Poland Is The Symptom And Europe Is The Patient

Authored by Larry C. Johnson via Sonar21,

The midnight brawl at Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal is not a Polish problem. It is the local flare-up of a continental disease. Across Europe, when voters pick the wrong candidate, the establishment reaches for a judge, an intelligence service or the EU’s checkbook, and calls the result “defending democracy.” The Journal of Democracy wrote the textbook. Warsaw is the teaching hospital.

The article

In December 2023, two months after Donald Tusk’s coalition pushed Law and Justice (PiS) out of power, Jarosław Kuisz and Karolina Wigura of Kultura Liberalna published a how-to guide in the Journal of Democracy. The title says it all: “How to Dismantle an Illiberal Democracy.”

Consider the provenance. At the time, the Journal was the flagship publication of the National Endowment for Democracy, the outfit that does in daylight what the CIA used to do at night. It split from NED this year after DOGE cut off NED’s funding in 2025, and it is now independent and partnered with Stanford’s CDDRL. In 2023, though, this was the democracy-promotion establishment telling Warsaw how to clean house.

The argument, stripped of its footnotes:

• Poland needs a “second wave” of transitional justice to deal with PiS “violations of the rule of law.”
• Avoid vague treason charges. Prosecute specific acts: the 2015 Constitutional Tribunal appointments, the 2020 attempt at an all-mail presidential election and the 2023 visa-for-cash scandal.
• Jarosław Kaczyński bears responsibility but will be hard to convict.
• Parliamentary investigative committees are the main tool.
• Expect resistance from the PiS-aligned presidency, Supreme Court and State Tribunal.
• Stabilize the system without breaking it.

The authors close with a disclaimer worth framing: “There is no clear roadmap… One should therefore not expect miracles.”

The critique

The defenders of democracy have written a manual for dismantling one. They don’t see the irony, and that is the most instructive thing about the essay.

Start with the word “illiberal.” It is not a legal category. It is a label handed out by people with conference budgets to governments they dislike. PiS won the 2015 and 2019 parliamentary elections outright. Yet the article treats its officials less like a defeated party and more like the communist nomenklatura of 1989, in need of a “transitional justice” process.

In fairness to Kuisz and Wigura, they are more careful than their cause. They warn against show trials and vague charges, and they admit nobody knows how to do this. But manuals are not read for their caveats. Politicians skip the footnotes and go straight to the chapter on tools.

Here is the core contradiction. PiS stands accused of capturing the courts, ignoring rulings and stacking institutions with loyalists. The cure prescribed is to purge the courts, ignore rulings and install the right loyalists. The sin becomes a sacrament when the right people commit it.

Poland, three years later: the manual in action

This week the manual left the library and went to the streets of Warsaw, escorted by riot police.

Since 2023, Tusk’s government has refused to recognize the Constitutional Tribunal and has ignored its rulings. Starting in March, parliament elected eight new judges. President Karol Nawrocki refused to swear in five of them. They held their own oath ceremony and mailed the oaths to the presidential palace, which is a new one even by Central European standards.

Then came October 30. According to Notes from Poland and ProtoThema:

• Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska suspended Chief Justice Bogdan Święczkowski and declared herself acting head of the Tribunal.
• Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek moved to strip Święczkowski’s immunity.
• Riot police blocked Święczkowski from entering his own court. His supporters cut through the fence with power tools.
• Nawrocki turned his plane around on the way to Senegal and, around 1 a.m., pushed his way past judges into the building. Each side accuses the other of physical aggression. Protesters outside called it a coup.

Tusk’s response, per Euronews: “In certain matters there can be no compromise.” He also warned about Russian bots, because no European crisis is complete without them.

Not everyone in the coalition is cheering. Szymon Hołownia said Poland should be ashamed and that forcing a fix only deepens the decline. Hołownia and the PSL are now attending Nawrocki’s talks. When your own partners start taking meetings with the other side, the roadmap has a pothole.

Kuisz and Wigura told us not to expect miracles. This isn’t a miracle. It’s a mirror.

The disease, not the symptom

Poland is just the case where the patient is thrashing hardest. Look at the rest of the ward and the same pathology shows up everywhere: elections treated as advisory, with the final say reserved for institutions nobody voted for.

• Romania. On December 6, 2024, the Constitutional Court annulled the first round of a presidential election after Călin Georgescu, an outsider polling in single digits, came in first. The grounds were declassified intelligence about “aggressive hybrid Russian attacks” and alleged illegal campaign financing. In March 2025 the electoral commission barred Georgescu from the rerun, while he was “the favourite in all the polls,” and the court unanimously agreed. That is one way to fix an election: hold it again without the winner.
• France. In March 2025 a Paris court convicted Marine Le Pen of embezzling EU parliamentary funds and banned her from office for five years, effective immediately. The frontrunner for 2027 was gone with one gavel. In July the appeals court upheld the conviction but cut the ban to 45 months, 30 of them suspended, so she can run after all. The judges giveth, and the judges taketh away. Either way, the judges decide.
• Germany. In May 2025, the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, branded the AfD a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party. The AfD polls at 24 to 26 percent. In February a Cologne court suspended the label, ruling the conditions for it “are not met.” Lawmakers are still pushing to have the Constitutional Court ban the party outright. Banning the party a quarter of your voters support is certainly one way to win an argument. In my old business, we called a spy agency monitoring the main opposition party something else.
• Brussels’ checkbook. The European Commission froze about €137 billion for Poland under PiS. On February 29, 2024, eleven weeks after Tusk took office, it released the money. One of its own officials conceded, “That does not mean the rule of law is fully restored and everything is fine,” and the reform plan was “still a draft ambition.” The rule of law, it turns out, is measured by who sits in the prime minister’s office. Hungary got the same treatment. Its new prime minister, Péter Magyar, promised to go to Brussels “to have EU funding released.” Message received in Budapest.

