Poland’s house of cards

In Netflix’s House of Cards, Frank Underwood never storms anything. He has no use for tanks or mobs. He arranges things so that, when the moment comes, the rules themselves hand him power. Sworn in as vice president without facing a single voter, he turns to the camera: “One heartbeat away from the presidency and not a single vote cast in my name. Democracy is so overrated.”Poland, one of America’s closest allies on NATO’s eastern flank, is now living through its own version of that plot.Frank talks to the camera. Polish politicians sometimes do too. In August, at a summer forum for young activists organized by his political allies, Prime Minister Donald Tusk spoke about the Constitutional Tribunal, the court that rules on what Poland’s constitution means: “In September, I need to be certain that our judges will enter this building and that it will all be in accordance with the law.” His judges entered a month late, on Friday. The police came too. The timing was striking. It was a Friday evening at the start of the All Saints’ weekend, when millions of Poles drive across the country to visit family graves, and the president was already airborne for a working visit to Senegal. At about 6 p.m., the tribunal’s chief justice and his deputy learned they had been suspended for a month. The order came from a judge elected this year by the governing majority, who had taken her oath in Parliament rather than before the president, as Polish law requires.Riot police ringed the building, and according to the court’s spokeswoman, its guards were told to pack their things and leave. The new judges were escorted in by the State Protection Service, Poland’s rough equivalent of the Secret Service, which answers to the interior minister. They came through a gate that connects the court to the prime minister’s office. A wall of police kept the chief justice out, and the justice minister, who is also the country’s chief prosecutor, asked the court to lift his immunity and his deputy’s to prosecute them.President Karol Nawrocki turned his plane around in midair. Shortly before 1 a.m., he walked through the police cordon and had to push past the new judges blocking the tribunal’s door. The justice minister said the video showed the president “attacking the judges.” It shows a former amateur boxer squeezing through a doorway and no blows. Nawrocki left at about 5 a.m., calling the night a “forcible takeover of a constitutional body.”Even groups that spent years criticizing the previous conservative government balked. The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights said the rules invoked “do not provide a clear basis for such a decision” and warned of a “dangerous precedent”: Any future majority could install a long-serving judge of its own and seize the court the same way.Americans don’t need a lecture about politicized courts — every Supreme Court confirmation is a war. But fights over who sits on a court are settled by votes, elections, and judges. When President Franklin Roosevelt wanted a friendlier Supreme Court in 1937, he asked Congress to let him add justices. Congress refused. He did not send federal agents to change the locks.In a televised address on Saturday, Tusk gave his version: “Legally elected members of the Tribunal were attacked, and the police on the scene protected the Tribunal from the attackers.” There could be no yielding, he said, to “lawlessness and violence.” Perhaps he believes that. But the rule of law doesn’t usually arrive on a Friday night, through a side gate, behind riot shields.So why the rush? Look at what this court can do.Poland has a constitutional mechanism that will sound familiar to anyone who knows the 25th Amendment. If the president is temporarily unable to serve and cannot notify the speaker of the lower house himself, the Constitutional Tribunal decides, on the speaker’s motion, whether an impediment exists. If it finds one, the speaker temporarily takes over the president’s duties. The official who files the motion is the one who would exercise those powers.In America, sidelining a president against his will takes the vice president, a majority of the Cabinet and, if the president fights back, two-thirds of both houses of Congress. In Poland, the other constitutional routes to displacing a president, prosecution before the State Tribunal or a finding of permanent incapacity, require a two-thirds vote of the National Assembly, the two chambers sitting jointly. The governing coalition does not have it. This mechanism requires no parliamentary supermajority. It does require a genuine impediment, and the tribunal decides whether one exists.Nobody in government has proposed using it. But the mechanism explains why control of the tribunal is about more than judicial appointments. In the final season of House of Cards, the plot