Hands Off the Constitution! The Oppositional Judges in Poland and Their Struggle for Checks and Balances

The political and academic discussion about the decline of democratic institutional standards in Poland rather looks at what the current Polish government aims to achieve and how that backsliding can be explained. However, in order to understand how enduring that backsliding may be an analysis of the opponents, especially the Constitutional Court and the Judicial Council, is an equally necessary perspective. Since the resistance of the constitutional and regular judges did bring many protestors to the streets, my contribution focuses on how, with which strategies and legal arguments they try to prevent the further decay of checks and balances. Although these protests were not successful in stopping the government from getting these laws first passed in parliament and then finally enacted by the president, a closer analysis of the strategic capacity of these actors, their partial achievements and failures would allow to assess their degree of agency. Such an actor-centered case study provides more precise information on the constitutional and political opportunities that actors have to oppose an enduring and powerful cutback of democracy.