimination against the LGBT+ community and, above all, for its extremist policy of denying the right to abortion.
Almost shocking, however, was the evolution of relations between Warsaw and Brussels on the rule of law. Since 2021, there has been an ongoing legal dispute brought about by two rulings of Poland’s Constitutional Court: the first on 14 July, when the Warsaw courts rejected the EU regulation allowing the EU Court of Justice to rule on the “systems, principles and procedures” of the Polish courts, and the second on 7 October, when the Constitutional Court questioned the primacy of EU law, calling Articles 1 and 19 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and several rulings of the EU courts “incompatible” with the Polish Constitution. At the centre of the dispute is the decision to provisionally suspend the powers of the disciplinary section of the Supreme Court of Poland, due to several arbitrary measures against magistrates disliked by the ruling majority. While the infringement procedure by the European Commission is ongoing, the EU Court of Justice has ordered the member country to pay a one million euro fine per day: the bill has already risen above half a billion euros – 526 million to be exact – from 27 October 2021 to 14 April 2023. Just today, Poland’s Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional the fines imposed on both the justice system and the Turów lignite mine, aggravating the dispute with Brussels.
At the European Council table, the changing of the guard in Warsaw closely concerns not only Orbán, but also the Italian government led by Giorgia Meloni. The PM will lose her closest ally among the other 26 EU leaders (despite the obvious contradictions between sovereignisms) with possible consequences for the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (Ecr) of the leader of Fratelli d’Italia re-elected to the presidency at the end of June. Law and Justice is one of the two most relevant parties in the conservative family, which is at the same time the biggest obstacle to a complicated pre- or post-election agreement with Manfred Weber‘s European People’s Party ahead of next year’s European elections. While at first glance a weakening of the two might open some glimmer of hope for a closer confrontation between Meloni and Weber in defining an alternative to the current majority between Populars, Social Democrats, and Liberals in the EU Parliament, one cannot hide the fact that for European conservatives the defeat of PiS in Poland represents yet another setback for the national elections in 2023. After the successes of the first half of the year in Sweden and Finland, the right-wing parties also suffered hard setbacks in Spain and Slovakia, although the 22 November elections in the Netherlands once again increased the focus on the political scenarios in view of the 6-9 June 2024 European appointment.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