Put the cases side by side and the illness has a clear set of symptoms. Courts annul or narrow the choices on the ballot. Intelligence services rate which parties are fit to compete. Brussels pays for good behavior, defined as the right government. All of it is done in the name of protecting democracy from the people who vote in it.

That is why the Kuisz and Wigura essay matters beyond Poland. It isn’t a Polish policy paper. It is a clinical protocol for treating a voter who votes wrong, written for a continent whose elites have concluded the electorate can’t be trusted with the keys. Tusk is just the first surgeon to try it without anesthesia.

What this means for NATO

An alliance is only as strong as the governments that have to say yes. Right now several of NATO’s key European members are too busy fighting their own voters, courts and presidents to launch any foreign venture. In some cases they couldn’t if they tried.

Start with Poland, the country Washington holds up as NATO’s model member and the frontline state on Belarus and Ukraine. Under Poland’s constitution the president is the supreme commander of the armed forces. Poland’s president and its prime minister are currently accusing each other of a coup. Ask yourself who gives the order to deploy in that situation. Then ask whether a Polish soldier knows whose order to follow. A country with two constitutional courts and a commander-in-chief shoving past judges at 1 a.m. is not preparing to project power. It is trying to hold itself together.

The rest of the ward is no healthier:

• Germany is debating whether to ban the opposition party that a quarter of its voters support, and that party wants nothing to do with a war against Russia. Any German government that sends troops east hands the AfD its next election.
• France faces a 2027 presidential race in which Le Pen, whose party has long been skeptical of NATO’s integrated command, is back on the ballot. No French president facing that race will gamble on a foreign adventure.
• Romania, home of NATO’s base at Mihail Kogălniceanu on the Black Sea, is still governed under the shadow of an election its own court canceled. Its political class has a legitimacy problem it cannot afford to aggravate with a war.

NATO runs on consensus. Every one of these governments is now weighing a foreign deployment against a domestic electorate it has spent years managing rather than persuading. When the elite’s grip at home depends on courts, intelligence services and Brussels’ money, asking voters to send their sons east is the one request it can’t risk. Sooner or later, the bill for treating the voter as the enemy comes due.

The irony is hard to miss. The project was sold as protecting democracy from the barbarians at the gate. What it has produced is an alliance whose members cannot agree with their own voters, let alone with each other. Moscow didn’t have to lift a finger. Europe’s “defenders of democracy” are doing the job for it.

The Globalists refuse to go away

Strip away the vocabulary of “rule of law” and “transitional justice” and you find a project aimed at Polish nationalism itself. PiS’s real offense was not packing a court. Plenty of governments pack courts. Its offense was putting Polish sovereignty, Catholic identity and the nation-state ahead of Brussels.

The record is consistent. Poland refused the EU’s 2015 migrant relocation quotas, and in April 2020 the European Court of Justice ruled that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had broken EU law by refusing. That July, the Commission denied twinning grants to six Polish towns over their “LGBT ideology-free” resolutions. Then came the €137 billion freeze. The message from Brussels never varied: national identity is welcome as folklore, not as policy.

To the globalist wing of the Western establishment, meaning NED, Brussels and the foundations and think tanks that orbit them, nationalism is a disease to be treated, not a view to be debated. A nation that insists on deciding what it believes, whom it admits and how it runs its own courts is “illiberal” by definition. Kuisz and Wigura simply gave that attitude a legal procedure.

Now look east, because the same people take the same attitude toward Russia, with fewer manners. NED has funded Russian civil-society groups for decades, which is why Moscow made it the first “undesirable organization” under its 2015 law. In June 2022, the U.S. Helsinki Commission held a briefing titled “Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative.” The title says the rest. Russian nationalism, like Polish nationalism, is treated not as a fact to be dealt with but as a pathology to be cured, by sanctions, regime change or, if the seminar circuit gets its way, partition.

Here is the irony I find most delicious. Washington and Brussels spent years cheering Polish nationalism when it was pointed at Moscow. Poland’s hostility to Russia was the alliance’s favorite asset. Point the same nationalism at Brussels and it suddenly becomes a threat to democracy requiring riot police. Polish patriotism, it turns out, is a weapon to be aimed, not a conviction to be respected. Poles should notice that the people eager to dismantle Russia’s sense of nationhood are the same people dismantling theirs.

That is my assessment, not the article’s. Kuisz and Wigura frame everything as restoring the rule of law, and insist that the PiS started this. Its 2015 Tribunal appointments were a power grab, and in its 2021 Xero Flor ruling the European Court of Human Rights found that a bench including an improperly appointed judge violated the right to a fair trial.

Nawrocki’s refusal to swear in the new judges is hardball too. Both camps have real legal arguments. That is exactly why riot police at midnight are the wrong way to settle it.

Even if you set motive aside entirely, judge the project by its adverse effects: a country with two rival constitutional courts and a president shoving past judges in the dark.

On NATO, a caveat. Domestic turmoil makes an offensive or expeditionary venture far less likely, but it does not mean these countries would refuse to defend their own territory. Both camps in Warsaw back heavy defense spending, and a direct attack on a member tends to unite even the most divided parliament. My argument is about appetite for adventure, not the willingness to fight at the border.

None of these caveats changes the central point. The fight in Warsaw isn’t really about judges. It is about whether a European nation may still define itself, or whether that right now belongs to Brussels, NED and the people who write manuals on dismantling democracies. Moscow got that answer years ago. Warsaw is getting it now.