FOR in the media

"Fortunately, at the moment no one is seriously thinking about Polexit in Poland and our membership has strong public support," Aleksander Laszek, chief economist at the Civil Development Forum, a think tank in Warsaw, told DW.

On October 26, the European Parliament adopted a resolution criticising the Polish Constitutional Tribunal’s decision to ban over 95 per cent of legal abortions in Poland. Indeed, out of 1,110 pregnancy terminations in 2019, 1,074 were carried out on the grounds of severe and irreversible foetal defects. This option will now be closed in Poland, which has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the European Union. On the same day the resolution was adopted, the prime ministers of Poland and Hungary met in Budapest to confirm that both governments would veto the EU 2021-27 financial framework and Covid-19 recovery fund.

On November 20, the ruling Law and Justice party adopted a resolution supporting the government’s announcement to veto to link EU funds to the respect of the rule of law. The vast majority of the opposition voted against this resolution. The opening words of this political manifesto reads that “the Parliament of the Republic of Poland notices and reminds that the Republic of Poland is a democratic and sovereign state ruled by law.” The governing party’s desire to tell the world that the rule of law is present in Poland recalls the words of Margaret Thatcher that “being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

Poland’s newly reshuffled Constitutional Tribunal ruled last week that abortion due to fatal or severe foetal impairment is no longer an option. Forcing women to give birth to severely malformed children, even those who have little to no chances of survival is now part and parcel of the Polish Constitution; what few abortion rights remained in the country have essentially vanished.

In mid-July, the European Commission published this year’s edition of the EU Justice Scoreboard 2020. It is a comparative and non-arbitrary source of data about the functioning, efficiency, and independence of the justice systems within the EU. The EU Justice Scoreboard enables assessment of the Law and Justice’s “reforms” of the judiciary and comparisons of Poland with the rest of the Member States.

All people in Poland are equal before the law. This sentence is unfortunately not true. The events of last weekend offered a stark reminder of that sad reality.

In the recent presidential elections in Poland, over 51 per cent of the votes were cast for the reelection of president Andrzej Duda of the ruling Law and Justice party. Soundly defeating the Mayor of Warsaw Rafal Trzaskowski, Andrzej will soon start his second term in office.

The Law and Justice party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has claimed that Poland's economy will catch up with Germany's by 2040. It is a bold claim by any standard, but could it become a possibility?

Many labor market regulations were created with large mid-20th century manufacturing plants in mind – which is the spirit of the Polish Labor Code of 1974. However, along with the process of industrial automation as well as the growth of employment in services, the economic reality has changed.

On 13 January 2016, exactly four years ago today, the Commission activated its rule of law framework for the very first time with respect to Poland.