The victory of Karol Nawrocki in the presidential election and his assumption of office due on August 6 constitutes a direct challenge to the mandate of Tusk’s left-liberal coalition to govern. Between 2015 and 2023, Law and Justice (PiS) secured a sustained democratic mandate from the Polish people to implement systemic reforms, winning every election during that period, including both parliamentary and presidential contests. In 2023, despite winning the largest share of votes, PiS was unable to form a government, and a coalition stretching from the Left to the centre was established under Donald Tusk’s leadership.
The fragility of this mandate stemmed from the necessity of co-governance with a president from the opposing political camp. The president holds the constitutional power to veto legislation, which can only be overridden by a three-fifths majority in the Sejm — a threshold Tusk does not command. According to the constitution, without the consent of a president elected by direct popular vote, a government cannot effectively govern; it may only administer. The only alternative is the path of constitutional breach — the very path Tusk has followed since December 2023.
He was able to do so because, despite lacking a mandate from the sovereign — the Polish people — he had the green light from the Biden administration and the European Commission to dismantle the sovereigntist camp in Poland. In Trump’s Washington, as is well known, Tusk would have no standing. But Brussels’ carte blanche for lawlessness in Poland is still fully operative.
The European Commission long ago abandoned its role as guardian of the Treaties. Alongside other central EU institutions, it has turned EU instruments into tools for appropriating new powers — through political faits accomplis, creative legal reinterpretation, and, increasingly, through financial and political blackmail. This undermines the foundational principle of conferred competences and incrementally erodes the sovereignty of Member States via a classic salami-slicing method of centralisation.
This power grab operates under a doctrine of selective application, a principle that exposes not just an institutional but clearly ideological and partisan dynamic. Conservative governments are treated with suspicion and hostility; left-liberal administrations are indulged and rewarded. Nowhere are these double standards more blatant than in the Commission’s approach to the rule of law in Hungary and in Poland.
This year’s Rule of Law Report by the European Commission provides the clearest proof of that trend. In a recent publication by the Institute of World Politics in Washington, I offered a critical analysis of the section concerning Poland. The Polish and Hungarian versions of that report have just been released by the Hungarian-Polish Institute of Freedom.
My analysis is not a mere rebuttal of the Commission’s scandalous report on Poland — which amounts to an endorsement of post-13 December 2023 globalist lawlessness and an appalling paean to liberal autocracy, which has taken to calling itself a “militant democracy.” It is, first and foremost, a documentation of the ongoing dismantling of democracy and the rule of law under the Tusk-led left-liberal coalition, a government installed in part through Brussels-backed coercion and a barrage of political and economic interference that flagrantly violated the founding principles the Commission is supposed to uphold.
For eight years, EU institutions waged hybrid lawfare against Poland’s Conservative government. Now, they serve as guarantors of the blatant illegality perpetrated by Tusk’s left-liberal administration. The Commission’s latest report either ignores, glosses over, or even praises actions that shatter the foundations of the rule of law and breach the Polish Constitution — often constituting serious criminal offences against the state under national law — or, alternatively, criminal acts of public office abuse, punishable under the same provisions of the Criminal Code.
Every page of the Commission’s report reeks of political cynicism and legal hypocrisy. Consider just first example: In 2024, Poland’s Prime Minister and Justice Minister carried out an unlawful, forceful takeover of the prosecution service. Citing three private legal opinions bought to support a predetermined conclusion, the Justice Minister declared that the independent National Prosecutor had never been legally appointed — despite a prior legitimate nomination. He was then physically barred from entering the prosecution headquarters. Shortly after, the Prime Minister — without the President’s statutorily required participation — installed a loyal political ally in the role. This paved the way for purges, politically motivated withdrawals of motions to lift immunity, and the scandalous shelving of cases involving Tusk’s political allies.
One such case involved Roman Giertych, a close confidant of Tusk, accused by prosecutors of siphoning over €20 million from a publicly listed company. The decision to drop the case was concealed for months, unsurprising, given that it relied on the preposterous claim that Giertych knew nothing of multimillion-euro transactions carried out by his… driver and bodyguard, in a company for which he was the lead counsel. And yet the Commission’s report states that “significant progress” has been made in ensuring the independence of the prosecution service from the government.
Today, under Tusk, the prosecution service functions as a political weapon against the opposition, with fabricated charges and psychological torture used in detention to extract false testimony. The European Court of Human Rights has already taken up multiple cases. My own unlawful detention, in blatant violation of international law, has resulted in Hungary granting me political asylum and Interpol refusing a Red Notice (a request to law enforcement worldwide to locate and arrest a person), putting Poland in the same category as Belarus, Russia, or other authoritarian regimes.
In another staggering distortion, the report notes only in passing that Poland’s National Electoral Commission rejected the financial report of one party, resulting in the loss of public funding, without mentioning that the party in question is Law and Justice (PiS). This was a thinly veiled attempt at the de facto liquidation of the main opposition party, entirely contrary to the statutory law and the facts. The Supreme Court ruled this action illegal and ordered funding to be reinstated under the Electoral Code. Yet Prime Minister Tusk took to X to declare that “in his view,” the money would not be paid, and the Finance Minister followed suit, ignoring the Supreme Court ruling.
