The Poles were called upon to demonstrate after a decision of the Constitutional Court questioning the rule of European law on national law, which could mark a first step towards a “polexit”.
Le Monde with AFP
They descended into numbers in the streets. Tens of thousands of Polish demonstrated, Sunday, October 10, to defend the membership of their country to the European Union (EU) after the decision on Friday of the Polish Constitutional Court challenged the primacy of European law on national law.
This decision could mark a first step towards an exit from the EU Poland. It is against this idea that the Polish came to demonstrate Sunday, to the call of the Leader of the Opposition and former President of the European Council, Donald Tusk. He had called his compatriots to be scrolled to “defend a European poland”. “We have to save Poland, no one will do it for us,” he added on Twitter .
“tens of thousands of people in Warsaw and in more than one hundred cities and villages in Poland came to protest what this government does to our homeland,” he launched Sunday to a huge crowd brandishing flags European Blues in Warsaw.
“I am here because I’m afraid we leave the EU. It’s very important, especially for my granddaughter,” said Elzbieta Morawska, 64, who passed into the capital. “The United Kingdom has just leaving the EU, and it’s a tragedy. If Poland share now, it will also be a tragedy,” said Aleksander Winiarski, 20, who studied in England and also manifested in Warsaw.
Tensions between Brussels and Warsaw
Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries have joined the European Union in 2004, fifteen years after the Lech Walesa trade union movement had contributed to overthrow the communist regime. Membership in the Union remains very popular, if we believe the polls, but the relations between Warsaw and Brussels have fallen sharply since the arrival of the Populist Party right and justice (EADD) in 2015.
In particular, the tensions relate to the reforms of the judicial apparatus desired by the Government, and whose EU believes that they are likely to harm the independence of justice and risk leading to a diminishing of freedom. democratic.
In addition to its decision on Friday, according to which several articles of the European treaties are “incompatible” with the constitution of the country, the Polish Constitutional Court, largely favorable to the current power, also asked the European institutions not to “act Beyond their skills “by interging in the reforms of the Polish judicial system.
Brussels had immediately reacted, by the voice of the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen: “Our treaties are very clear. All decisions of the EU’s Court of Justice are required to all authorities Member States, including national courts. EU law prevails on national law, including the constitutional provisions, “she said, stating that” that is what all the Member States of the EU adhered “.
Before the judgment was rendered, the EU had warned that the case could have “consequences” for the payment to Poland of the European recovery funds in the context of the CVIV-19 crisis.