WARSAW: Polish President Andrzej Duda ratified one of three judicial reform bills on Tuesday, but his veto of two others left the Law and Justice (PiS) party’s flagship judicial reform plan in limbo and triggered questions about the ruling coalition.
Amid signals from one of the PiS’s junior coalition partners that it backed Duda’s position, the PiS deputy speaker of parliament denied that the coalition was in jeopardy or that an early election might be necessary.
The conservative, nationalist-minded PiS appeared to be rattled on Monday by the veto announcement from Duda, who had previously appeared closely aligned with PiS. Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said the government would not “yield to pressure from the street and from abroad”.
The law ratified by Duda allows the justice minister to hire and fire the senior judges who head ordinary courts, a measure that the PiS says is needed to speed up a system widely seen as too slow and redolent of the communist era, and to make the judiciary more accountable to the people.
Critics at home and in the European Union accuse the conservative, nationalist-minded PiS of trying to politicise the judiciary, pointing to previous moves to increase government control over public media, state prosecutors and the Constitutional Tribunal.
On Monday, after vetoing two bills giving the government more influence over the Supreme Court, Duda appeared to give a nod to the tens of thousands protesting nightly against the judicial reform plan, saying that the reforms must not “separate society and state”.
Duda will present alternative proposals in the next two months for the bills he vetoed.
Jadwiga Emilewicz, deputy development minister and member of the small right-wing Polska Razem party, tweeted: “Legislative initiative in president’s court. This is a good solution for Poland”.
PiS needs Polska Razem’s nine seats to maintain its lower house majority, and the tweet prompted questions about a coalition break-up to PiS’s deputy parliamentary speaker, Ryszard Terlecki.
“I don’t see a risk of that, at least for now,” Terlecki told reporters. “There are no reasons to hold an early parliamentary election. The majority is stable enough, so it will be maintained for these two years (to the end of its term).” “There is no war at the top,” he added.
Polska Razem then issued an official statement saying that, while it broadly agreed with Duda’s view of the bills he vetoed, it had not considered voting against the government because “it is obvious that a division in the coalition on such important bills would have to lead to an early election”.
The three main opposition parties, Civic Platform, Nowoczesna and Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, held a news conference to announce a joint effort to produce their own judicial reform plan.
Ryszard Petru, the head of Nowoczesna, said he expected more street protests after Duda issued his proposals.
“Let’s remember that this was one battle,” he said. “It may be that we’re facing further battles in the autumn.”
PiS under its founder and leading light Jaroslaw Kaczynski has already ridden out a number of setbacks without a significant loss of support in its core small-town voter base, notably when street protests and an opposition blockade forced it to abandon plans to tighten the abortion law and restrict media access to parliament.
However, recent surveys have shown the combined opposition drawing level with the PiS-led coalition. — Reuters
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