A Whiff of Compromise in Warsaw’s Air

Morawiecki retorted that he was "not surprised by the level of emotion" demonstrated by Ziobro, given that the CJEU's rejection of Poland and Hungary's legal challenge to this new conditionality mechanism concerned an area of the justice minister's competency. The leader of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, admitted to being "a little surprised" by Ziobro's intervention.

A major beneficiary of EU funds, Poland is set to receive 76 billion euros from the current EU budget, so the threat of the European Commission applying this rule-of-law conditionality to future payments is crucial. However, it's less of a concern to the ruling class in Warsaw than that in Budapest. To activate the mechanism, the European Commission needs to demonstrate that failings in the country's rule of law are directly affecting how EU funds are being spent. And that has always been more of an issue in Hungary, where businessmen close to Prime Minister Viktor Orban have enriched themselves using EU funds, than in Poland, where those connections are less obvious.

"The CJEU ruling highlights that the mechanism can be applied only when rule of law issues pose a sufficiently direct and serious risk to the sound management of the EU budget. In some cases, establishing such a link might be challenging and subject to political criticism," points out Andrius Tursa, Central and Eastern Europe advisor for Teneo Intelligence.

Therefore, the domestic debate over the CJEU verdict in Poland quickly turned to other lines of conflict with Brussels over the rule of law, particularly to those with more immediate financial costs.

Poland's most pressing concern relates to the suspension of the disbursement of 24 billion euros in grants from the EU's...