Poland’s Supreme Court has begun collecting complaints related to the validity of last week’s parliamentary elections and referendum, accumulating 12 election-related grievances and five referendum-related protests less than a day after the publication of the official results of the vote in the Journal of Laws on Wednesday.
The Supreme Court did not specify the nature of the complaints. However, the National Election Commission previously reported on cases of ballot papers allegedly being removed from polling stations, and election-related documents being damaged or destroyed.
The highest court in the land will also have 60 days to rule on the validity of the referendum held concurrently with the vote – which asked Poles four questions related to the selloff of state assets, an increase in the retirement age, the removal of the border barrier with Belarus, and the admission of illegal aliens through the EU’s forced relocation mechanism.
The ruling Law and Justice Party (Polish acronym PiS) lost 41 seats in Sunday’s vote, taking 194 seats, a 35.4 percent plurality that’s unlikely to be enough to stop the opposition Civic Coalition (PO) from forming a coalition together with the Third Way (Trzecia Droga) and The Left (Lewica), which won 157, 65, and 26 seats, respectively, enough for a slim majority of 248 seats out of 460 in Poland’s Sejm parliament.
Poland’s election campaign was marked by special bitterness this time around, with the PO threatening to create a “tribunal” to try President Duda, Prime Minister Morawiecki and other high-level PiS officials for a host of suspected crimes, and holding a large-scale march through the streets of Warsaw two weeks before the vote. Lech Walesa, Poland’s first post-communist era president, warned ahead of the elections that tensions were getting serious enough to warrant a possible slide into “civil war.”
With the PiS government drifting away from NATO’s united front of support for the Zelensky government in Ukraine over a dispute related to the dumping of Ukrainian foodstuffs in Poland, Warsaw’s allies in Brussels and Washington appeared prepared to challenge the results of last Sunday’s vote if the ruling party were to cling to power.
Days before the elections, the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based think tank and grant organization funded by the US, German, and Swedish governments, issued a scathing report on “How the Integrity of Poland’s Elections is Undermined,” citing allegedly “biased electoral laws, abuse of state resources by the governing party, and undermined media freedom and judiciary independence.”
With the pro-EU, pro-Ukraine PO’s apparent victory, however, US and European officials and media have changed their tune, with the White House congratulating Warsaw on record voter turnout and saying it “looks forward to working with Poland’s next government,” while European People’s Party chief Manfred Weber hailed the results by proclaiming “Poland is back.”
PO leader and possible future Prime Minister Donald Tusk plans to travel to Brussels next week to negotiate the unblocking of billions of euros in EU funds for Poland frozen during the EU’s long-running spat with the PiS over alleged "rule-of-law" violations by the current government.
Meanwhile, an aide to President Duda indicated that the ruling party will have the first shot at forming a new government, if it can somehow cobble together a coalition by splitting off and aligning part of the opposition Third Way’s coalition bloc allies with itself.