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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   22028 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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Police deployed during stand-off over control of top Poland court, although all of the right-aligned posters on twitter and 4chan are calling it a coup. Apparently, there is some constitutional shenenigans in the appointment and approval of judges by the Polish president... sound familiar? I don't actually know very much about Polish politics - or European politics, beyond the anglosphere - so unfortunately my OP is a bit light. Does anyone in the Motte read Polish, or know what's going on?

My gut instinct is to say that Donald Tusk has overstepped in this manuever. You can't extralegally ignore your own head of state, even if it is to fix problems created by past abuses of the constitution. Unless there is some compromise in the background, things could get real tense, real fast.

I can give you a very loose overview but I'm fuzzy on the details.

So remember that Poland was a Soviet puppet state until 1989. When they were democratizing they sort of set aside the issue of judicial appointments and kept the Soviet era judges on. Judicial rulings just hadn't been very important and they had a lot of things to sort out.

In the 90s the judges solved the appointment issue by deciding that future judges would be chosen by current judges.

Now it's important to remember that judges serve for life and people live a long time these days. eg Parler was shut down by Amazon in 2020 and had to go before a judge appointed by Jimmy Carter when they tried to get an injunction.

So in 2015 the right wing PiS government wanted to bring some democratic representation / accountability into the appointment process. And also appoint some right leaning judges, obviously.

There have been disputes since. Tusk says that the PiS appointed judges are illegitimate, President Nawrocki has refused to swear in recent nominations from the Tusk lead parliament. Tusk says that doesn't matter.

So there's a crisis of legitimacy for the courts.

This is kicking off now because the EU wants it's eastern nations to be fully on board for war with Russia. Tusk is heavily EU aligned.

There have been disputes since. Tusk says that the PiS appointed judges are illegitimate, President Nawrocki has refused to swear in recent nominations from the Tusk lead parliament. Tusk says that doesn't matter.

Judges are appointed by the Sejm (legislature) but must (by regular law) be sworn in by the President. The law is really not clear whether the President is absolutely required to administer the oath to any judge or whether that functions as an effective veto by simply refusing to schedule such a swearing-in.

I'm sad to say because I don't support Tusk politically, but the former is probably the better read at least on a purely (autistic) legal reason. A clause intending to create a substantive power such as a veto should be explicit, not implicit in procedural steps.

Then again, I'm also inclined to say that if lawfare is fine for one side then it's fine for the other too. But that logic is what burns institutions down.

This is kicking off now because the EU wants it's eastern nations to be fully on board for war with Russia.

The EU wants that from Tusk. I don't think the courts have much to say about it, so it's just blowback from that.

There have been disputes since. Tusk says that the PiS appointed judges are illegitimate, President Nawrocki has refused to swear in recent nominations from the Tusk lead parliament. Tusk says that doesn't matter.

This all has a very Roman Republic vibe to me. The President's constitutional role in swearing in judges was taken for granted as ceremonial, but the President started to refuse to be present for the swearings-in, so the Prime Minister goes ahead and claims that he can have them sworn in without the President... We'll see, I expect Tusk to get most of what he wants, but it's a lot easier when you're Caesar (in his first Consulship) and have the undisputed support of the populace, as opposed to having won a tight election.

This is kicking off now because the EU wants it's eastern nations to be fully on board for war with Russia.

Huh? Isn't PiS anti-Russian to the point they were the butt of jokes about it literally right up until the war?

Yeah but they also have too much of a nationalist streak. The EU pitch is "We're planning to feed 40% of your working age males into the meat grinder, but don't worry! We'll import MENA people to replace them." PiS would probably have issues.

Prior to Trump, we probably would have said the same about the US GOP, too. It could easily turn out that right-wingers in Poland just end up culturally affiliated with Russia.

Sure, in the same sense that it could easily turn out the EU is actually pro Russia now. Like, it's not logically impossible, so it could happen, but I think a better argument than "it could happen" is required.

The pattern I am obviously suggesting is a right wing cultural affinity for the clearly conservative Russia, which would not apply to the liberal EU.

They seem quite friendly with clearly conservative Muslims, Russians are positively liberal by comparison.

Fair point, but surely we both immediately understand this as just an outgroup phenomenon. They are too foreign to count.

I'm not sure I agree, given how many Muslims now live in Europe, I'd say they're, if anything, less foreign. What Russians do is Russia is no skin off a European liberal's nose, while they actually have to deal with, say, Muslim attacks on gay pride parades. What's more, it's not even that long ago that Europe was more pro-Russia, at least relatively. It was even pro-Russia relative to Trump (like... who do you think it was that built these Nord Stream pipelines?).

Now, I'm not saying that kind of flip is impossible, all is fair and love and war, and in politics allegiances change. From what I understand you can even see the right-wing pro-Russia shift slowly taking place as boomers die off, the thing is it's happening by way of a more extreme party slowly gaining voter share, not by flipping PiS from the inside. So given the history of the party, and given the history of the European establishment, this all just comes off as some advanced projection coupled with "we have always been at war with East-Asia".

More comments

  • I guess with PiS it's quite conceivable that they could pull something like starting such a war, pulling the whole of EU into it, and then exiting and making ceasefire separately and leaning back and watching while the rest of Europe bleeds. They were very much the "our country über alles" but not above pretending to do international cooperation for more gibs party.

  • The more decisive question, of course, is not actually alignment on war with Russia but alignment on accepting refugees. Poland is one of the countries that has been refusing to share the load, is now starting to look conspicuously better for it and making it awkward for its Western neighbours. With sufficient cynicism you might compare the EU outlook on this with the theory on China/Taiwan and Russia/Ukraine where bad leadership can't suffer the existence of a living example of how good the same sort of people could have it under an alternative political system.

PiS accepted tons of Ukrainian refugees...

Ok. Poland is the one refusing to share the load with the problematic refugees - the ones usually born east of America, west of Thailand and south of Istanbul.

west of America, east of Thailand and south of Istanbul.

You might have west and east mixed up there, maybe? That's approximately a chunk of China, South Korea, most of Japan, the Phillippines, Indonesia, and Australia/New Zealand. Plus a lot of the Pacific Ocean.

I'm not going to say there can't be problematic immigrants from that region, it's just surprising to me if those are the main groups people are worried about.

You are right. corrected.

I'm obviously talking about the sort of refugees that would significantly change the national character (though I gather that Poland actually got more friction between them and the native population than they at first expected, and soured on the whole thing a bit too). This is like gotchaing someone complaining about immigrants in the US with a statistic about immigrants from Scotland.

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