Poland’s parliament has passed a bill changing the judicial process for the validation of this May’s presidential election.
Under the move passed on January 24, judges appointed to the Supreme Court under the previous Conservative (PiS) government will be excluded from the process.
Currently, the Supervisory Chamber of the Supreme Court supervises the registration of candidates and certifies the results in all elections. That was how the result of the last parliamentary election, which led to the formation of the centre-left government led by current Prime Minister Donald Tusk, was confirmed.
In the past few months, the Tusk government has come into conflict with the Supervisory Chamber over the latter’s ruling restoring state funding for PiS. That had been removed by the pro-Tusk majority on the state election regulatory body (PKW).
The government has refused to carry out the decision of the court and PiS funding remains blocked.
In December last year, the head of the PKW Sylwester Marciniak warned that the government’s refusal to honour decisions of the Supervisory Chamber of the Supreme Court threatened the process of holding the presidential election.
Following that, the Speaker of Parliament Szymon Hołownia, who leads a centrist party that is part of Tusk’s ruling coalition, proposed a bill to shifs the supervision and certification of the election away from the Supervisory Chamber. Instead it proposed giving that power to the 15 most senior justices of the Supreme Court, based on their length of tenure.
That proposal passed on January 24 with the votes of the ruling coalition against the opposition PiS and right wing Confederation party. It was justified on the grounds that the legitimacy of the Supervisory Chamber of the Supreme Court had been questioned by both the European Court of Justice and the present Polish Government.
PiS and Confederation members have slammed the legislation as a power grab by a government that has already taken control of the majority of the PKW. That majority decided back in August of last year to remove the PiS’s state funding over alleged misuse of public funds.
Senior PiS MP Marek Ast opposed the bill on the grounds of it “differentiating between judges and undermining the exclusive prerogative of the president to appoint judges”.
His party also pointed to the fact that 12 of the 15 longest-serving judges who would, according to the government’s proposal, adjudicate on the election, had begun their legal careers in Communist times.
President Andrzej Duda, who is allied to PiS, on January 25 expressed doubts through his aide Łukasz Rzepecki about signing the legislation. He told media that the legislation “was contrary to the principle that no major changes in the election process should take place in the six months preceding an election”.
Duda also said it was “inconsistent on the part of the current majority to recognize the Supreme Court’s validity with regard to certifying the results of the parliamentary, local and European elections and then to argue that this was inappropriate with regard to the presidential election”.
If he refuses to sign the legislation, the measure will be dead in the water as Tusk and his allies do not have the three-fifths majority in parliament required to overturn a presidential veto.
Still, the lack of an election validation process on which both both government and opposition are agreed may lead to a legal dispute about the election’s outcome.
The latest opinion polls on the ballot due to be held in May have shown a marked shift towards the Right with the gap between Tusk party’s candidate, Mayor of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski, and PiS’s Karol Nawrocki narrowing significantly.
At the same time, support has been growing for the Confederation’s candidate Sławomir Mentzen.
