A Constitutional Settlement Is Poland’s Only Hope
In Poland, the narrow defeat of liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski by the ultra-conservative Karol Nawrocki in the June 1st presidential election marked a turning point. The possibility of restoring the pre-2015 constitutional order has effectively vanished. But this does not mean Polish democracy is doomed.
Poland’s European partners must recognize the dramatic shift Polish voters delivered. Rather than fixating on the formal legality—or illegality—of the dizzying array of judicial reforms and counter-reforms enacted since 2015, the time has come to encourage all sides to pursue a national constitutional settlement. This new framework must address not only judicial independence but also the deeper social and political polarization now defining Polish life.
A primer on Poland’s constitutional crisis
To grasp the significance of the presidential election for Poland’s constitutional future, we should recall how we got here. For nearly a decade, Poland has faced a constitutional crisis rooted in a series of formally unconstitutional and substantively undemocratic moves by the government of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party and its ally, President Andrzej Duda.
After taking power in 2015, they swiftly packed the Constitutional Tribunal with loyalist judges—three appointed in clear violation of the constitution. In 2017, they illegally shortened the term of the National Council of the Judiciary, replacing judges’ representatives with political appointees. Today, more than 25% of Polish judges, including a majority in the Supreme Court, have been nominated by this discredited body.
Further laws continued this authoritarian trend. PiS created two special chambers in the Supreme Court—staffed exclusively by the disputed judges—and transformed the prosecution service into a loyalist structure. Chief judges at all levels were purged.
The situation changed in 2023, when a broad opposition coalition led by former Prime Minister and European Council President Donald Tusk won parliamentary elections. After a historically delayed transition, President Duda reluctantly granted Tusk the mandate to form a government. A tense period of political cohabitation began.
New Justice Minister Adam Bodnar moved to reverse eight years of PiS judicial “reform.” He replaced the Deputy General Prosecutor—despite a last-minute PiS amendment requiring presidential approval for such changes—and the Cabinet refused to publish rulings of the PiS-captured Constitutional Tribunal. Some saw these moves as too aggressive, others as too timid; PiS and Duda called them outright lawless.
Ultimately, the liberal coalition has always known that repairing the damage to Poland’s judiciary requires deep statutory reform. Numerous proposals have been developed—many discussed on this blog. All share one goal: reversing the effects of PiS’s 2015–2023 illiberal rule.
The June 1st electoral verdict
Yet under Poland’s semi-presidential system, none of these legislative changes can take effect without the president’s approval. Every statute must be signed by the president before promulgation. Although his veto is not absolute—parliament can override it with a 60% majority—Tusk’s coalition lacks that margin. The blocking minority belongs to PiS and the even more far-right Konfederacja party.
Moreover, the president does not need to veto a bill outright to kill it. The Constitution allows him to refer legislation to the Constitutional Tribunal before signing. There, the Chief Judge—a zealous PiS ally—can delay proceedings indefinitely.
Given these constraints, rule-of-law advocates were under no illusions: only a liberal president would sign into law the changes needed to dismantle the legal edifice PiS built.
In a significant triumph for democratic renewal, the June 1st election was generally conducted freely and fairly. While some irregularities occurred on both sides, and the media environment remained polarized, the process bore no resemblance to the abuses seen under PiS rule: no Pegasus surveillance of opposition leaders, no state media functioning as Orwellian propaganda, no brazen deployment of state-owned companies to bankroll government candidates.
In this fundamentally honest ballot, voters delivered their verdict. Having experienced both PiS’s revolutionary governance and Tusk’s liberal counter-revolution, they chose—by a narrow but clear margin—Karol Nawrocki: a fervent PiS supporter, ideologically on the party’s right and close to Konfederacja. Nawrocki is poised to become Poland’s most conservative president since 1989.
The post-election landscape
What does this result mean for the future of the rule of law in Poland? The conclusion is as simple as it is stark: the fight to return to any version of the pre-2015 constitutional order is over.
President Nawrocki will remain in office until at least 2030. Given the advantages of incumbency, he must be considered the favorite to win reelection and serve a second term.
Nawrocki will certainly not sign any of the judicial reform proposals prepared by Minister Bodnar and his legal team. More fundamentally, it is unclear how long Bodnar—or the broader Tusk government—will remain in office. The next parliamentary election is due by 2027. For over six months now, opinion polls have consistently shown that PiS and Konfederacja would win a clear majority if elections were held today.
Even under the most optimistic scenario from a liberal perspective, the next decade will thereby be dominated by a tense cohabitation between a big-tent centrist government and an ultra-conservative, semi-executive president. But a more likely trajectory is, as of now, the American one: a brief, ineffectual liberal interlude, followed by a full return of the far right to power.
Anyone who continues, in this radically altered reality, to speak in business-as-usual terms about restoring the rule of law is, frankly, deluding themselves. The situation demands not restoration, but reinvention—radically new constitutional ideas for radically new political conditions.
Towards a constitutional settlement
Concrete proposals for a new beginning are already on the table.
Since 2018, we have co-led a cross-partisan group of 130 intellectuals committed to designing a new constitutional vision for Poland. This initiative—known as the Social Contract Incubator or IUS, based on its Polish acronym—has been a rare collaborative space, uniting outspoken critics of PiS like us with its cautious or even committed sympathizers. Our vision was presented in a 2023 book, with a forthcoming English edition. The book outlines a pragmatic yet ambitious model for constitutional renewal. At its core is a new constitutional deal grounded in territorial decentralization and cross-ideological power-sharing.
