Brussels – A first step to try to defuse tension between Poland and the European Union after years of tension and fines related to non-compliance with EU Court of Justice decisions. The European Commission today (Feb. 5) approved a €300 million support scheme for workers affected by the closure of lignite mines and coal and lignite power plants.
The Polish measure provides a one-year severance payment for employees who will lose their jobs due to the closures and paid leave of up to four years for all those nearing retirement age. As stated in the decision of the EU executive, the Warsaw scheme “is necessary and appropriate to mitigate the social impact” and has “an incentive effect in that it facilitates society’s acceptance” of early closure. Above all, the Brussels decision highlights the fact that a channel of dialogue is increasingly being opened with the new government of Donald Tusk on all the pending dossiers from the confrontation caused by the predecessor Mateusz Morawiecki, including how to comply with the lignite mine closure.
On this front, a dispute between Warsaw and Brussels over the Turów mine has been open since 2021. On September 20, the Court of Justice of the EU decided to impose a daily fine of 500,000 euros on Poland for failing to stop the operations of the mine and its power plant on the border with the Czech Republic following Prague’s complaint in February of that year. According to European judges, the mine’s operations extended until 2026 would adversely affect the water supply of its citizens on the border, but Warsaw has refused to pay what the ruling stipulated. Despite closing the case on Feb. 4, 2022, thanks to an agreement between the two governments, the EU Court of Justice decided to close the case but without revoking the fine.
The Turów Mine (Poland)
Thus, a few days later the EU Commission decided to withhold approximately 15 million euros from the EU funds earmarked for Poland precisely because it failed to pay what the EU Court had imposed from September 20 to October 19, 2021. The standoff continued over the next year and a half of the Morawiecki government, with the climax reached last December 10—the same day that former Prime Minister Morawiecki was rejected by the national parliament for a new term as premier—when the Constitutional Court of Poland declared unconstitutional the fines imposed also regarding the Turów lignite mine. The new Tusk-led executive has promised to restore the rule of law and alignment between Warsaw and Brussels across the board: the green light for the support scheme for the workers of the lignite mines to be shut down seems to be heading in the direction of restored dialogue.
The other disputes between the EU and Poland
Those over the non-closure of lignite mines are not the only problems created by the former government in its relations with Brussels, which have been put under pressure by the former ruling party Law and Justice’s challenge to EU standards on respect for the rule of law. Since 2021, there has been an ongoing legal dispute brought about by two rulings of the Constitutional Court of Poland: the first on July 14, when judges in Warsaw rejected the EU regulation allowing the EU Court of Justice to rule on “systems, principles, and procedures” of Polish courts; the second on October 7, when the Constitutional Court has challenged the primacy of EU law, calling Articles 1 and 19 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and several rulings of EU courts “incompatible” with the Polish Constitution.
The former Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki
At the centre of the dispute is the decision to provisionally suspend the powers of the disciplinary section of Poland’s Supreme Court, due to some arbitrary measures against magistrates disliked by the governing majority. While the infringement procedure is underway by the European Commission, the EU Court of Justice ordered the member country to pay a one million euro fine per day: from October 27, 2021, to April 14, 2023, the bill had risen to over half a billion euros (526 million to be exact).
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
