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Thirty years ago, Leszek Balcerowicz unleashed the “shock therapy” that put Poland on the path to rapid economic growth after decades of communist rule. Business boomed, the economy expanded and the former finance minister and central bank chief won plaudits in the West for his reforms.

Patryk Wachowiec, a legal analyst at the Civil Development Forum, said this change was particularly troubling as it would undermine the primacy of EU law.

“Since 1964, the inherent principle of primacy of EU law over national law has been recognised in ECJ case law: judges have an obligation to disapply national law when it is contrary to EU law, without consulting their own national constitutional tribunal,” he said.

Ever since the European Commission initiated a third infringement procedure in respect to the recurrent attacks on the rule of law by Polish authorities last April, the situation has continued to seriously deteriorate. We have now reached the unprecedented and frightening stage where Polish judges are being subject to harassment tactics in the form of multiple arbitrary disciplinary investigations, formal disciplinary proceedings and/or sanctions for applying EU law as interpreted by the ECJ or ‘daring’ to refer questions for a preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice.

In mid-November 2019 Leszek Balcerowicz and Lech Wałęsa visited Washington DC to participate in events organized on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the transformation and political changes in Poland as part of the "30 Years of Freedom" project.

In his policy speech Mateusz Morawiecki largely repeated his standard narrative about the messianic role of Law and Justice in the history of the Third Republic of Poland. The opportunity ("historical moment") faced by Poland in 1989 was "only partially seized". What is worse, "neoliberalism caused a conceptual confusion and a mess in the value system". 

The ruling of the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) concerning the Disciplinary Chamber and the new National Council of the Judiciary (KRS) is another ruling concerning changes in the Polish judiciary in recent years. It answers only some of the doubts, and further answers are expected in 2020.

30 years after the velvet revolutions of Eastern Europe, the think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni has awarded its prize celebrating freedom to the Polish economist Leszek Balcerowicz. In 1989 he was the key man of the reforms in Poland, the first country that went from communism to the free market. The NBQ asked him how he did.

Three decades ago, on November 15, 1989 Lech Wałęsa spoke to the joint session of Congress as the leader of the “Solidarity” – a movement that has just toppled communism in Poland, and began the unraveling of the Iron Curtain.

On 8 July 2019, prosecutor Mariusz Krasoń was relocated from the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Cracow, Poland to the District Prosecutor’s Office in Wrocław-Krzyki, almost 300 km away, and two levels lower in the hierarchy. The Justice Defence Committee (KOS) indicates that in May 2019, prosecutor Krasoń initiated a resolution of the Assembly of the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Cracow.

After the election campaign, the Law and Justice Party stopped pretending that the 2020 budget would be deficit-free, starting a discussion on its amendment. The implementation of the new election promises will be difficult to reconcile with the existing spending rule, but there have already been voices offering it to be softened, such as Prof. Łukasz Hardt of the Monetary Policy Council.