Prophet of Doom

「这下明白我89年为啥这样做了吧。」

For those of you following along with events in Warsaw, Donald Tusk's coup is not the opportunistic work of a few weeks', but has been progressively built up to over about three years. December 2023: Days into office, and with the Constitutional Tribunal ordering him to leave public media alone, Tusk's culture minister sacks the management of Polish state television, state radio and the national news agency on the strength of a non-binding vote in parliament. December 27th 2023: The president vetoes the funding, so the minister puts all three into liquidation. January 2024: The Tribunal rules against the takeover, and the government declares that its ruling has "no legal significance". January 9th 2024: Police enter the Presidential Palace and arrest two opposition MPs whom the president had pardoned. January 12th 2024: The justice minister declares the appointment of the National Prosecutor void and removes him. In September 2024 the Supreme Court's Criminal Chamber rules the appointment valid, and the prosecutor's office dismisses the ruling as the work of "unauthorised persons". 2024: The government restricts the publication of Tribunal rulings in the official journal, and a law that nobody publishes is a law nobody need obey. July 2024: Prosecutors detain the opposition MP Marcin Romanowski despite his immunity at the Council of Europe. A court finds the detention unlawful. He and the former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro later flee abroad. August 2024: The electoral commission docks the main opposition party's public funding. January 2025: The Supreme Court chamber overturns that penalty, the commission reverses, and the finance minister refuses to pay, citing "legal doubts" about the court. It took until August 2026 for another court to oblige him. July 2025: Karol Nawrocki is confirmed as president with 50.89% of the vote, against Tusk's candidate. The government publishes the result in the official journal with a note disputing the court that certified it. Until March 2026: The government refuses to fill vacancies on the Tribunal's 15-seat bench, then fills eight this year, enough for its nominees to outvote the rest. April 2026: Polish law says Tribunal judges swear their oath "before the president". Nawrocki refuses four of them, so they swear it before a notary in parliament. May 12th 2026: The Tribunal rules that they must swear it in front of the president. The government ignores it. October 14th 2026: Maciej Berek, a former minister whom Tusk calls his "right-hand man", swears his own oath in parliament, the fifth to do so. October 29th 2026: A deputy police chief orders preventive units across Poland on to full alert from November 2nd to 8th 2026, with submachine guns and night vision. The police say this concerns sabotage. Officers tell Rzeczpospolita they don't believe it. October 30th 2026: Friday evening before All Saints (big deal in Poland, lots of people out of town visiting relatives in the country). Nawrocki leaves for Senegal. Polish reports say the plan was weeks old, known to about four people in government and three in the police. A member of the government told Interia the timing was no accident. That evening: Riot police arrive. Seven of the new judges, escorted by state protection officers who answer to the interior minister, enter through a gate leading from the Prime Minister's own chancellery, according to the court's spokeswoman. That evening: Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, one of the five the president refused, declares that she has suspended the chief justice and his deputy for a month and is now running the court. She claims authority as its longest-serving judge, on the basis of a judicial career that began in 1995. Her seat on the Tribunal dates from this year. That evening: The court's website falls under her control. The justice minister delivers motions to strip the chief justice's immunity from prosecution, addressed to her. That evening: Police keep the chief justice of Poland's constitutional court out of its grounds, after his supporters cut through the fence. October 31st 2026, about 1am: Nawrocki, having turned his plane around, lands on Polish soil having been refused permission to land. He pushes his way past Korwin-Piotrowska into the building and tells them "you are not Constitutional Tribunal judges". The justice minister now wants prosecutors to look at the president. October 31st 2026: The European Commission, unmoved by any of it, tells the president to approve the judges. Tusk goes on television and says that "in certain matters there can be no compromise". His Foreign Minister's verdict is that the scenes were "not elegant". November 3rd 2026: Korwin-Piotrowska has called a General Assembly of the judges for Tuesday. Tusk's motion is that he is cleaning up a court that Law and Justice captured. Law and Justice won two elections, and it did what an elected government must do to see that its voters' wishes weren't vetoed by a bench of its predecessors' friends for the sake of those friends' private interests. His warrant for undoing all that comes from Europe's judges, in Strasbourg and Luxembourg, who have written every ruling he waves about, and who were never elected by a single Pole. Donald Tusk went to the country in 2023 promising that the law would bind the powerful, and his own side can see what has become of that. Marcin Matczak, the constitutional scholar and no friend of Law and Justice, says the legal basis for Friday's suspension is "nonexistent for a million reasons". Szymon Hołownia, whose party sits in Tusk's coalition, says the events "bring shame on Poland". Even the Helsinki Foundation calls the legal basis questionable. Tusk has a phrase for all this. He calls it "militant democracy". How very honest of him. The EU, functionally, is a vehicle for the return of old ancien regime principles. The elevated oligarchy of a few bureaucrats, rather than aristocrats as was the case in the days of old. They believe an election is an election until the wrong man wins it. Then look up from Warsaw. Romania's constitutional court annulled a presidential election in December 2024, and its front-runner was barred from the rerun. Germany's spy agency branded the country's largest opposition party extremist, until a court stopped it in February 2026. Marine Le Pen heads for next year's French election under a court's order to spend a year in an electronic tag, which she is appealing. And here at home, Labour put off the elections in 30 councils, most of them its own, and gave them back only when Reform took it to the High Court, at the taxpayer's expense (proving thereby that not all courts are quite so militantly against the public interest). Europe, Britain included, is being robbed from its voters. For 30 years the peoples of the West have been governed by arrangements they were never asked about, on migration, on money, on who owes what to whom, and they have gone on voting the wrong way with a patience that terrifies their rulers. The worm is turning, the half life of the Metropolitan way has long been exceeded, and their demise is now inevitable. So we should expect worse as they seek to delay the coming of the final death throes. On Saturday Tusk told the nation that his opponents were like a thief who snatches an old woman's handbag and then cries violence when he's caught. Rzeczpospolita's sources say the planners of Friday's operation had assumed that only a handful of pensioners would stay at the court, and that everyone else would go off to the graves and home. They were as wrong about this as they are about almost everything else.

Non même pas, je ne veux pas d'audiovisuel public. Ce n’est pas une mission régalienne