There has never been so much talk of the rule of law and ‘European values’ in Europe as since voters brought conservative governments to power in Hungary and Poland. The accession of the Fidesz / Christian Democrat KDNP coalition in 2010 in Hungary, and then of the “United Right”, a coalition led by the Law and Justice party (PiS), in 2015 in Poland, marked the beginning of an increasing number of conflicts between Brussels and the two capitals. Another coalition led by the PiS in 2005-2007 in Warsaw had already given a foretaste of the reactions that could be provoked within the European Union by the arrival in power of a conservative government in one of the former Eastern European countries that joined the bloc in 2004.

While the criticisms levelled at the two countries of former Eastern Europe, whose resistance contributed most to the fall of communism and the break-up of the Soviet empire, are not identical, they do share many similarities. Like Poland, Hungary has been criticised for reforms to its Constitutional Court and judicial system. However, more than the Polish governments of Beata Szydło in 2015-2017, and then Mateusz Morawiecki from December 2017, Viktor Orbán’s government chose, in the early 2010s, to back down on certain points to avoid a head-on confrontation. Nevertheless, its justice reforms have still been criticised in Brussels, as can be seen in the European Parliament’s resolution of September 2018, which activated the sanction procedure against Hungary under Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union, and also in the Commission’s annual reports, published since 2020, on the rule of law in the EU.

With Poland, however, the dispute with Brussels has gone further and now seems to be making a head-on confrontation difficult to avoid, with two verdicts from the Warsaw Constitutional Court delivered in 2021, which set out the limits of the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union on Polish territory by noting that the organisation of the judiciary is not one of the competences transferred to the EU under the European Treaties, and by reaffirming the primacy of the Polish Constitution over CJEU rulings in areas where sovereignty has not been transferred.

In connection with these verdicts, on 19 October 2021, in her speech to the plenary of the European Parliament on the crisis in the rule of law in Poland and the primacy of EU law, the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said: “The Polish government has to explain to us how it intends to protect European money, given this ruling of their Constitutional Court. Because in the coming years, we will be investing €2.1 billion with the Multiannual Budget and the NextGenerationEU recovery programme. This is European taxpayers’ money. And if our Union is investing more than ever to advance our collective recovery, we must protect the Union’s budget against breaches of the rule of law.”