This was also a tactical move to clear the field for Tusk’s hand-picked presidential candidate, the globalist favourite Rafał Trzaskowski, to secure full control of power. Hence the intense pressure to win the presidential election, by unlawful means if necessary. But once again, the Polish people rose to the occasion. Tens of thousands of small donations financed Karol Nawrocki’s campaign, which succeeded against all odds — including a state apparatus, media complex, and left-liberal establishment aligned in full assault mode.
The Commission’s hypocrisy is nowhere more evident than on the issue of media freedom. Around the world, globalists are at war with free speech and Poland is no exception. Earlier this year, the Digital Affairs Ministry drafted a censorship bill under the guise of DSA regulation. Independent journalists face growing persecution and threats, some issued directly by the Public Prosecutor’s spokesperson and the new Justice Minister. Advertisers are blackmailed into boycotting conservative media, while reporters from conservative TV Republika — Poland’s most-watched channel — are barred from government press conferences. Officials openly threaten to revoke their licenses. The Commission’s report? Praises the “reform” of public media.
What did this “reform” entail? A violent and unlawful takeover of state media, in open defiance of binding legal provisions. I personally witnessed this during my first official parliamentary intervention at the Polish Press Agency headquarters, after learning that individuals acting on behalf of Culture Minister Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz were attempting to seize the building by force. Under Polish law, only the National Media Council, not a minister, has the authority to appoint or dismiss public media leadership. Alongside journalists and other opposition MPs, I physically guarded the office of the agency’s legal president, preventing an unlawful occupation. Ironically, Sienkiewicz now serves in the European Parliament’s Special committee on the European Democracy Shield — which, to him, apparently means breaking into public institutions by brute force.
Equally omitted is the unprecedented attack on the National Broadcasting Council, a constitutional body entrusted with safeguarding free speech and media pluralism under Article 213 of the Constitution. The Council’s chairman courageously defended free speech and was not afraid to issue licenses to conservative broadcasters. In retaliation, MPs from the ruling coalition initiated impeachment proceedings, not to obtain a conviction, but to force a suspension and paralyse the institution. This occurred despite a Constitutional Tribunal ruling, first as an interim measure prohibiting any action in the case, and later in a final judgment, affirming that the initiation of impeachment proceedings requires a qualified three-fifths majority and does not automatically result in the suspension of a member of an independent constitutional body. Ignoring the judgment (which, under Article 190, is universally binding and final), the Sejm suspended the chair by simple majority — simultaneously violating two constitutional safeguards: those of the Council and the Constitutional Tribunal. These constitute a constitutional coup d’état, for which Polish criminal law provides penalties of up to life imprisonment.
The pattern repeats in the judiciary. The Justice Minister, in violation of statutory provisions, shortened the terms of hundreds of court presidents and vice-presidents, replacing them with party loyalists. In addition, he ignored a Constitutional Tribunal ruling that such actions, when excluding the participation of the National Council of the Judiciary — a constitutional body entrusted with safeguarding judicial independence (Article 186 of the Constitution) — are unconstitutional. As a result, the manipulation of judicial panels in politically sensitive cases has become routine. The judiciary is now subject to political purges. Over a thousand judicial vacancies remain unfilled, with the Ministry refusing to announce new appointments, in an effort to prevent any nominations outside of left-liberal control. Meanwhile, judicial statistics are deliberately concealed to obscure the mounting collapse of the justice system.
The Minister of Justice disregards the National Council of the Judiciary entirely, except when his prosecutors raid its offices with security services, breaking into cabinets and confiscating sensitive disciplinary files, including those concerning his own political allies. He then dismissed judicial disciplinary officers, despite the law guaranteeing them fixed terms without provision for dismissal — justifying it with an a contrario interpretation.
The list of abuses, institutional, legal, constitutional, is long. Of course, the Commission should not even be addressing most of these issues. That is not why Member States fund a bloated EU bureaucracy. But if the Commission insists on acting as Europe’s rule-of-law watchdog, it must at least be impartial. Instead, “rule of law” has become a euphemism for ideological warfare against conservative governments that defy the globalist project.
Let’s be blunt: Had a PiS government committed even 1 per cent of the transgressions now carried out by Tusk’s coalition, Brussels would be in uproar, and global headlines would scream about the death of democracy in Poland. What we are witnessing is an extraordinarily crude political operation that cannot, despite all efforts, be disguised in the trappings of neutrality or objectivity. But what can one expect from second-tier politicians sent to Brussels — including Didier Reynders, the architect of these annual reports, whose own explanation for decade-long gambling winnings amid money-laundering allegations was as crude and implausible as the Commission’s misuse of “rule of law” rhetoric.
Marcin Romanowski is a Doctor of Law, university lecturer, former Deputy Minister of Justice in the Law and Justice government, currently a Member of the Polish Parliament in exile in Hungary and Director of the Hungarian-Polish Institute of Freedom in Budapest
Dirty-tricks Tusk refuses to accept victory of Nawrocki in presidential election