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Polish Putin: Autocratic Power Grab Accelerates in Warsaw
By Jan Puhl
Poland's
national-conservative government was quick to sideline the country's
high court. Now, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his party have their sights
set on complete control of the state.
March 30, 2016 –
01:28 PM
At age 73, she is
the grande dame of politics in Warsaw -- and she still talks so much
and so fast that hardly anyone can get a word in edgewise. More than
anything, though, Jadwiga Staniszkis is not afraid of those in power.
Even as a young
assistant professor during communist times, her defiance got her into
trouble and she spent some time in prison as a result. Today, 27
years after the fall of communism, Staniszkis is once again taking on
the authorities. The sociology professor has become one of the most
outspoken critics of the current national-conservative government
under the control of Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Although Kaczynski has no
formal position in the government, he is widely seen as the one
pulling the strings in the background.
Staniszkis was long
a fan of Kaczynski and has even campaigned for his
national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party in the past. She
once gushed: "I think he is perhaps the most intelligent
politician in Poland. I like him a lot."
Today, she says: "He
wants to monopolize power with no limitations. The approach is
informed by a Bolshevik understanding of politics."
Kaczynski has placed
state-run media in Poland under his control and weakened the
country's highest court, known as the Constitutional Tribunal. And
that was just the beginning. The Warsaw-based newsmagazine Polityka
has even described it as a coup d'état. There have been large
protests in the country, harsh criticism from Brussels and a rule of
law inquiry from the EU, but nothing has yet stopped Kaczynski.
Now, on his path to
absolute power, he is preparing to put every last aspect of the state
under his control. Already, he can rely on his party's majority in
Polish parliament to do his bidding. But he apparently has
aspirations beyond just dominating ministries, state agencies and the
judiciary. Under his leadership, the state is to take on a stricter,
fatherly role -- not unlike an autocracy.
In the battle over
the Constitutional Tribunal, Professor Staniszkis knows the primary
adversaries well. Both Andrzej Rzeplinski, who is president of the
court, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who has robbed the court of its power,
attended her university classes.
A Waste of Time
Rzeplinski still
goes to work every morning and, in the pompous court building in the
Warsaw government quarter, he regularly meets with court justices to
discuss the constitutionality of laws. But it is little more than a
waste of time. The PiS government simply ignores the court rulings
and doesn't allow them to be published in the official court reports,
believing as it does that the court was assembled illegally.
Experts like the
Warsaw-based legal expert Rafal Stankiewicz are concerned that chaos
may soon be the result. He says that in Poland, two "completely
independent legal spheres have developed." He defines the "old"
sphere as the one based on laws that have been approved by the
Constitutional Tribunal, and a new one based on the laws pushed
through by the national-conservative parliamentary majority. "I
see an erosion of the rule of law in Poland," Stankiewicz says.
The question is:
Which laws should courts obey? And what value do their rulings have
when it isn't clear which legal sphere is applicable?
Jaroslaw Kaczynski
is likely the only one who is satisfied with the current state of
affairs. In a recent interview, he made it clear that he wouldn't
agree to any compromise in the constitutional clash. He is simply
waiting patiently for Rzeplinski's term to expire in December as
scheduled and will then fill the post with one of his own.
The parliamentary
majority enjoyed by PiS is a comfortable one. But it is nonetheless
not large enough to push through constitutional amendments. Still,
with the high court paralyzed, Kaczynski can change Poland's
constitution without resorting to the legislature.
"Without a
constitutional court, citizens are defenseless in the face of state
power," says Adam Bodnar, who was appointed human rights
commissioner by the last government. It is likely that he too will
soon lose his job. During the election campaign, PiS promised "dobra
zmiana," meaning "good change."
Installing Loyalists
With the new media
law, PiS has provided a taste of what might still be coming. The
reform sidelined the National Broadcasting Council and allows the
party to appoint its people to the most important state-run media
posts. The public television broadcaster TVP is now little more than
a PiS party station. Indeed, the station has a new nickname among the
populace: TVPiS.
Kaczynski's party
has been just as assiduous when it comes to installing loyalists in
the civil service and at state-owned companies. A PiS man, for
example, now heads up the state-owned Arabian stud farm Janow
Podlaski -- even though he is a banker and knows nothing about
horses.
Kaczyinski has long
had it out for political and business elites in Poland. A core
element of his political thinking is his conviction that the 1989
revolution was incomplete and that many communist functionaries who
only superficially embraced the new regime remained in important
positions in administration and state-owned companies. He believes
they have continued to slow Poland's development to the present day
and must now be filtered out down to the very lowest levels.
When Kaczynski was
in power the first time 10 years ago, he tried to get rid of all
ex-communist functionaries. But he was ultimately blocked by the
Constitutional Tribunal, which ruled that his approach was too tough,
too extensive and not respectful enough of civil rights. Now, though,
the path is open for a new attempt.
Opposition
politicians also expect the PiS to curtail the rights of local
parliaments, municipalities and provinces. Many large cities, such as
Poznan, Gdansk and Wroclaw, are governed by popular mayors who do not
belong to PiS. But they are dependent on money from the federal
government. Kaczynski can use this dependency to exact obedience.
Plus, he has also
appointed Zbigniew Ziobro, a tough, law-and-order type, to head up
the Justice Ministry. Ziobro is in favor of harsher sentences and
stricter rules governing trial procedure. He has allowed
investigators to conduct surveillance on email accounts and computers
even absent a court order while other legal reforms have made
significant changes to property rights. The aim of the latter is to
prevent Polish property from being purchased by foreign investors.
Reminiscent of Putin
Absent the
inconvenient objections from a constitutional court, PiS is even able
to manipulate voting and election law, including the gerrymandering
of electoral districts such that the national-conservative candidate
has the advantage. That, at any rate, is one of the methods applied
by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán -- a Kaczynski soul-mate --
to safeguard his power.
The newsmagazine
Polityka recently described a worst-case scenario in which PiS could
write a new anti-terror law such that allows for the persecution of
the opposition. Already, Kazynski has accused demonstrators
associated with the Committee for the Defense of Democracy (KOD) of
being Russian agents. "They are people who go to the Russian
Embassy to complain there about PiS," he said. For several
months, KOD has been organizing regular protests, bringing tens of
thousands of people onto the streets almost every week to voice their
opposition to the government's high-handedness.
Public opinion
researchers have found that a majority of Poles are not supportive of
PiS in its fight against the constitutional court. At the same time,
though, 38 percent of voters still support Kaczynski's party, more
than for any other party. Supporters of PiS tend to be younger,
whereas KOD mostly attracts older supporters. The older ones lived
through communism and know how valuable civil rights are.
For those under 30,
by contrast, EU membership is seen as a given -- and they are very
aware that their peers in Western Europe are much better off
materially. "How should you tell a 25-year-old university
graduate that he earns less than someone his age in Brussels who
sells kebabs?" the liberal paper Gazeta Wyborcza wrote recently.
With a varied menu
of socially minded promises, PiS capitalizes on this feeling of
disadvantage. One plank in the party's platform, for example, pledges
that Polish wages will catch up to those in the rest of Europe within
15 years.
Professor
Staniszkis, who has known Jaroslaw Kaczynski for several decades, has
not been allowed to see him for months. The two don't have that much
to say to each other anyway. "He doesn't understand the Western
concept of sovereignty, which uses a system of checks and balances to
prevent a dictatorship of the majority," says Staniszkis. Her
former student, she adds, wants absolute power. "It is archaic
and reminiscent of Putin's approach to power."
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