This approach acknowledges Poland’s entrenched regional divides—between the more urbanized, progressive northwest and the more rural, conservative southeast. It also rethinks one of the most contentious battlegrounds of the past decade: the judiciary.
In our proposal, judicial appointments are removed from the hands of warring national factions. Instead, judges would be selected from a pool of qualified candidates and require endorsement from mayors representing at least 60% of the population in the region where the judge would serve. This grounds judicial legitimacy in local democratic accountability, not national partisan warfare.
Judicial reform could pave the way for broader structural change. Why must school curricula, for example, be dictated from Warsaw? Would it not be more democratic for local communities to decide whether they prefer patriotic education or sex education? In a deeply divided country like Poland, decentralization can transform zero-sum national battles into local debates that reflect the values of diverse communities.
Finally, we propose a new check on central legislative power: a reimagined Senate composed of regional governors and mayors of Poland’s largest cities. Legislation would require Senate approval, creating a more balanced national governance framework. This would be far more effective than the current system, where the presidential veto acts as a blunt, partisan instrument—potent when the president and the Cabinet come from the opposite political camps, and entirely absent when they do not.
Is the settlement possible?
The obvious question is whether an emboldened right would now consider compromising with the liberal camp. After all, amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds supermajority in the more powerful parliamentary chamber, the Sejm. In the current term, that means securing support from roughly a third of right-wing MPs from PiS and Konfederacja.
Surprisingly, early signals are not entirely discouraging about the feasibility of such an outcome. Already a year ago, Konfederacja strongly endorsed a “constitutional reset.” During the presidential campaign, the party’s leader, Sławomir Mentzen has also backed devolving education policy to regional and municipal levels.
As for President Nawrocki, he would be unwise to assume his narrow mandate guarantees a sweeping right-wing victory in 2027. One plausible reading of the election is that voters—having experienced both the PiS revolution and the Tusk-led counter-revolution—prefer divided government.
From that vantage, our proposal may offer precisely what voters want: not a return to total liberal or conservative rule, but a new structure of vertical checks and balances grounded in local power. Should Konfederacja continue to support the reset, President Nawrocki would struggle to remain disengaged. And if he resists, liberals could frame the 2027 election as a referendum on another era of unchecked right-wing rule.
But it takes two to tango.
Reconciliation also requires liberal introspection. Too often, liberal intellectuals have urged Polish politicians to adopt a Bidenesque narrative casting the right as an irredeemable threat to democracy. That message worked—once. It helped mobilize voters behind the broad coalition that brought Tusk to power in 2023. But existential narratives age poorly. Eventually, insisting that only progressives represent Poland’s true democratic values begins to sound self-righteous and polarizing. Conservative voters cannot forever be cast as victims duped by demagogues. At some point, the conflict stops resembling a battle for ideals and begins to look like a struggle against neighbors, friends, and family who simply think differently.
Well-intentioned rule-of-law defenders have not always helped, either. Their focus on formal legality often downplayed the substantial democratic legitimacy of Poland’s conservative project. PiS-aligned candidates have won four of the last five presidential elections. And liberals elsewhere—when similarly empowered—have at times stretched constitutional boundaries in the name of progress. Roosevelt’s New Deal remains a telling example.
If Poland’s allies—especially in legal and academic circles—can shift their goal from rigid fidelity to the 1997 Constitution toward a broader defense of democratic governance and fundamental rights, new paths will open. Our proposal is one such forward-looking, realistic path.
A reason for hope
Indeed, the ferocity of Poland’s constitutional conflict obscures a more hopeful reality: the country’s ideological divide is narrower than it appears. Poland’s opposing camps agree on core geopolitical priorities. Both liberals and most conservatives support EU membership, NATO, and a robust defense posture in the face of Russian aggression. Both value the strategic alliance with the United States.
Domestically, the differences are also less stark than political rhetoric suggests. Tusk has shifted rightward on migration and embraced infrastructure projects once championed by PiS. What remains are cultural and moral disputes—on abortion, same-sex civil unions, and religious education. These issues matter deeply. But are they worth tearing apart a successful nation while a brutal war rages next door?
International actors—particularly EU institutions and legal scholars—should support efforts toward reconciliation. President Nawrocki, though closely aligned with PiS, enters office with a clean slate. Unlike his predecessor, he bears no direct responsibility for the judiciary’s political takeover. That gives him an opportunity to chart a different path.
The Tusk government should meet him with seriousness and respect. If both sides engage in good faith, a constitutional settlement is not a pipe dream. In fact, under current conditions, even ordinary legislation requires cross-party consensus that amounts to a de facto constitutional majority. As we explained earlier, no law can be enacted without both parliamentary approval and President Nawrocki’s signature. A reform capable of clearing that bar would, by definition, have support across Poland’s political spectrum—including parts of PiS and even Konfederacja.
Replacing endless political warfare with reconciliation is not a utopian fantasy—because Poland has done it before. The country’s democratic rebirth in 1989 began with the improbable Round Table talks between the communist regime and democratic opposition. That peaceful transition continues to inspire democrats around the world. If Poles could find common ground with Moscow-backed hardliners, surely they can—and must—find it with one another today.