Page 39 - bnemagazine bne_December 2021_20211203.pdf

bne December 2021 Central Europe I 39
part is conditio sine qua non,” von der Leyen added.
Poland stands to receive €36bn in grants and loans from the recovery fund. The money is the backbone of the government’s so-called “Polish Deal,”
a wide-reaching investment plan.
That, in turn, is a major part of the government’s strategy to win the
third term in office in the election
due in 2023.
The CJEU on October 27 fined Poland €1mn a day for not dismantling the disciplinary chamber of the Supreme Court. Poland says it is not going to pay because the court’s order was “unlawful”, Deputy Justice Minister Sebastian Kaleta tweeted in reaction.
Kaleta referred to a ruling by the government-engineered Constitutional Court, which said in early October
that the articles of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU) pertaining to judiciary matters are incompatible with the Polish Constitution.
In a related development on the
same day, the European Network of Councils for the Judiciary (ENCJ), an organisation of EU bodies representing judges, voted to expel Poland’s National Council of the Judiciary (KRS).
The KRS is Poland's judge-appointing body that was overhauled by the government amidst concerns that the overhaul served to secure the executive branch's influence on who becomes
a judge, possibly a lenient one.
The ENCJ suspended the KRS in September 2018, stripping the Polish body of its voting rights and excluding it from participation in ENCJ activities.
“The KRS does not safeguard the independence of the judiciary, it does not defend the judiciary, or individual judges, in a manner consistent with its role as guarantor, in the face
of any measures which threaten
to compromise the core values of independence and autonomy,”
the ENCJ said in a statement.
Poland moots plans to make its army one of Nato’s largest
Wojciech Kosc in Warsaw
Poland plans to more than double the size of its military to at least 250,000 troops, the country’s defence ministry said on October 25.
The plan is the new initiative of Poland’s radical rightwing government led by Law and Justice (PiS) and would make the Polish Army one of the largest in Nato.
“If we want to avoid the worst, which is war, we must act according to the old rule ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’,” said Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland’s deputy prime minister responsible for security, and the de facto top decision- maker in the country as the chairman of the Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Other than enlarging the army, the plan – set out in a new draft bill dubbed “On Defence of the Fatherland” – assumes stepping up the modernization of the armed forces, and increasing the size of the so-called Territorial Defence, a kind of paramilitary service for civilians, to 50,000.
Kaczynski and Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak did not provide an estimate of the timeline for the changes nor how much they would cost.
The politicians only said that the project will be paid for by the Armed Forces Support Fund, which will be financed from the issuance of Treasury bonds, as well as bonds issued by the state bank BGK, and from the profits of the National Bank of Poland.
The financing structure will be similar to the one used by the government to keep the economy afloat during the worst of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, Blaszczak noted.
The opposition has railed against the plan as unrealistic and taking ever more state spending outside of parliament’s control.
Poland has long been one of the few Nato member states that spend the alliance-recommended 2% of GDP on defence. Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, Poland has grown wary of the need to beef up its military potential.
Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak meets soldiers participating in the Rys-21 exercise in September.
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