to remove President Claire Underwood under the 25th Amendment came down to a single letter, signed by people the plotters controlled. In Poland, the signatures that would matter belong to the judges of this court.The court has a second extraordinary power: it alone can declare a political party unconstitutional. It did so to Poland’s Communist Party last year. The justice minister has hinted at what could come next. Asked about banning a nationalist opposition party, he said: “If we rebuild the Constitutional Tribunal, then we can consider looking at these kinds of parties.”The man next in line is Włodzimierz Czarzasty, the speaker. He is a former member of the party that ran communist Poland. His party won less than 9% of the vote in 2023, and he got the speaker’s chair through a coalition deal to rotate the job. In September, attacking the president over defense funding, he said that if the president couldn’t intellectually grasp the issue, he should “abdicate.” In February, the U.S. ambassador to Poland cut off all contact with him over what the ambassador called “outrageous and unprovoked insults directed against President Trump.” On Saturday, when the president invited parliamentary parties to emergency talks, the speaker’s party stayed away.Nawrocki won the presidency last year with 10.6 million votes. No Polish voter cast a ballot to make Czarzasty president. Yet under the constitution, he is first in line to exercise presidential powers. One heartbeat away.The idea has been in the room before. Last year, Czarzasty’s predecessor as speaker said he had repeatedly been sounded out about delaying Nawrocki’s swearing-in. In his own telling, the speaker would then have stayed on, exercising the president’s powers. People were asking, he said, whether he was ready “to carry out a coup d’état.” He refused.That matters because the presidency is the most powerful remaining check on the coalition. In little more than a year, Nawrocki has vetoed more bills than any previous Polish president did over an entire presidency, and the coalition lacks the three-fifths majority needed to override him.Look at what he has vetoed. The biggest target was a $49 billion European Union defense loan. In March, Nawrocki vetoed the law implementing it, citing sovereignty and the cost of the debt. The loan’s procurement rules require at least 65% of component costs to come from the EU, Ukraine, or eligible European partners — components from countries such as the United States are capped at 35%. That matters in a country that has staked much of its military modernization on American hardware: F-16 and F-35 fighters, Patriot missile batteries, Abrams tanks, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers, and Apache helicopters. The government, which says most of the EU money would go to Polish arms makers, signed the loan agreement anyway in May, under a Cabinet resolution rather than the law the president had vetoed. A month later, at the inaugural flight of Poland’s F-35s, Washington announced another $4 billion in loans for American weapons.The president has also been the coalition’s main obstacle on social policy. In July, he vetoed bills giving unmarried couples, including same-sex couples, a new legal status, which he called a back door to marriage. Last month, the lower house passed bills restoring abortion in cases of severe fetal abnormality and partly decriminalizing help with an abortion. They are headed his way. A bill allowing abortion on demand up to 12 weeks, a campaign promise of the prime minister’s party, waits in committee. The speaker’s own party has pushed for full same-sex marriage for years.The government’s attitude toward the court on such questions is already clear. This summer, the tribunal ruled that a government regulation allowing civil registries to record same-sex marriages performed abroad was partly unconstitutional. The government said the ruling had no legal force and put the order into effect anyway.An acting president from the coalition would remove the obstacle Nawrocki now represents. A tribunal dominated by the majority’s appointees could also prove far more receptive to its constitutional arguments.POLAND’S PRESIDENT WANTS ‘FORT TRUMP’ TO STOP RUSSIA. DONALD TUSK WOULD RATHER PLEASE BERLINWashington should care. Poland spends a larger share of its economy on defense than any other NATO member. In September, President Donald Trump credited “the bold leadership of my friend, Karol Nawrocki” for progress toward a new U.S. Army base in Poland. The man next in line is one the U.S. ambassador cut off in February.Frank Underwood’s genius was that he never looked like he was seizing power. He just made sure that when the moment came, his people held the keys. On Friday night in Warsaw, someone changed the locks.Miłosz Manasterski is a Polish political commentator.